Another Thing

Another thing, among many, that Trump does not understand is the nature of legacy. Consumed by megalomania, porting a vacuum where self-awareness should be, indifferent to the contempt he prompts, he wishes to leave his mark: his name on everything, his face on US bank notes, a ballroom, a triumphal arch – though his real legacy is a trail of wreckage, distrust and death: a weakened America, a more fragile and dangerous international order, a world far more uncomfortable and struggling than it was before he got into the White House. It is, after all, a simple thing to understand, in understanding what has happened: place such a one behind the wheel of a fast car, or put a loaded AK47 into his hands, ask him to maintain downward pressure on the lever of an unpinned hand-grenade, or carry a Ming Dynasty tea-set over a tight-rope – and there will be trouble. And here we are: in trouble.

The Republican Party has woken to the fact that Trump does not care what happens in the midterm elections. He cares only about his ‘legacy’. He thinks he will have registered his presence in history by arches and ballrooms. Instead he will count in the litany of disgust, as a horrible mistake who set everything back by decades. Not by noble, life-affirming, positive contributions, not be leaving the world a better place, not by putting good causes before self and career, not by exemplifying modesty, kindness, and dedication to service, but instead by iteration of gross self-serving folly, ignorance and carelessness, he has polluted history, and his name will be anathema in it.

The universal is distilled in the particular. Thus the mark of Trump is best exemplified by the kitsch with which he has smeared the White House’s interior. Take a look at how he has ‘decorated’ the Oval Office. The curators of a Museum of Tastelessness could not have done better. When he added a gallery of predecessors with labels announcing his spitefulness and vindictiveness regarding them, you would have thought he had finished piling a Pelion on Ossa of bad taste – but then came the East Wing adventure, demolishing it to substitute a veritable bloviation of kitsch, as if his desperate striving to be remembered requires more than mere excess.

The mess Trump has made of the White House is the domestic version of the mess he has made of the US, its reputation and place in the world, and of the world itself. So lacking is he in self-awareness that it cannot be hoped he will one day have an epiphany, and be overwhelmed by realisation: by embarrassment and shame, upon understanding what he has done and how he is seen. The best that can be hoped is that he will live long enough to see his successors holding their noses as they dispose of his efforts, cleaning and disinfecting, filling the trash-cans with the rubbish of his Presidency. One relishes the idea of such an ego facing such a mortification. Even that, however, is paltry recompense for the damage done – not just to hopes and arrangements, but to lives uselessly, indeed criminally, lost because of him.

‘Indifferent to the contempt he prompts’: yes, but he is simultaneously beyond thin-skinned. He is stung by comments about falling asleep, mispronouncing words, mixing up countries or misnaming them, falling over, and rambling in speeches. His constant references to passing cognitive tests – bigly, of course; no one has ever passed a cognitive test as brilliantly as he has – reached another high last Friday with his saying that every candidate for high office should be required to take a cognitive test lest the country find itself saddled with a moron…oh lord, if only the already over-mutilated corpse of irony could be left in peace.

A semiotic study of the images Trump posts from his loo in the wee hours would conclude, among much else, that they are middle-finger responses to those who impugn his Master-of-the-Universe-ness. Take the one about him and a gaggle of epigones floating in the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial. His cetaceanic physique is AI-d into something resembling what Saint Paul thought the resurrected martyrs – having seen no corruption – will look like; we know different, a case of our being smarter (temporarily) than AI. But it is the louche lèse-majesté of the gesture, a sneer at Lincoln and associated sentiment, at those who do not regard Trump as biglier in every way than Lincoln, for look! Trump can treat with casual contempt a memorial to the great President who saved the Union and was unable to tell a lie.

The Guardian reports that ICE has outsourced to a private company the task of hunting down undocumented children previously released from ICE detention. The shade of Anne Franck falls over this particular pixilation in the horror-show that is Trump’s America: families hiding children from armed bullet-proof-vest-wearing paramilitaries who are the very signature of fascism. Think of it – this is the USA today.

If there is one silver lining to the whole Trump disaster, it is that the US might learn a lesson and adjust itself so that it can live up to the Hamiltonian ideal of ensuring that fit persons, and fit persons only, will be employed to serve the people. That requires that the people choose well who shall administer that service, and that the institutions which constrain the people’s servants, whether elected or appointed, will be secure against capture by malignant fools. To repeat, as one endlessly must, what Frederick Douglass said, for it has to be the watchword: ‘We should have our government so shaped that even in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.’ The US is not so shaped, a fact of which Trump is the living, stinking, monstrous proof.