2020 Blog Week 45: Sic Semper Tyrannis
First up, apologies for the wanky latin title. But just now I was watching the crown and someone said sic semper tyrannis, which essentially means bad things will eventually come to all tyrants. And it seems appropriate, because today it holds true.
Trump vexed me. It’s safe to say I wasn’t the only one. But specifically from my generation’s point of view, his inauguration in 2016 marked the point at which the world we had grown up in, and come to understand, broke down. We were born at a good time, a time of cultural optimism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 90s tech boom. We were too young to remember 9/11 and too young to understand the 2008 financial crisis. While we were growing up, the go-to edgy political maxim was that it hardly mattered who you voted for, both candidates are the same. One politician falls, another rises, but the status quo remains. How the turns have tabled.
2016 brought Brexit and Trump, and things palpably changed. In hindsight the cultural currents were there for a long time before they surfaced, but when they did surface…
..it was, well, quite dramatic.
Trump’s innumerable flaws are obvious, and they’ve been dissected and discussed in detail elsewhere. But aside from the sexism and the racism, what really vexed me about Trump was how he never seemed to face the consequences of his actions.
His business ventures were almost always colossal failures. Trump University turned out to be a complete scam, Trump steakhouses failed after 2 months, and his casinos lost money. But he bounced back. He’d gone bankrupt 6 (?) times, but still maintained the image of a massively successful billionaire. And then his political career took off, and he was skyrocketed to the presidency despite never having held public office, despite having the entire political system mocking him, successful despite it all, successful despite a recording of him boasting about sexual assault being released during his campaign. And then his actual presidency, a cacophony of daily catastrophe. He manhandled world leaders, called countries shitholes, he was fucking impeached, for christ’s sake, and none of it made any difference. He glided through enough outrage and scandal to sink a continent, shrugging it off like water off a duck’s back.
It was as fascinating as it was horrifying. He pioneered a new method of politics, in which it was impossible to be shamed. If you never admit you were lying, never admit you were wrong, never allow yourself to be held to account, then sooner or later it begins to work. Your opponents know you will refuse to be shamed, so they stop trying to shame you. And then you can tell your own lie, maybe even a blatant lie, but because you’re the most powerful person in the world, everyone has to listen to you. Has to report what you’re saying, comment on what you’re saying. And because (most of) the media and politicians play by different rules, they are forced to discuss your lies, debate your lies, work to disprove them even though they are patently false. Trump could’ve claimed that George Washington was a chinchilla, and the world would’ve had to take him seriously. GEORGE WASHINGTON A CHINCHILLA? asks every front page. Fox News would’ve backed him up, Sean Hannity shouting that George Washington’s hair looks just like that of a furry rodent. In the interest of fairness, CNN would’ve held a debate between a chinchilla expert and a man who thinks chinchillas have always run the US government. Trump would be questioned about it in a news conference, but of course he’d double down, saying the fake news media were unfairly attacking him. And Trump’s supporters would gather at his rallies shouting some new chinchilla chant. Then a few days later, it would all be overwritten by the next scandal.
It was all
so
exhausting.
I feel like I got a bit off topic there. But my point is that Trump was never held accountable for his actions. Instead he only got stronger, only gained in popularity. And no one had any idea how to fight him. Frankie Boyle captured it perfectly when he described Trump as a supervillain in a world without heroes.
That description has haunted me for the last four years. How do we fight someone so manifestly bad? Who succeeds not in spite of, but because of his arrogance, his unkindness, his shamelessness? Even today, the day Joe Biden beat Trump in the 2020 election, I don’t think we really know how to combat Trumpism.
During this election campaign, 220,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, which Trump has belittled from the beginning. During this election campaign race riots broke out for months after the police murdered more innocent black people on camera. During this campaign the president shouted non-stop through a 90 minute debate, after contracting the virus and possibly spreading it during that debate, AND HE STILL ALMOST WON.
This feels like a victory. It feels really good that Trump lost, and it’s good to feel good, particularly after the year we’ve all had. But fuck me, without the pandemic I don’t think Biden would’ve won at all. After four years of taking a sledgehammer to racial equality, democracy, climate science and all the rest, 71 million Americans voted for him. More people voted for Trump than any other sitting president in history. That is a huge mandate for Trumpism, and it’s only a matter of time before the next Trumpist candidate comes along. Hell, it might even be the man himself. He could run again in 2024.
And even before then, this is by no means an endorsement of Joe Biden. That reanimated corpse of centrism will probably try to continue the American supremacist agenda of hypercapitalism and crushing the world’s resource-rich countries, paying lip service to environmentalism while destroying the environment, doing little or nothing for the poor and the destitute. And even before then, there’s sure to be a few more tricks up Trump’s fraying sleeve. Who knows what could happen before January.
But if Biden is sworn in next year, I will breathe a sigh of relief. Because aside from questionable politics, it means something for the President of the USA to be a certain type of man. One who will act with intelligence, levity, a touch of humour, a touch of emotion (because think about it, how many emotions have you seen from Trump? Have you ever seen him laugh?). One who would choose a black woman to be his VP, one who cried at his son’s funeral, one who would admit when he was wrong. At the very least, one who would admit it if they lost a presidential election.
