This is how Donald Trump’s presidency ends
New York Magazine canvassed a hundred New Yorkers asking each the question, “How Will the Trump Presidency End?” Remember, this question was asked in New York, so you can expect a New York bias. Nevertheless, a thin majority (51%) responded he will run again and lose in 2020 – and a further 8% thinks he will lose and have to be deposed, with 23% believing he will win reelection. The remaining replies ranged from “don’t know” all the way to impeachment to “he will become dictator for life.”
What struck me about all this is, based on the opinions of people in a distinctly anti-Trump city, how easy it is to believe that Donald Trump has a Vegas chance to survive this current crisis. Most particularly, in a post-Fairness Doctrine, Post-Truth era, the “man on the street” thinks that a proven arch criminal, traitor, sexual predator and liar has a decent shot at a second term.
Welcome to a world where it is possible to believe that the Apollo mission to the moon was a hoax, where global warming is a business dirty trick of Chinese export, where the 911 attacks were engineered by the Bush administration and UFOs travel trillions of kilometers for the sole purpose of making lovely designs in our crops. Welcome to the world of “anything goes.” This is the State of the Union of “thought” as it exists in America today. And it is nothing short of unbelievably, staggeringly stupid.
I do not know who will be taking the oath of office on Wednesday, January 20th, 2021, but I do know who it won’t be, and I’ll stake my reputation on it: it won’t be Donald John Trump. To support this extraordinary claim I turn to no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton, who said in his Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
If anything has been a constant in American national politics, it has been the routine left to right and back again swing of the pendulum of the political spectrum. Never before in history has that pendulum swung so severely to the right, and never before has there been so powerful a groundswell risen up of equal and opposite reaction, fueled by an outrage seldom seen before, and one about to be augmented by a Generation Z explosion – coming of age and desperate to vote Donald Trump into oblivion. And you may quote me.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.