The 45th President of the United States of America is going absolutely nowhere. And he’s going there fast, regardless of what he wants us all to believe.
In 48 days, on January 20 when Joe Biden is inaugurated as 46, 45 will be nowhere. Well, if you can call Mar-a-Largo ‘nowhere’. And I think we can. Donald J. Trump won’t be at the inauguration at the Capitol – he won’t show up to that. Instead, he’ll be in nowhere land, at his golf club, raging and helpless.
Last night, in a 46-minute taped speech at the White House – minus the press pool, so minus questions – Trump vowed to continue the “fight” for the election, “rigged” and “stolen from the American people”. According to Trump, “everyone” knows he won the election – bigly – even those judges who have thrown out his legal team’s election fraud cases.
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? It’s not news that Trump is an out and out liar. He’s shamelessly lied his way through his presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s lying still. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’ll do anything – including undermine our democracy – to stay in the White House. But he won’t stay. And more to the point, nor will he return. Trump is over.
His influence will quickly fade, his grip on even his most ardent supporters will loosen. Without the power of the presidency, he will be in the wilderness, his days filled with criminal prosecutions, civil law suits and bitter betrayals. Old friends won’t answer the phone; his family will distance themselves. We’ll still see him, should we wish to, on Newsmax and OAN, selling right-wing conspiracies and lies, and in advertisements, selling pillows for Mike Lyndell and books for Tucker Carlson.
But he will have moved – quickly and seamlessly – into the land of hustle and hasbeenary; as distant from the respected and respectable usual life of former US presidents as he is from morality and honesty.
It’s horribly easy to believe otherwise, of course. The news is filled with speculation about Donald Trump’s afterlife: the chances of him standing for president again in 2024 (high, apparently); of him traveling the nation, circus-like, gathering up adoring new followers (very high, I’m told); of him raising hundreds of millions of dollars with which to bribe Republicans into submission (high like Everest, is the general view).
But I think this is all pretty much nonsense.
It’s not that I underestimate Trump’s ploys and plots, his disregard for America and its people, his self-regard or his self-aggrandizing. Or his solid base of star-struck fans and eye-to-the-main-chance political supporters.
But I think we’ve forgotten, oddly, how little there will be left of Donald Trump once he leaves the White House.
The man who Paul McCartney – as smart a commentator as most, I reckon – once described as “the mad captain”, is truly desperate. He already knows he’s lost the presidency. What he’s really afraid of now is losing our attention (well, that and prison).
But watching Trump and his foam-lipped satellites screaming their daily lies is like watching a horror movie late at night, in an empty house, in a violent storm. Eventually, the ridiculous becomes believable; the descent into hell inevitable.
But everything changes if we just have the sense to switch off the television and put the lights back on.
Look. There is Donald J. Trump, a failed, one-term president. He sits brooding in his nowhere land, a fat old spider, making all his nowhere plans to weave another gluey web in which to draw foolish Republicans. But it’s not going to stick anymore.
It’s not that the GOP and its hangers-on are no longer greedy or stupid – or corrupt, or frightened, or plain susceptible – because they are. But there will no longer be any point in them flocking to a shrunken, needy Trump; a man finally powerless, grappling with his own fears, with little left to give.
In one of Trump’s long-ago, God-awful, books – The Art Of Persuading Pipeline Layers And Pillow Makers, I think it was called – he wrote: “There’s an old proverb to the effect that ‘fear makes the wolf bigger than he is’, and that is true.”
Let’s try to remember those oh-so-wise Trumpian words as he huffs and puffs in the coming months. Let’s make sure our fear doesn’t fool us into letting him blow the house down.
Kath Raymond Hinton 