A post-Trump world
Nine years and nearly four months ago, Donald Trump descended an infamous escalator and burst forth upon an unprepared world in a stench of lies, bombast and ordure. From that day to this he has dominated the news. A quiet day was a day when he did or said something infuriatingly bigoted, stupid or downright evil only twice. His name has appeared in print, on television and in social media literal billions of times. He has been, ever since, an atrocity, a one man 9/11, holding us hostage to our incredulity, captivated by our fascinated revulsion. Just when we thought he’d hit bottom he showed us we had no conception of what bottom can look like.
And in less than a month he will be gone. To be sure, the aftermath of so much evil cannot be short. He will leave behind a trail of devastation. It will take years to fumigate the nation of his stink. But like Hitler, McCarthy, Nixon, Rush Limbaugh and all the bigots, autocrats and spreaders of hate that came and went before, he will leave behind no clever words or homilies. Nothing about Trump is enduring.
Naturally there will inevitably remain a few Trump apologists. But as the years pass and his legacy of enmity fades he will evolve, like Joseph McCarthy did, into a national embarrassment. One-time Trumpists will deny they ever knew him. He’ll become the proverbial cautionary tale, the one that future generations will scratch their heads in wonderment about and swear they never would have fallen for his lies. Historians will speculate about why so many were mesmerised by this circus clown, this inarticulate conman, this combination Bond Villain and used car salesman. Psychologists will weigh-in about extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds.
But in the immediate aftermath of a Trump defeat, and yes, I am certain now he will be defeated in November, the Trump myth will begin to wither and die, right before our very eyes. Everything will begin to unravel. His haggard and hate-twisted face will become more haggard, more hate-twisted. His congenital repugnance will become more repugnant. His incoherence will become more incoherent. He will, as Shakespeare put it, descend into a “second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
When Trump goes to prison, and yes, I think that is now inevitable too, fewer than you now might think will protest. Dethroned cult leaders seldom inspire enduring loyalty. Their formerly rabid acolytes get up and walk out in the middle of their sermons in the midst of diminished crowds of fading enthusiasm. The moribund signs of the end of a Trump era is beginning to show, it’s starting to visibly fray around the edges. Trump is dying, literally and figuratively, right before our eyes. We are witnessing his final rally, his Battle of the Bulge, and it will fail. He will fail.
So what next? What new thing will fill the gap left behind by America’s very own wannabe Hitler? No one can say. I would love to assure you that we will return, politically speaking, to the world I was born into, the world of Eisenhower, when Republicans were Republicans and Democrats were Democrats, but we both had one thing in common. We both loved our country and agreed to come together when the best interest of the country was on the line. Will we ever return to such a thing? We shall see.
In the meantime we can rejoice in the coming demise of Donald Trump. We can rejoice in a return to a kind of normality we haven’t known for nearly a decade. There will still be plenty to do, of course. We must undo the horrors of Trumpism, restore Roe as the law of the land, divest ourselves of a corrupt SCOTUS, purge the land of Republican attempts to corruptly influence elections through gerrymandering and the subterfuge of “election reform,” and, above all, save the planet from ourselves.
But let us also take some time to rejoice. In the aftermath of a Trump defeat, let’s enjoy the rest of November and the run up to Christmas. Let’s revel in the final triumph over this evil man. Yes, we have plenty of work ahead of us. But let’s remember to enjoy our victory. We’ve earned it. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.