There he goes, like a caricature by Mark Twain, riding his pig out of town under the cover of darkness, this over-ripe seller of pomade and victimhood, leaking lies ’til the end, leaving behind a legion of suckers who still pray for him every night so that they don’t have to acknowledge how badly they got had.
Once the poison of the last four years dissipates, or at least congeals, and we become used to the soothing ordinariness of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, I suspect the US presidency of Donald Trump will begin to look increasingly like what it was: a Ponzi scheme perpetrated by a man who, for reasons science will no doubt discover, exerted an almost supernatural grip on the emotions — and wallets — of a certain type of bigot.
This was the black-blue/white-gold dress optical illusion turned toxic and projected onto the biggest stage in the world, where half of Americans saw an avenging angel of whiteness and counterfactual, warped nostalgia, wrapped in the Star-Spangled Banner, with Jesus at his right and John Wayne at his back; and the other half saw him clearly: a barely literate frat boy with a penchant for bankrupting businesses, looking at teenaged girls in their underwear and seeking affirmation from foreign tyrants and domestic fascists.
And what was it all for? The snowflakes on the far right, mistaking feelings for facts, endlessly declared that Trumpism was a genuine political movement. Perhaps, for some of the suckers, it still is, the way members of disintegrating cults cling to dogma even after the Angel Apostle who started the whole thing has given it all up and become a stockbroker.
But Trump didn’t run for president to make America Great Again or to End the War on Christmas or to Build the Wall or Drain the Swamp or Lock Up Hillary or Defeat Isis or any of the other things he vowed to do and didn’t.
He did it so Donald J Trump, serial bankrupt and compulsive liar, could extract money from the Rust Belt, and East Coast executives eager to exploit it, to pay off the debts he’s accumulated over a lifetime of being fantastically shit at business and utterly resistant to dealing with consequences.
Like everything Trump has ever touched, it was simply about trying smother his shrieking, terrified inner child with money and praise.
Of course, as almost every worthwhile pundit has pointed out by now, scrubbing out this human skidmark doesn’t mean the US and the world are safe from Trumpism or the white right’s wholehearted embrace of magical thinking backed up with assault rifles.
The US presidency of Donald Trump will soon begin to look increasingly like what it was: a Ponzi scheme perpetrated by a man who, for reasons science will no doubt discover, exerted an almost supernatural grip on the emotions – and wallets – of a certain kind of bigot.
At the time of writing, before Wednesday evening’s inauguration of Biden, the ceremony was shaping up to be less a celebration of democracy than a type of dash into and out of a heavily protected Green Zone.
The US is still a country where big, dirty money always, always wins. It has no labour party, no free health care, no meaningful restrictions on gun ownership and, worse, a deep belief that these things are, at best, gateway drugs to socialism, at worst, pure evil. Through a combination of wilful ignorance and a crumbling education system, it still hasn’t understood what slavery meant and what its legacy continues to mean.
But for the next four years it can, at the very least, begin to reclaim some of the ground surrendered to the mad king Trump.
It can remember and start to live by values that might just make it great, arguably for the first time.
It can take back the language of progressive idealism that Trump stole and warped, and remind us again of some basics: that speaking out against hateful behaviour isn’t “political correctness gone mad”; that trying to marginalise those who want to use violence or corruption to privilege themselves isn’t “cancel culture”; that there are racists and anti-racists, not “fine people on both sides”; that calling someone an anti-fascist is a compliment, not an insult.
And perhaps one of these days we can all start edging back to a world in which reality is what scientists and philosophers suggest it might be, not what hollowed-out fraudsters and their fart-catchers pronounce it to be as they scribble on weather maps with Sharpies or whine to their echo-chambers that maths is biased and legitimate elections should be overturned, or claim that their hate-filled, murderously neglectful, vastly corrupt administration was the greatest the world has ever seen.
Here’s hoping.
