TRUMP: The man who came to fix America in a fix
All his life, the only constant about Donald Trump has been that everything must be about Donald Trump. “I alone can fix it,” the property tycoon claimed about America’s deepest problems in a speech accepting his Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency in 2016. On Tuesday, four years after Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, Americans voted in what amounts to a referendum on the 74-year-old’s brazen claim.
Polls consistently found that a majority opposes Trump, but those who do support him express rarely seen levels of adoration, so the chance of another epic upset cannot be ruled out. When a man draws large crowds around the country chanting “We love you!” — during a pandemic — who would bet confidently against him?
Yet having taken office vowing to end “American carnage,” Trump today presides over even greater turmoil, accused by many of breaking, not fixing, a country in worse disarray than at any point since the 1970s. More than 230,000 have died from coronavirus, while lockdowns have left millions in economic dire straits. Racial wounds, bared during a summer of protests, fester while Republicans and Democrats in Washington bicker and backstab.
And for all his bragging, Trump himself is damaged. After relentlessly downplaying the health crisis, he was hospitalised with Covid-19 a month from Election Day, saying afterward that he almost died.
While his health appears to have recovered, his reputation is ragged.
He is only the third US president to have been impeached and faces a morass of courtroom probes, ranging from tax issues to accusations of rape and other sexual assault.
The harshest critics see even deeper wrongdoing — wrongdoing of historic, existential proportions that has sullied the White House, turned American against American, and betrayed the millions abroad who once looked to Washington for guidance.
Of course, Trump can brush off his presidential challenger Joe Biden, who calls him “a threat to this nation”. But the critiques of men who once worked with, not against, Trump are, like so much else in this administration, unprecedented.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” wrote former defence secretary James Mattis, a ramrod straight US Marine Corps general who resigned in 2018.
“I think we need to look harder at who we elect,” Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, another Marine ex-general, said icily.
“Unfit for office,” said John Bolton, who served as national security adviser and is one of the most rightwing foreign policy experts in Washington.
The lifelong salesman, reality TV performer and master self-promoter, has never let himself stay down for long. He won’t now.
On the day Trump got out of hospital, with treatment still ongoing, he tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” He claimed to feel 20 years younger. “I wanted to rip that Superman shirt open,” he has said to cheers from crowds on the campaign trail. That humorous boast — just self-confident or ludicrously egomaniacal? — summed up everything that makes Trump so magnetic to fans and infuriating to opponents.
But all year, even as the rancour around his presidency grew, Trump has been striding in that same fashion toward a hoped-for second term, convinced as ever of his indispensability. “Whether you love me or hate me, you have got to vote for me,” he says.
Polls suggest that the president has only the narrowest path to victory over Biden. He’s down in almost every swing state, he’s even fighting to keep the deepest of deep Republican strongholds, Texas.
Yet Democrats fear that Trump can again defy the laws of political physics. Back in 2016, many Americans literally laughed at the idea of a Trump White House. With his improbable hairspray-assisted coif, bronze make-up, famed diet of fast food and obsessive television watching, the fast-talking, non-stop-tweeting New Yorker had been seen, at best, as a political circus act.
Yet that November 8, the neophyte politician defeated Clinton, a Democratic heavyweight whose victory had seemed all but assured. The thrill felt by supporters at that triumph and the trauma inflicted on Trump’s opponents is hard to overstate. And every event of the 45th president’s tempestuous first term only stoked those conflicting emotions.
To his own side, amounting to just over 40 per cent of the country, Trump constituted a giant middle finger to every member of the establishment, from the
Republican party bigwigs to leftist Hollywood and the media.
To everyone else, he was a national nightmare beginning on election night and recurring daily.
And like the human embodiment of one of his glass skyscrapers, the elected President Trump soon towered over the country.
The harder his opponents tried to knock him back down, the more he thrived.
An extraordinary twoyear investigation into links between Russian meddling in the 2016 election and
Trump’s campaign confirmed troubling behaviour but eventually ended in anticlimax.
When Democrats launched impeachment proceedings in
2019, the Republican Party, which had once pushed desperately to keep Trump from even running, backed him to the hilt. He was easily acquitted.
All the while, the kind of offstage turmoil that might ordinarily sink a presidency — court battles with a porn star, accusations of billeting government employees at his golf clubs to earn hefty profits, the jailing of his lawyer — fuelled Trump’s defiance. —