So, he’s finally gone. Donald J Trump, America’s forty-fifth, and worst, President, boarded Air Force One for the final time and was flown to his sprawling luxury playpen at Mar-a-Lago. There he will be able to write (or have ghost-written) his memoir about his four years in the White House: “It was beeoodiful. It was so incredible. We did incredible things, wonderful things. And maybe we will again.”
Let’s hope not. Could Trump run for office again? Not if he is impeached for a second time. The House of Representatives voted 232-197 in favour of impeachment but it now goes to the Senate, where it is not yet clear how many Republicans will actually vote for it; some because they would never vote against a fellow Republican on principle, no matter how heinous his crime, and some because they are simply terrified that if they do, Trump’s supporters will target them and their families.
How did Trump ever get to be President? He embodies a particularly horrible aspect of ordinary American: bigoted, shallow, arrogant yet deeply insecure and resentful of authority, contemptuous of science and rational thought. Not every American who voted for Trump – and seventy-four million did – is like this; the old Republican Party used to stand for something quite alien to Trump. Deeply Conservative, of course; deeply, sometimes bizarrely religious, but also fundamentally decent. The late John McCain was a rare example of this type of old-school Republican.
When I have visited the States I have been struck by the qualities of friendliness, easygoing confidence (not arrogance) and a kind of old-fashioned neighbourliness which is very likeable. But Trump brought out the worst in some Americans. They felt emboldened by his manifest oafishness, the facile language he used to describe the issues faced by America. Suddenly it was okay to be stupid, racist, sexist and generally crass – hey, it must be! That guy with the hair is, and he’s the goddamned President! Suddenly you could feel proud of yourself for nurturing those kind of views – in fact, you could be a Proud Boy!
The attacks of the mob on the Capitol were the logical final stage of the storm of toxic brain-pus whipped up by Trump over four years or more. From the grinning imbecile lounging in Nancy Pelosi’s chair with his feet on her desk, to the man in the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt, to the face-painted attention-seeker with the horned headgear who became the poster boy for nutjob cult QAnon (I wonder if he knows that wearing horns on one’s head is a sign of being a cuckold?) all these assorted freaks, oddballs and losers knew that Trump was their man, and they were determined to Stop the Steal – even if it meant committing murder.
This is what happens when you stop believing in things because they don’t fit in with what you want and only believe in what you want to hear. Many of these people genuinely believed (and still believe) that widespread electoral fraud had been committed to deprive their Messiah of victory. They’re doubtless the same people who believe that Covid is a Hoax, and that in reality, hospital wards are empty. That’s not just unAmerican – that’s just plain cuckoo.
Anyway, he’s gone now. No longer will we be forced to listen to Trump’s suggestions for dealing with the virus (“you can use ultraviolet light – or just powerful light… get it in through the skin or… some other way… And inject disinfectant… Almost a cleaning…”). No more of his depressing comments about his supporters who turned out in Charlottesville, the neo-Confederates, the neo-Nazis, the Klansmen that Trump called “very fine people”. No more Rudy Giuliani dribbling cheap black hair dye into his shirtcollar like a cut-price Count Dracula fading away with the dawn. And no more tweets about ‘covfefe’ or what a great guy his new best friend Kim Jong-un is.
There was some British politician, I forget who, who on being succeeded by a rival remarked, “There comes a time in every minister’s life where he must make way for an older man.” This is certainly the case here, and let us be thankful for it.
Good luck, President Biden. If you never achieve another thing, at least you got rid of Donald J Trump.