The eye of the storm
Welcome to what could be the final days of American democracy. It’s very likely we’ll look back on these days and helplessly ask, “Why on earth didn’t someone do something?” That’s not a new question in world history, by the way. For nearly a century people have been asking that question about a previous time when a dangerous, convicted felon was handed power by an elderly man. I’m referring, of course, to January of 1933, when 84 year old president Paul Von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. And here we go again.
First, I want to make one thing very clear. The world might survive Trump. American democracy might survive Trump. It’s no certainty that Trump and his clown car of miscreants, buffoons and opportunists will be able to unravel the entire American system of government in just four years. If the confirmation hearings have demonstrated anything they have shown that Trump’s people are mostly vain and stupid, without the remotest idea of what they are doing. But it might also turn out that you don’t need to be competent to kill America. We just don’t know. Until now, nobody has ever tried.
I can hear some of you saying, “Oh yeah, what about Nixon?” We need to understand something right off the bat here. Nixon wasn’t Trump. He wasn’t anything like Trump. Nixon was, to be sure, a little man, a petty man, a vindictive man. But he was, in his own way, a patriot. I believe Nixon would have rather died than allow the entire American system of justice, elections, the framework, the Constitution, to be overthrown. Nixon believed in America. Trump doesn’t. Trump doesn’t believe in anything but Trump. Trump is also a malignant narcissist, a deluded megalomaniac and a psychopath. Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy we have ever faced.
But yes, it’s true, the American system of government might just be robust enough to survive Donald Trump. After all, it already has. Trump infested the White House for four years before. But this Trump is far, far more dangerous. This time Trump 2.0, if you will, has no guardrails, no one to steer him clear of some of his more dangerous ideas, no anonymous body of White House employees to “manage” him. This time he has the permission of the Supreme Court to commit any crime he wants. And this time the West Wing is going to be stacked to the rafters with nothing but sycophants and cultists.
The question isn’t “will America survive?,” the question is “why on earth are we taking this chance?” What madness possessed 77 million people to once again vote for this braggart, this idiot, this buffoon, this stupid, evil man? Why are we voluntarily surrendering power to the most dangerous man on earth? Is this the identical moral and mental softness that brought down Ancient Rome?
I have no idea what America is going to look like in 2028, and neither does anyone else. How many Americans would have predicted, let alone welcome, a Trump return to power in 2024 in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection? Lawrence O’Donnell flatly declared back then that Donald Trump would never enter the White House again. And yet here we are.
It’s a pair of crowning ironies that Monday is both Martin Luther King day and a day when the flag will be flying at half staff for Jimmy Carter. On that day Trump will lie many times. His biggest lie will come when he promises to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” while simultaneously defying that document. He is Constitutionally forbidden from being president because he openly engaged in and encouraged insurrection against the United States while giving aid and comfort to the insurrectionists. It defies belief. A writer of fiction would have blushed to propose such a preposterous plot. And yet here we are.
How did we get here? I’ll leave the answer to that baffling question to the sociologists and psychologists and historians. The fact is we are here. The fact is in four years it might turn out to be illegal to write what I have written today. Somehow the legacy media, social media, a cabal of billionaires and a mentally soft constituency has conspired to bring together a perfect storm of utter lunacy. And here we are, in the eye of that storm.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.