Out, damned orange spot
By the time this goes to print much may have happened. But none of it will reverse the sweet truth that Trump is doomed. Over the weekend Trump tweeted that he was almost alone in the White House. It is a potent image: the shambling thug a prisoner in his own palace. It is how autocrats tend to end up, alone with the one person who can’t betray them. The next step’s a mob at the door.
It’s reminiscent of act five of Macbeth. The king’s in his castle. His wife’s dead. Everyone who can has fled. But Macbeth, for all his faults, was a brave man. Trump’s just a greedy coward.
Plenty of people have fled from Trump, including all the generals he hired. They fled to save what they could of their reputations. They’d imagined they could work for Trump and retain their integrity but they were wrong. Despite all their years in the military, dedicated to countering the worst of human nature, they underestimated
Trump’s selfishness, vanity, greed and ignorance. They couldn’t control him. They became soiled by association. Everyone does who comes into Trump’s orbit. Consider Rudy Giuliani; once a proud mayor of New York, now a goggle-eyed liar.
Two institutions exist to establish the truth. One is the press. The other is law enforcement. Trump, tellingly, has attacked both from day one. For the truth is his enemy, and since the truth cannot be destroyed, he has to destroy the reputations of those who tell it.
But the press, undaunted, is running him to ground. And it has now emerged that the FBI began investigating Trump 18 months ago. Astonishingly, they suspected the president of the United States of being the agent of a foreign power.
And their suspicions were bang right. The evidence abounds that Trump is in Putin’s pocket. And not, I suspect, just Putin’s. Consider how he sided with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
How precisely Trump will fall remains unclear. He cares about nothing and nobody but himself, so he will not mind what damage he causes. He will happily start a war, foment rebellion, close the government, sack the FBI, defy the courts – anything to save his own skin.
From the start he has fawned to the military, flattering them, lying to them, cosying up. Perhaps he hopes that the army will come down on his side in a civil war. And with them a redneck mob of NRA members, evangelical Southerners and backwoods boys who don’t like black people and who’ve never trusted government.
But I am confident the States will survive the fall of Trump. And it will be interesting to see who goes down with him.
Already his allies have seen there is no reward for loyalty. Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, was as loyal to Trump as a dog to a butcher. But when Cohen got into trouble Trump dropped him like a hot stone, called him a rat and a liar.
Trump’s three eldest children will stand by him. They have no choice. They are complicit in his crimes. But his wife will be off at a sprint, lugging her jewel-case and her pre-nup.
And when Trump becomes an electoral liability those Republicans that can will also flee. But others won’t be able to because they too have acted corruptly: colluding with hostile powers, accepting laundered money, lying to investigators. They all need to go to prison. Along with Trump and his vile family. There can be no pardons. The country and the world both very much need to see the law applied equally to all.
‘‘He will happily start a war ...’’