Donald Trump is the biggest loser in history
“Maybe that was something he lost,” Charles Foster Kane’s editor laments with chilling clairvoyance about the meaning of Rosebud in “Citizen Kane,” the great film of 1941. “Mr. Kane was a man that lost almost everything he had.”
Sometimes when life imitates art it does so marginally. One can feel pity for Charles Foster Kane the rich man, coming to the end of his life and realising the only time he was ever truly happy was when he was a penurious child playing in the snow with his sled. That pitiableness doesn’t translate well to Donald John Trump. For my part, if I have any capacity to pity Trump, it has yet to assert itself.
Besides, Donald Trump was never penurious. He was born sucking on the proverbial silver spoon. Over time his father, Frederick Christ Trump (yes, that really was his name), apportioned out to him 400 million dollars in a series of tax free, and possibly illegal, living bequests. It was a staggering amount of money then and it remains a staggering amount of money today.
But like Kane, Trump is a man that “lost almost everything he had.” Or soon will. Friday’s judgement of 83.8 million dollars against Trump by the jury in the E Jean Carroll defamation and rape lawsuit is just the beginning. The 250 million dollar New York fraud case is coming, with some no doubt blood-curling add-ons. His right to practise business in New York is gone. Then there’s the millions he owes for his mounting legal debts.
It seems every month Trump’s deeply devalued “brand” is being removed from buildings wherever the Trump name is to be found. Now he himself could be removed entirely from society. Trump faces 91 criminal counts, any one of which could carry jail time. I would not want to bet against the proposition that Donald Trump is going to die in prison,
It’s fair to say that Donald Trump is history’s biggest loser. Never in history has anyone been given so much — money, Ivy League education, power, a profitable family business and a good name — and lost it all. He has plummeted from the greatest height, the presidency, down to the most tenebrious depth of rack and ruin. Trump will be remembered as the ultimate self-unmade man, the quintessential riches to rags story. And he has no one to blame but himself. Citizen Trump is a loser.
Everyone who comes into contact with Trump also becomes a loser. His capacity to lose is fractal. His losses beget losses. Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Rick Gates, and the thousands of January 6 insurrectionists have either gone to prison or are well on their way. Rudy Giuliani went from “America’s Mayor” to a figure of scorn and contempt. Rudy has lost his money, his dignity and his right to practise law. Donald Trump gets more lawyers disbarred than any other corrupting force.
In the annals of loserhood Trump has done what some thought was impossible. He has personally presided over the bankruptcy of no less than six casinos. Indeed, if Trump could be said to have a specific talent, bankruptcy might be it. Trump Steak, Trump Vodka, Trump Shuttle, Trump University, everything with which he comes into contact withers and dies. As Hillary Clinton once put it, Donald Trump has “written a lot of books about business. They all seem to end in Chapter 11.” If Trump had appeared as a contestant on The Apprentice he would have had to fire himself.
Yet the losing is only just beginning. Trump appears to be rapidly losing his mental faculties. He looks ghastly. The stress of being criminally prosecuted and universally hated is taking a huge physical toll.
He gets shockingly little sympathy, even from MAGA. The knuckle-dragging, drooling, Dunning-Kruger specimens who still elect to drink the Trump Kool-Aid think of him as a god who doesn’t require sympathy. He can’t even turn to his chronically absent wife, a woman he cheated in while she was pregnant with Barron. Citizen Trump is a loser. He is a defeated, vanquished, washed up, has-been failure. Loser J Trump is finished.
Trump lost every election he ever ran in or presided over. He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost the presidency outright in 2020. He lost in 2018 when, thanks to his historic unpopularity his party was crushed in a Blue Wave. The Senate win he was supposed to get in 2022 turned into a loss. The House landslide he and his party rightly anticipated turned into a pathetic, creaking, pyrrhic half-victory.
Yet, when I think of the harm he’s done to the nation of my birth, the divisions he’s inspired, the petty squabbles and pathetic victimhood he’s infected the Republican Party with, the million-plus Americans who died unnecessarily due to Covid, the women he’s raped or assaulted or sexually harassed, the good, honourable family businesses he’s ruined because he decided not to pay them, the tens of thousands of lies he’s told, I cannot summon the smallest token of pity for him. Seeing Trump die in prison, without his chauffeur-driven limos or his entourage or his daily, two hours of makeup, makes me glad. I want to celebrate in a great schadenfreude bacchanalia. I want him to suffer, I need him to suffer.
Donald J Trump, ordinary, down-and-out Citizen Trump, is a soulless, narcissistic, egomaniacal lump of nothing. He deserves our contempt. If he’s had any value at all he has served to remind us, just as the Nazis did in 1930s Germany, that there exists among us an element that is almost as evil, almost as contemptible, almost as dishonest as he is. 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.