Every bully has his bunker
As I write, Trump is hiding in a bunker under the White House terrified of what his compatriots might do to him if given the chance. The bully is chalkfaced and trembling, his braggadocio reduced to a whimper.
The last tweet I saw from him consisted of three words, typed in block capitals because everyone knows that block capitals make things come true. The three words were those favourites of authoritarians, LAW AND ORDER. Ha.
Trump despises the law. He routinely breaks laws when he finds them inconvenient. He’s done so all his life. His so-called university broke the law. His so-called charity broke the law. He is the unindicted co-conspirator in the case for which his long-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen went to prison. He’ll face that rap when he leaves office.
He surrounds himself with thieves. His campaign manager went to prison. His deputy campaign manager avoided prison only by ratting on his campaign manager. His adviser Roger Stone, as nasty an operator as you could meet, is off to prison this month. Team Trump is a walking crime wave. Twenty women have accused Trump of sexual assault. And here he is screaming for law and order. You have to laugh.
By law and order Trump means something else entirely. He means a society that’s skewed in his favour, a society that continues to protect him and others like him from the consequences of their greed and lust and crimes. He means the status quo, that keeps the poor and blackskinned polishing his golf clubs for a pittance. That’s law and order to Trump.
No doubt the Secret Service will have urged Trump to withdraw to the bunker, because that’s their job, but a president can overrule the Secret Service. A president with a whole heart and a clear conscience can stand and say that if the people who elected him have a beef with him then it’s his duty to go and meet them so they can thrash this out. But not this timorous dough boy. Not this lardy child of privilege. Not this coward. He couldn’t get to the bunker fast enough.
Every bully boy dictator from Hitler to Yanukovych has kept a bunker as a refuge from the people he vowed to serve. But a bunker doesn’t just protect the bully from the mob. It also protects his fantasy from reality. Behind its walls of inch-thick steel the little bigman can continue to move hypothetical troops on maps, plan triumphal arches with his statue on the top, order the assassination of his enemies.
But eventually even the bunker falls and after that there’s nothing for it. Hitler and Jim Jones killed themselves. Ceausescu was hauled out and shot, Mussolini strung up, and Gaddafi dragged from a length of sewer pipe and ripped apart. That’s what Trump fears, viscerally, because he knows it’s what he deserves.
And that terror is Trump’s first punishment. With luck there’ll be more to come. Let’s hope there’s a humiliating landslide defeat in the coming election. Let’s hope he is hissed from the White House by a crowd of a million delighted people. Let’s hope the Southern District of New York already has the charge sheets ready and that the Feds come knocking on his door the very next day. Let’s hope he’s perp-walked in cuffs down Fifth Avenue, his hair hanging lank to his shoulder, his pate as bare as a balloon, his face the colour of milk and twisted with dread. He deserves every bit of this and more.
And right now he’s holed up in a bunker and sweating. That’s a good start.