Nobody has ever seen anything like it
Every crime ever committed in the history of crime has at least one human witness. Unfortunately, those witnesses aren’t reliable, as witnesses go. Those witnesses to every crime are always the criminals themselves.
There can be little doubt that Donald Trump is a material witness for more crimes, large and small, than any other US president in human history. By a long shot. By a country mile. Number one with a .700 calibre, nitro express bullet. That’s because Donald Trump is the witness that every crime always has. He IS the criminal.
I’ll go even further than that. Donald Trump is not just any criminal, either. He very well could be — and someone needs to check with Guinness and find out if they have such a category — the biggest criminal in human history.
If not, then surely he’s the most versatile. After all, can you think of anyone else who’s a rapist, a mass murderer, a traitor, a terrorist, a thief, a court-identified fraudster, a conman and a swindler? Can you think of anyone else who’s been indicted in four different jurisdictions on 91 criminal counts? I can’t. Nobody, as Trump himself is fond of saying, has ever seen anything like it.
Trump is unusual in his criminality. Unlike most criminals who try to hide their crimes, Trump confesses his crimes, right out in the open.
Oh, he doesn’t confess in the usual way. He doesn’t say, “I’m sorry, I did it, me culpa.” No, he confesses his crimes by accusing others of the very crimes he’s committed. Or he accuses others of crimes he’s about to commit. For instance, he accused Hillary and Joe of rigging their respective elections right in the middle of his attempts to rig those very elections. He calls Joe Biden a fascist, when he’s the very quintessence of fascism.
These odd revelations even extend to Trump’s own public discredits. No sooner had Trump scored dead last and Biden scored fourteenth in the recent Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus rankings of US presidents, Trump immediately started referring to Joe Biden as “the worst president in American history,” based entirely on nothing. He’s like a child on a kindergarten playground who turns every taunt and tease around by saying, “Oh yeah, well YOU’RE the stupid one!”
Trump is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a classic vaudeville villain in real life. Or a Bond villain, or a Batman villain. There is something oddly comic about his villainy, as if his very walk were accompanied by sinister and silly tuba music. He’s like Lex Luthor meets The Joker. It’s impossible to believe that his drooling acolytes continue to fall for his bullshit, and yet they do.
I’ll tell you something revelatory about Trump’s fans I noticed recently. Every time Adam Schiff posts something on Twitter — anything at all about any topic — the MAGA crowd following him loudly and bitterly and hatefully proclaim him a liar. Why? Because, in a highly political move, Schiff was censured by the MAGA Congress for allegedly lying about Trump, by “falsely” accusing Trump of colluding with the Russians during the 2016 election.
Now I’m not going to debate that, even though it’s obvious that Schiff’s censure was clearly an instance of strictly political vengeance. That isn’t my point. My point is to highlight how furious Trump fans are, how fanatically and hatefully exercised they are at the very notion that Schiff or anyone would dare to tell a lie about anything, as if lying were the blackest and most hateful sin imaginable.
They’re clearly furious about it. And yet their anger is expressed in defence of Donald Trump, the biggest liar in history, a man who cannot speak for thirty seconds without telling a provable lie, a man who probably lies in his sleep. They hate with a purple passion the very thing Trump does as naturally as breathing. It’s the purest and most perfect irony I have ever seen. Again, nobody has ever seen anything like it.
This is the surreal world to which we have found ourselves these last nine years. The world wasn’t like this ten years ago, not really. Back then, Republican follies were confined to mundane sorts of things, of binders full of women and misspellings of the word potato, of fiscal duplicities and corrupt corporate favouritisms. Not murders and rapes and treasons and lies. What the hell has happened? Was the world always mad, or did it require a Trump to render it so? I’m honestly not sure.
To repeat again a favoured Trump idiom, nobody has ever seen anything like it. All I can say is, once the Donald Trump menace is finally and blissfully removed from our lives, I hope we never see anything like him again. 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.