What is it about the Americans who have inflicted Donald Trump on themselves and their fellow citizens as president? It can’t just be that the Democrats have consistently fielded weak and unappealing candidates for the job. Why the Democrats do that is another story altogether. But Trump – the idiot king – emerged as the candidate of the Republican Party. Why did they choose him in 2016 and again prostrate themselves before him between 2016 and 2020? Why did they forsake all of the rival contenders for the Republican nomination?
That Trump is now demonstrating what most sensible people always knew about him may well lose him popular support among American voters. But the fact remains that he has been implanted in the Oval Office by a party which used to be respectable – the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, George Bush snr and, yes, even Ronald Reagan.
How did Tea Party extremists become the reactionary tail that wagged the US legislature? How can it be that in Trump’s cabinet we have rivals who likened him to Hitler, questioned his sanity, and utterly rejected his suitability for office?
How humiliating is it for ordinary Americans to be led by a man who demanded the Nobel Peace Prize and hijacked the award from María Machado? How crass. Are decent Americans not sickened and ashamed by this narcissistic idiocy? Why do people who full well know how terrible a man he is agree to serve under him – whether in his cabinet or as his diplomats? In that I include among them his envoy to Ireland.
It isn’t that he is simply cringe-making in the mind of any sensible person. He has warped all of the US democratic institutions. He has appointed lackeys to the federal courts. He has deployed his armed forces in American cities. He is terrorising entire communities with his campaign of arrests and expulsions. He has subjugated the independence of America’s great universities. He has unlawfully renamed the US Department of Defense as the Department of War while demanding a Nobel Peace Prize. He brought on stage the late Hulk Hogan. He invited Conor McGregor to the White House on St Patrick’s Day. He has pardoned fraudsters and political donors at an unprecedented level.
Worse still, he has attempted to pervert history by asserting that Ukraine is responsible for the Russian invasion. He tried to mug Volodymyr Zelenskiy in his gold-encrusted office. He has, in his time, encouraged lawless, would-be dictators such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
On top of all that, his government has published a National Security Strategy which commits the US to the destruction of the political cohesion of the European Union and paves the way for American assistance for “patriotic” political parties committed to the EU’s dismemberment.
The Greenland saga is a case in point. The island of Greenland is totally available to Nato to secure the interests of the western alliance. The suggestion that Greenland lies open to acquisition or subversion by Russia or China is utterly fanciful. Any security interests that the US believes are currently underserved in Greenland or the Arctic region can, without any difficulty, be addressed within the context of the Nato umbrella.
How can any American tolerate a president who justifies threats to acquire territory by force – especially when this usurpation of the principles of the United Nations and of international law is excused by reference to Norway’s failure to award him the Nobel Peace Prize? Or Britain’s cession of sovereignty in the Chagos Islands, which preserves the strategic base in Diego Garcia for the US and the UK?
If Trump’s antics and postures are laughable, the laugh is on the Americans who put him back in the White House. I am glad that his opinion poll approval ratings have plummeted. Anecdotal information coming my way suggests that the scales are falling from the eyes of many previously naive followers of the Maga delusion. The forthcoming midterm elections for the House of Representatives may well deprive Trump of capacity to govern as a monarch. Changing the complexion of the US Senate midterm is considerably more difficult.
But the onus now lies heavily on the Democrats in America to uphold and restore democracy as never before. The US needs a strong and credible contender from the middle ground to challenge Trump and/or his chosen successor in 2028. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris simply did not measure up in the minds of middle America as dynamic and powerful champions of western democracy throughout the world. In a political system dominated by the cash hoards of America’s millionaires and billionaires, politics of moderation are insufficient to capture America’s political imagination. Figures such as senator Bernie Sanders and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani are unlikely to gain the trust of conservative middle America – especially when they face the financial resources and the media onslaught of hard-right TV such as Fox News.
It is perhaps consoling that the worse Trump behaves the greater is our room for optimism.