Me, me, me, me, me, me, ME!

It was a cold British winter evening in November 2020 when I was luxuriating in a deep, hot bath of water and flicking through YouTube entries, alighting on random things of interest. Something caught my eye. I couldn’t quite believe it. The losing candidate in the American presidential election was claiming that the electoral process had been rigged against him and that he was determined to overturn the results in the courts. This was both disturbing and revolutionary, I’d never heard anything like it. The seeds had been sown for almost six years, and counting. I would have to make daily checks on Donald Trump to make sure he wasn’t up to something worse than he had been the previous day. My wife declares me obsessed with the man. And in a sense, I am obsessed - by the witnessing of a nation in decline. Disturbed that people can sleepwalk into a situation with parallels in 1930s Nazi Germany. Horrified by the thought that people really think that hiding their head in the sand will make the threat go away.

There is no room here to catalogue all of Trump’s nefarious plans, and to thank God for his general incompetence. You would need a large book to do that. In many ways, Trump has done us all a favour by highlighting the weaknesses of the American political and legal machinery. He has exploited all of it and demonstrated that the ‘checks and stays’ designed to protect the nation were nothing more than unenforceable gentleman’s agreements. Nobody ever thought that an utter criminal would ever get into the White House yet nevertheless be afforded all the concession and reverence due to a regular president.

The problem is this: the office of President of the United States (POTUS) is a great and serious institution in the modern world. You can’t install a buffoon and expect to get away with it. Yet the American system has lumbered its way over the years to a position which supports just that. You need money, power and influence to even be considered. So much money that only old men need apply. There are only two parties in the race which has led to an unhealthy polarisation in the population and, in recent years, a move towards open hostility and mudslinging in all and every matter has led to the right-of-centre Republicans labelling their rivals lunatic Communists, and for the left-of-centre Democrats to declare themselves up against lunatic fascists.

I have always found myself to be deeply offended by the notions of lying and of cheating. You really would not want to be accused of either, and it would be a big issue even to intimate that somebody else was guilty of one or the other. Well, that used to be the case. But now all unpalatable truths are dismissed as emanating from somebody who is lying, almost certainly so that they can cheat in some way. It’s a grossly unpleasant way of thinking and speaking, but it has risen up and engulfed the former decorum and politeness of political discourse in less than a decade. This is not simply offensive to the ear; it prevents any possibility of collaborative working or compromise. We are on a slippery slope to the collapse of politics.

Trump likes to invent offensive nicknames for his adversaries. It’s puerile and unbecoming but, nevertheless, one of his trademarks. Gavin Newsom is currently Governor of California and is somebody Trump would be well-advised to be fearful of; he has been given the epithet Gavin Newscum. An eight-year-old would be embarrassed. The president was then proud to announce, and he’d only just thought of it, but he was very pleased with it, that the Democrats should be called Dumocrats. He knows what he’s doing. This is for his regular supporters who seem to like this sort of nonsense.

It’s easy to think that this is all Trump’s fault. He seems to embody all that is wrong with the world. But I suspect there is some other mastermind playing a long game of subterfuge in order to upset the world order for their own nefarious purposes, if that isn’t too suggestive of a shadowy Bond villain. Trump, himself, has hinted at just this by describing a Deep State which is really running everything. But then he goes on to describe it as a Democrat-inspired entity; something to be feared, and which only he can fix.

So, how has this collapse been engineered? Well, it requires large numbers of monumentally stupid people. America is really quite good at that even though it has truly wonderful educational institutions and some of the world’s brightest minds. The USA has traditionally been the home of technological innovation, driven on by a relentless desire to thrive economically and to achieve success generally. But this success has been achieved by a small cohort living on the east or west coasts of the continent. The rest of this vast country is pretty much populated by boneheads. Of course that’s a ludicrous generalisation, but my best guess is that it’s not far off the mark.

If I could characterise the bone-headedness, it would be like this…

I haven’t got much time for politics because I need to be out on my tractor, or rounding up the steers, or some such. So, I need something pithy to get behind. Some three-word phrase I can chant mindlessly. That Trump seems a regular guy; he was on the TV in The Apprentice – always pointing at people and firing them. Nice hair. I ain’t got time for newspapers (or, indeed, any other form of coherent and balanced information sharing) so I just watch Fox News and base my personal view on whatever they’re saying. They make it all seem straightforward. And besides, they cover all the things which reinforce my mindset – basically, racism and the cost of living. And wokeness, whatever that is. I fly the flag.

Trump emerged and is ruthlessly exploiting America’s weaknesses. In some ways you have to take your hat off to that. He sees everything as a zero-sum-game. There are only winners and losers. He’s a winner, by the way. But life isn’t like a football game; it’s more nuanced. Trump doesn’t do nuance. You’re either with him, for which you will be rewarded (unless you’re poor), or against him, for which you will be punished (especially if you’re poor). He once described the war dead as “suckers & losers”. I don’t know how you survive that politically, but for Trump it was just another day; there’ll be worse tomorrow.

I don’t want to discuss anything in detail, but what follows will touch lightly on Trump’s central characteristics. The ones I’ve chosen are Acquisition & Greed, Retribution, Chaos, Hypocrisy, Narcissism, Self-belief and immorality. You would not want any of these traits used to describe you, and you would be unlikely to choose a friend who displays any of them – much less all of them.

As I write, in August 2026, Donald Trump is in his second term in office as POTUS. In his first four-year term, in 2016, he made the mistake of appointing senior government officials who knew what they were doing. They prevented him from perpetrating anything too calamitous nationally, but they couldn’t prevent him from committing the sorts of crimes which would put you or me straight into jail.

He lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden but immediately claimed, without evidence, that the election had been stolen from him. He rallied his supporters to the extent that some of them rioted at the Capitol building in Washington in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. One rioter was shot and several police officers subsequently died. As with all things Trump, the whole thing was ambiguous. My speech was perfect, it was a lovely day, the rioters were, in fact, great patriots who should be rewarded.

While he was out of office, Trump was found guilty of rape and of fraud. He was on the verge of being tried for the withholding of secret documents (oddly enough in the toilet at his Mar-a-lago beach resort), and for attempting to subvert an election by the use of a mob. But the law moves slowly and Trump (miraculously in my view) was re-elected before the larger cases could reach a conclusion. As President he got the Supreme Court to declare him immune from prosecution – then, now and for the future. This time, Trump appointed sycophants to all the important government offices. They were usually Fox News TV hosts and very few had experience relevant to their new roles. But they certainly were not going to stop Trump from doing whatever he liked. And it looked like he had a few things to get off his chest.

Trump is a person who believes he can do nothing wrong. If something does go wrong, then somebody else is immediately fired for it. Lots of people have been fired. If something goes dreadfully wrong then he claims to know nothing about it, otherwise he prefers personal credit for his omniscience – until it goes wrong.

He likes to create chaos. He’ll say something one day, and the opposite the next. Or claim that he never said the thing in the first place. Trump is somebody who completely understands the news cycle. If something is going wrong, then just invent another newsworthy crisis to head everybody off at the pass. The trouble is that everything is getting very complicated now. It might be imagined that he started his Iran war in order to divert attention from the failure to release those Epstein files which specifically mention him. He is systematically trying to dismantle the free press – it’s all 1984 stuff.

Much of what Trump does is driven by retribution. Because Biden was in power while he was suffering at the hands of the legal system, Trump concluded that it was because Biden had weaponized the Justice department; to make all this stuff up and then prosecute Trump for it. As a consequence, he is actively seeking to take revenge on anybody who seems to have crossed him. Trumped up charges are being made against lunatic lawyers, and lunatic political opponents, and any other lunatic who got in his way. Nearly all this stuff fails through sheer incompetence, but it’s only for the benefit of his bonehead supporters and himself. “I am your retribution”, he promised them.

One of the principal motivations in this man’s life is the notion of legacy. He sometimes approaches this in a clownish way, “Your favourite President – me”. And sometimes as an overt statement to the future. Very few people stand up and declare Trump to be the stable genius he knows himself to be, other than the palpably farcical adoration from members of his cabinet, designed for the TV cameras. Trump usually has to declare how great he is himself. The boneheads at his rallies seemingly just like to hear the same old stories again and again and again. All of them maligning an opponent and glorifying himself.

To this end, he has declared an emergency and issued an executive order to demolish the East Wing of the White House. He’s building a typically gaudy, tasteless and gold-burnished ballroom in its place. He wants to build the world’s largest triumphal arch. He slapped his name on the John F Kennedy Arts Centre, and wants to rename a Florida airport after himself. He wants to be remembered as the greatest of presidents, and the most powerful man there has ever been. Even if the comparisons are with Hitler, Genghis Kahn, Stalin and Attila the Hun.

Trump will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark on this period of American history. The only trouble is that it’s a shit stain. The history books, I promise you, will have much to say about Trump’s presidency.

The man is almost crippled by his own self-belief. It’s infectious; his supporters imagine him to be playing five-dimensional mind chess. They don’t know why he does what he does, but they do know that he will have a plan, and that it will make their lives better. I mean, that was the way it was on The Apprentice, right? And now he’s surrounded himself by other TV notables.

Trump is sometimes tempted to think out loud, just to test his undoubted genius. Thankfully, nobody follows all of his advice or people would have been shooting undiluted bleach into their veins to combat Covid.

Trump has pulled America out of the World Health Organization and installed a vaccine denier as his health secretary but is puzzled why he has a severe measles outbreak on his hands. He pulled America out of the Paris Accord on climate change but has had to invent implausible explanations for devastating forest fires. He has shut down USAID and really wants to pull out of NATO. But he knows best.

Repetition seems to be the name of the game. You can tell an outright lie, but if it is repeated often enough then maybe it will morph into reality. Trump often declares that he inherited the worst economy in American history from Biden; inflation was high, prices were skyrocketing, job numbers were low. In fact, the very opposite is true but if the lie is repeated sufficiently often and especially if there is absolutely no kickback from journalists or TV presenters, then it must be true, mustn’t it? And if the inheritance was so rotten, then even today’s lamentable figures must be better by comparison, mustn’t they? A nephew’s mother-in-law lives in one of the southern states and posts frequently on Facebook. My favourite message ran along the lines… “To give them their due, the Republicans got it dead right when they said that if I voted for Kamala (Harris) then we’d get higher prices, higher inflation and be constantly at war. I did vote for Kamala and look what we got!”

One of the tools in the authoritarian playbook is the attempt to rewrite history in order to wipe the slate clean of previous misdeeds. Just recently, Trump has been revisiting the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He needs to convince people that he was the victim of a crime; that the January 6th rioters were fervent patriots who were badly treated by the justice system. So, at the start of his second term, he pardoned all of them. There cannot therefore have been a crime, because nobody was convicted. At the time of writing, Trump is desperately trying to find a way of rewarding them all through payment. We hear that he is also exploring ways in which his two impeachments in the first term might be erased from the record.

Donald Trump is no stranger to hypocrisy. In the 2016 election, he accused his rival, Hilary Clinton, of having violated national security by sending emails through a private server rather than official government ones. She was later exonerated but not before the hordes of Trumpists had chanted “Lock her up, lock her up” in the run up to the election. It is uncertain whether either Trump or his supporters had a clear idea of what it was she was supposed to have done. But at the end of his first term, Trump was found to have illegal possession of thousands of classified documents in boxes stored at Mar-a-lago. He was screaming that everything was above board.

Trump often declares mail-in ballots as being unsafe and the source of much of the electoral engineering which alters election results and often calls for their outright ban. Nevertheless, it is a mechanism which he almost always adopts when voting himself. Sleepy Joe is the friendly nickname he reserved for Joe Biden who, by the end of his presidency, was definitely showing signs of frailty. But Trump is often pictured with eyes closed in the Oval Office, at his friend’s funeral, and even at his tasteless cage-boxing match on the White House lawn to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the republic.

There is a dreadful immorality associated with Trump’s tactics. During the attempt to get the 2020 election overturned, he named two election workers, both black women (of course), and made public their postal addresses whilst accusing them of stuffing votes into black sacks so as to remove them from the count – something which he had seen himself on a surveillance video. They had, in fact, been storing counted ballot papers in sacks exactly as they had been instructed. But their lives were turned upside down by attacks on their properties and the death threats they regularly received.

On day two of Trump’s Iran war, a tomahawk missile destroyed a girl’s school killing 170, mainly children. Months later the incident is “still being investigated”. ICE agents, in their principal role of detaining anybody who looks foreign, managed to kill several people fleeing for their lives after car stops. Video footage made these killings look like executions. But months later the incidents are “still being investigated”. Any apology or admission of guilt would look weak of course.Trump is a wealthy man. His father left him a large fortune but, in spite of his best efforts to do so, he hasn’t managed to blow it all away yet. The only man in the world to run a casino which went bust, Trump is regarded as best placed to run the nation’s economy.

Unusually for a president, Trump sells branded merchandise. Gold sneakers, a Trump bible, meme coins and mobile phones. The bible has the unique distinction of having the American Constitution printed at the back, thereby representing two things that Trump doesn’t believe in. The president has taken to buying stocks and shares minutes before making statements which will raise their value. He has reportedly trousered 2.2 billion dollars in the last twelve months alone.

And this is me trying to be concise and brief.

In a little over 80 days, in November 2026, the nation will vote for members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both are currently controlled by Republicans. But Trump’s approval ratings are now so low (a little over 30%) that Democrats are projected to win both races and thereby render Trump a lame duck president. He doesn’t seem all that bothered, despite repeated attempts to doctor the electoral system in his favour. I fear that he plans to announce some kind of emergency so that no election takes place at all. And this is why I’m making my comments now. I think that in order for American democracy to survive, Trump needs to be beaten now. In 2028, the incoming president should take steps to limit the powers of the presidency – especially where they are unilateral. The judiciary should be selected independently of politics, and the presidential pardon should be limited. Let’s see what happens.

Trump rose to power on the promise of MAGA. Make America Great Again. There was nothing (much) wrong with America at that time. There is now. A new administration really will have to make America great again. Well done, Donald.