I’m not somebody who thinks that everybody who voted for Donald Trump was an idiot. But I do think that it’s a sad indictment of US politics that for so many people in 2016 Trump seemed like the best option they had. His election didn’t really surprise me at all.
In so many ways this is a person who is not equipped to be president of any country, let alone one of the most powerful in the world. For four years it seemed like the whole world was watching him through the cracks in our fingers as we covered our faces in a mixture of horror and embarrassment.
A narcissist of the highest order, Trump demanded to be centre of attention all the time. Even during the Covid pandemic, it seems like he always felt that he should be holding forth at press conferences rather than letting epidemiologists and medical professionals, who actually had knowledge of the subject, take the lead. How else can we explain the suggestions of injecting disinfectant or bringing “light inside the body” to fight infection? What we were witnessing was a bumbling idiot who had been convinced of his own genius by sycophantic toadies and his social media following.
I don’t think that everything that Trump did was disastrous, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that every view that he holds must be 100% wrong so we should think the absolute opposite. In many ways, the sections of the media which were hostile to him from the outset seemed to play into his hands by taking that sort of approach. Has any other president ever been able to play the victim of media bias to his supporters in quite the way that Trump did? I doubt it. The sense of an increasingly divided society seemed, from this side of the Atlantic at least, to characterise his term of office, with the different camps virtually living in different versions of the same country.
When he was voted out of office the whole world saw how that ended. An egotist so full of his own inflated sense of worth that he couldn’t see how he could have legitimately lost, and a following who are all too susceptible to seeing conspiracies at every turn, was always going to be a volatile situation. Those who swallowed all the Q Anon bullshit seemed to seriously think that the army was going to storm into the Capitol building, reinstate Trump as president, and arrest all of his opponents. It’s hardly surprising that they claimed to be storming the Capitol because Trump had told them to, and that they then expected him to use his presidential privilege to pardon them for the crimes they were being accused of. He didn’t do that of course – maybe he saw these people as useful idiots all along, throwing them a bone every now and again to keep them onside but disowning them as soon as the world agreed that they’d got out of hand.
And now Trump has decided to run for president again. You can’t imagine that the American people would fall for this a second time, and you’d imagine that the more likely result will be that his actions will rip the Republicans apart over the next couple of years. We can but hope.