The Beginning of the End

Do you remember how it began?

Or how you felt when you heard the news?

That Donald Trump… the reality TV show host, the self-promoting guest star of sitcoms and movies galore, the man who once took a ‘stone cold stunner’ at Wrestlemania, that ridiculous looking guy with the massive comb-over who had spent the previous few years peddling racist conspiracy theories…well, he was running for President of the United States!

He announced his bid on the 16^th June 2015, descending an escalator in Trump Tower to make official something that had been long rumored but which now became all too real. As the Guardian preserves of that day…

Trump took to the stage as speakers bellowed out Neil Young’s 1989 song Rockin’ in the Free World, and went on to attack most of the rest of the world as he blamed Barack Obama for letting the country collapse to the level of “a third world country”.

Most of his wrath was directed at Mexico, which he accused of “bringing their worst people” to America, including criminals and “rapists”.

“They’re sending us not the right people,” he said, adding: “The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems.

“They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing their problems,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting.”

Because I remember how I felt when I heard the news.

Delighted.

I thought that this would be funny and farcical in equal measure. Trump would launch a circus through the Republican primary leaving a trail of merry chaos in his wake…a cert giving the appallingly racist commentary he was now spouting which I felt would taint the Republican brand…until he inevitably ran out of road and someone from the Republican establishment…probably Jeb Bush…would step forth to be anointed as their candidate for the 2016 election.

Many folks had the same reaction. The comedian John Oliver publicly rued the fact he had hoped (in 2013) for Trump to run for precisely that reason; the sheer entertainment value of seeing him do it.

And Oliver rued the fact because Trump did declare his candidacy. And Trump did run. And Trump did lead a circus through the Republican primary. And a lot of people looked at this man and instead of recoiling thought ‘you know, he may be on to something…’. And then he crushed all before him and became President in an outcome nobody (save Michael Moore) expected…including Trump, who was as surprised as anyone else to find himself elected on that dark night in 2016.

Since 2016, Trump has reshaped the entirety of American political discourse around himself. During his first term, it was all about him. During the Biden interregnum, it was all about him. And up till last night in the United States, it has been all about him. This malignant narcissist has become the most consequential figure in the story of early twenty-first century, the tribune and promoter of the disease of the western world of a far right willing to fight culture wars rather than deal with real problems and happy to seek out scapegoats rather than solutions.

Would the problems we now face in our societies be as toxic were it not for him exacerbating them? Would the divisions we confront be as poisonous if not for those who ape him? The man has shattered norms that were norms for good reason, coarsened discourse and coshed idealism to the gutter to be replaced by his own petty transactionalism.

Everything he touches turns not to his favorite of gold but to far baser elements that tarnish, rust and rot.

We all stopped laughing long ago. A moral lesson in treating politics as entertainment when in many cases it is life or death. Upon his return to the White House in early 2025, Trump shut down USAID with some claiming hundreds of thousands of people have died in developing countries as the life-saving programs it operated closed down and that is but one example of the suffering he has caused by the complete absence of empathy in his heart.

But whilst politics should not be a reality show, the stunning and historic rebuke of Trump and his MAGA movement that occurred on Tuesday night shows the curtain is being prepared to come down on this decade long experiment in putting a man manifestly unfit for the role into the office. For the first time in over a decade a glimmer of light has appeared on the far horizon.

With control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party can at last restore Congress to what it should be, a check on the overreach of this incompetent, malicious executive. Some within their ranks counsel that they should restrain their instincts for retribution and focus on addressing the affordability crisis that is tormenting ordinary Americans, a crisis Trump has both compounded with his ill-thought-through tariffs and illegal wars, to prove to them they can govern better than the now broken Republican Party. Why indulge the desire for retribution from the Democratic base?

Frankly, they can do both. Vengeance in this case will be a happy coincidence to holding a corrupt administration accountable.

The Republican party governed so woefully these past two years that it would take a deliberate effort to do worse and I would argue it is necessary to hold Trump’s enablers in his administration and in the Congress to account, for all the damage they have done to their country, to the western alliance and to the wider world. They either abetted him or cravenly stood aside for him.

As for the man himself, power is rushing away from him with every passing second in the aftermath of this catastrophe. He faces two years of investigations, subpoenas and fights with a Democratic Congress happy to stonewall his agenda with a steadfastness not seen since the Republican party frustrated the agenda of President Obama in his closing years in office…except this time, the President will richly deserve this outcome.

Of course we aren’t out of the woods yet. With no prospect of his domestic agenda being enacted, Trump will likely head the siren’s call of foreign affairs where he will have a much freer hand. Many Presidents before him have taken this path. Few though have done a thorough demolition job on the institutions of the world order prior to taking this pivot.

The expectation is that Trump will very rapidly restart the war in the Middle East now the mid-terms are over and there is nothing to hold him back. In this he will certainly be joined by Netanyahu, fresh from his own humiliation at the polls and eager to jump back into the fray. Iran is already warning of severe consequences if this occurs, threatening to widen the scope of their own retaliation.

And there are so many other ways for him to betray Ukraine and the entire West in his quest to fawn over Vladimir Putin.

Things are going to get worse before they get better I believe and we all pay the price in one form or another.

But I do believe this is the turning of the corner at last. Every day that passes brings us closer to that day Trump will leave the Presidency and we can begin to rebuild what he has destroyed. It will never be as it was before, and America will pay a permanent price in terms of its power as a consequence. That is the lesson they should internalize the next time a would-be authoritarian proclaims that ‘he alone can fix it’. Even though the movement he represents is not done…and given we can trace it all the way back through American history in a multitude of guises, it will probably never be done…this foul iteration of it in the shape and shadow of one man is at last, thankfully, on the way out.

Let us remember it and him when its next configuration rears its ugly head.