Donald J Dumped
So farewell then, Donald Trump, hands down the most divisive, unpleasant and dangerous president the US has seen. The manner of his going, writes Patrick Bulger, has much to teach us about the man and the nation he led for four scarcely credible years
And that, folks, would seem to bring an end to the nasty, brutish and short reign of Donald J Trump. He becomes the first US president to not be given a second term since George H Bush in 1993, and one of very few in US history. At least Bush could take solace in being beaten by the brash and brilliant small-state governor Bill Clinton and his even cleverer wife Hillary. No such luck for Trump. He’s being replaced by Uncle Joe Biden, an even older white guy who stood for the Democratic Party nomination in 1988 and 2008 and lost both times, a forgotten man of politics, and at 78 in a few days’ time the oldest president in US history.
His astonishing rise to the most powerful elected position in the world, at the expense of the insufferable Trump, is not so much a matter of cometh the hour, cometh the man, as it is a case of cometh the century, cometh the man. The oldtimer Trump likes to deride as “Sleepy Joe” has been in the game of US electoral politics since the 20th century.
A very stable genius
For Trump, it is the end of a fantastic dream (some might say nightmare), his dethronement capping what is quite possibly the most astonishing, if not bizarre, chapter in US political history. Certainly the most entertaining. But the line that is drawn under Trump may prove to be a dotted one. And though his legacy may not endure, the scars he has inflicted will take many election cycles to heal. Some may argue that he will remain a force in US politics for some time to come, even beyond the grave, a brooding “ghost president”. Hell, there’s even been talk of a Trump run for the White House in 2024. Regardless of what he decides, Trump may be gone but Trumpism could be here to stay.
Trump’s disdainful verbal putdowns of Biden, the moderately bright, earnest senator from Delaware, are typical Trumpian slurs on a venerable member of the despised political elite, ad hominem insults of the sort he uses to disarm (in his own mind at least) anyone who would seek to bring any expertise, or even humanity and common sense, to the complex problems facing the world. If anything, it’s Trump who has been caught napping on the job. He claims to be among the cleverest people in the world, going large on Twitter in 2018 with the revelation that, “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” He commented that his winning the presidency at his first attempt “would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”.
Only in America
Stability cannot be overrated in a genius, especially one who has lots of brilliantly disruptive ideas. Fortunately for Trump, though, he is neither a genius nor, by authoritative accounts, even remotely stable. His ideas, such as they were, were disruptive but seldom brilliant. Styled as a “Make America Great Again” capwearer’s Chauncey Gardiner, Trump was true to the movie character played by Peter Sellers after his surprise electoral triumph in 2016. He was clearly oblivious to the complexity of the task at hand, not to mention leadership of the free world, and confounded critics and supporters alike by not “growing into the job” in the White House as some had thought he might. And he had none of Chauncey’s vintage charm, either.
Here was a man who claimed he would “drain the swamp”, but who became the ultimate swamp monster himself, the crazy coiffed superstar of the reality-TV melodrama that was his spell in the Oval Office. Essentially a hollow and vacuous overachiever, and proud of it too, Trump is a character that only the US of A in all its gory splendour could have spawned. His likely setting would be in a picture comic, a cross between Richie Rich and Little Lotta. In business, he pursued an openly predatory style of enterprise driven by an entirely materialistic take on the American Dream, a world in which people are ciphers to be discarded, ripped off, bamboozled and bullied out of their hard-earned dollars. That was the Trump way of doing business, leading to more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions, and six bankruptcies in a career that ranged from flogging Trump-branded steaks to offering expensive bogus “university degrees” on the Trump way of doing business.
He is the scheming hero straight out of an Ayn Rand beetle-crusher: opportunistic, self-serving, scornful of anything resembling charity or any sort of philanthropy. Lacking any visible trace of empathy, or even the capacity to give two hoots about anyone but himself and his awful family, he is the ultimate Ugly American. Who, truly, will mourn his passing from the White House?
Icebergs ahead
To be fair, one could argue that Trump’s “dealmaking” philosophy brought to bear on some of the world’s complex diplomatic problems offered some new solutions, and possibilities, for peace in a volatile world. He pulled US troops out of Syria, and didn’t start any new wars. He wrote to, and received, love letters from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, becoming a garrulous old uncle beguiled by a cunning nephew.
He spent a long time alone with Vladimir Putin, and emerged with a face as white as the Russian winter. Who knows what the former KGB agent has on him? He winked and nodded at China’s Xi Jinping, and engaged in a futile trade war with China. He rewarded his backers by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He was rude to: the French, the Canadians, the world’s “shithole countries” (that’s us), Angela Merkel, the EU, Nato, South Korea, Mexico … He said of Puerto Rico, after withholding $13bn in hurricane disaster aid for
He confounded critics and supporters by not “growing into the job” in the White House as some had thought he might
He spent a long time alone with Putin and emerged as white as the Russian winter
three years, “I have to say, in a very nice way, very respectful way, I’m the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.” Trump added, “Nobody even close.”
So by the standards to which a US president ought to be held, Trump measures up adequately on the foreign policy front, even if there was a flimsy, one-man-show feel about everything he did. Yet for someone who prides himself on such superior intelligence and human intuition, Trump proved quite blind to the hardly hidden icebergs that loomed, and indeed doomed, his presidency.
Catching Covid
Foremost among these, because it has claimed the most human victims, is the coronavirus, which has cost close to 250,000 lives in the US on Trump’s watch. He turned mask-wearing into a political contest, the absence of one becoming a mark of loyalty to him. In countries that show less ceremonial deference to their leaders, such conduct and record could lead to terrible consequences for an ex-leader.
Politically, Trump made the fatal error of putting himself on the wrong side of a straightforward equation. This was informed by his insistence on playing to the handy prejudice of sinophobia in calling it the “China virus”, and falling out with the scientists, in particular Dr Anthony Fauci. As Trump stumbled from one rally to another in a last-ditch effort to retain his presidency, the crowds chanted, “Fire Fauci!”, providing a medieval touch to a modern-day remake of the Salem witch-hunts.
He made it a choice between lockdown and mandatory anti-Covid measures, and the economy, when a more sensible person of even limited intelligence would surmise that a mix of the two was required, and the skill existed in gauging the mix
But not Trump. Who else can claim to have come up with the medical-frontier