A year ago, President Trump addressed the United Nations for the first time in his second term. As I chronicled at the time, it appeared to mark the passing of something profound in the intangible concept of American exceptionalism, the ‘shining city on a hill’ as Ronald Reagan put it. The belief that America was something special. Yes, I know this was for many a useful hypocrisy but the point was a lot of Americans genuinely believed it and a lot of folks beyond their borders probably bought into it too.
The public trashing of that belief by the current Chief Executive, who aspires to mere greatness where his predecessors dealt in transcendence, was discombobulating in a fashion even as we have grown more cynical these past few decades with respect to the Americans. ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi’, thus passes worldly glory with ideals cast aside for the far more measurable and tangible and base rewards of his own power and wealth.
I had in mind to do a sequel in response to his UN speech yesterday evening, but as I went through his words it was not discombobulation, or shock, or sadness, or anger that I responded with. It was sheer boredom. Never as eloquent a man as his opposite and enemy Barack Obama was, Trump has tended to compensate with aggression or ‘daring to say the unsayable’ as he equates the restraint of better individuals with weakness and stupidity.
Yet after a decade and a half of his puerile commentary the schtick has gotten old, his endless litany of complaints regarding how unfairly he thinks he is being treated are wearisome, his moanings about how the rest of the world have taken advantage of the United States are dull (particularly when it becomes increasingly clear that in his imperious approach to the office, he sees the United States merely as a synonym for himself) and his threats to every friend balanced solely by his craven deference to his nation’s enemies are but a rote and predictable motif.
If you want a summary of what he said, just think of every speech you’ve heard him make in the past year or so and you’ll get the general gist without having to endure the monotony of actually listening to it yourself. I find myself agreeing with former American ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul who said of it…
“I think we’re at the end of the Trump era,” he said. “I think this will be forgotten as a speech. Nobody will remember it. I’ll bet you people are checking their phones right now in the building itself. They’ve heard it all before, and I think people are tired of it.”
And the era that is ending is that of a man who is, as I have argued, manifestly unfit for the office he holds. He is now on the brink.
On November 3rd of this year, Americans will head to the polls to determine the composition of one-third of the Senate and the entirety of the House of Representatives. The Republican Party, hollowed out and repurposed as Donald Trump’s Minion Caucus, has attempted to distort the election by engaging in an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymander wherein once again US legislators choose their own voters in a legal yet ethically vacuous practice that should horrify all those who believe in true democracy.
This has been aided and abetted by a US Supreme Court whose paper-thin claims of being neutral arbiters of the law have been shredded with their willingness to tear up precedent to enact Republican political priorities, including the gutting of the civil rights law that preserved African American representation in States that have historically done their utmost to suppress that representation. That they did so using the reasoning that taking race into account when drawing the districts was unconstitutional was such a complete inversion of the intent of the law in the first place that the sheer chutzpah of the majority in favour of the decision definitely rankles.
Further voter suppression efforts in advance of the election are still continuing such as his attempt to limit postal voting whereas others such as the SAVE act perished in the face of an insurmountable threat by Democrats to filibuster the legislation in the Senate.
And yet in spite of this, the odds are his party will suffer a reckoning come election day with the House of Representatives and perhaps even the Senate falling to the Democrats.
Voter rage in the US can be attributed to a multitude of factors including his defence of AI, his illegal war on Iran, his economic war against his allies, his anti-immigration drive that has effectively driven the Hispanic voters he convinced to vote for him back in 2024 back into the arms of the Democrats…but it all really boils down to one thing.
The cost of living.
As NBC news reports here, the widespread belief is that the President has hurt the economy through his actions.
…the poll suggests an increasingly gloomy political environment for the GOP. Longtime double-digit leads over the Democratic Party on who would better handle inflation and the economy have evaporated. More than 6 in 10 voters say the Iran war has not been worth it. Voters don’t appear to be motivated by Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation he championed last year.
Instead, Trump himself is a powerful motivating factor, but more for Democrats than for Republicans, as more voters — including nearly half of independents — say they consider their vote a signal of opposition to the president than at any other time in three decades of NBC News polling before midterm elections.
American Presidents and their parties traditionally pay the price at the midterm elections which are held two years into every Presidential term (a time frame I think is much too short but that is another topic) and, facing gridlock at home, frustrated Presidents tend to pivot to world affairs to cement their legacy. However, Trump has already run riot through the international system, enabled again by the supine legislators of his own party who were supposed to check his excesses but who instead just let him get on with it. He has no great project such as the Northern Ireland or Middle Eastern peace processes to busy himself with as Clinton did. In fact, much of the wreckage that used to constitute the international order can be attributed to his thorough demolition job.
No, Trump will turn elsewhere for his legacy.
Godwin’s Law is meant to prevent glib comparisons to the Nazis, the excesses of the Third Reich should not be trivialised was the reasoning of the author. But Godwin’s law is not a blanket prohibition either and if the comparison works then it should be made so long as it is jusitifiable and demonstrable with evidence. Trump will seek his legacy in the same place the Nazi leader aspired to, in grandiose architecture.
Hitler intended his legacy to be ‘Germania’, a rebuilt and reimagined Berlin that would serve as the capital of his thousand-year Reich. A massive city of monuments and marble designed to awe and inspire all who saw it as a tribute to the glory of Germany, of the Nazi Empire and, of course, to the Fuhrer himself.
The fact that the marshy swampland Berlin is built on meant the plan was likely unrealisable and would have resulted in much of this glorious new edifice sinking into the stinking muck is a deliciously ironic metaphor though given the city remained but a fever dream it is, thankfully, just a metaphor. Plans for the new city were only halted in 1943 when the tide of war turned and of course they were never resumed.
In a similar vein, Trump has sought to entrench his legacy by his own redevelopment of Washington D.C. He has torn down the historic East Wing of the White House and is determined to build a monstrously proportioned ballroom in its place. He has usurped the Kennedy Centre, the memorial to the slain President Kennedy, and is threatening to tear it down because he has been forbidden from plastering his own name across the building.
And, like Hitler, he has visions of a vast ‘triumphal arch’ as the centrepiece of his construction spree, a gaudy and colossal eyesore limned with the gold leaf he has a penchant for and which he envisions as a ‘military complex’ complete with drones and snipers manning it.
This is what obsesses him now. Monuments and statues and buildings that serve no other real purpose than pander to his own sense of grandiosity (how often have we heard this ignorant and foolish man declare himself the expert on any given topic because he cannot bear the thought of someone being smarter than he is). The cost of living is an irrelevance when compared to the cost of his personal glory.
And in this petty obsession and continual harping on the same old points of grievance he simply cannot let go, Trump has become boring. That doesn’t lessen the damage he has done nor what he threatens as his powers wane and his influence retreats. He still has over two years left in office with which to wreak havoc. We should be wary of that. But the man himself, once so shocking, has become the personification of tedium. We skip shock straight to anger now and the anger is a constant companion without respite. We have accepted there is no moral or ethical floor for him and thus he no longer surprises us with the depths he is willing to plumb.
With luck, even if he does manage to desecrate the American capital with one of these architectural horrors, he will share his reaction with us through social media as perhaps his successor will bulldoze them to make the point that no one is above the law and that no American President can be allowed to deify themselves or define their own legacy whilst in office. I, personally, would find that a cathartic spectacle.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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