Being human at the fall of Trump
I was walking with my wife and daughter towards the sea to catch the sunset, on Day Three of England’s second national lockdown of 2020. To be honest, out on the streets, it didn’t look very different from pre-lockdown and most people seem to have given up on strictly following government orders, plotting their own behavioural paths through England’s raging pandemia. The harbour bridge was open to let a fishing boat through, so we stopped — in the open air and at a reasonable distance from the others around us. In my pocket, I felt a buzz and leant on that instinctive muscle memory of checking my phone for the latest update.
It was a picture from my Seattle-based sister in the family WhatsApp group, of some election results being shown on MSNBC. ‘Finally called!’, she’d captioned the photo of her TV screen. And with that message, the curtain finally fell for me on the Trump era. I jubilantly turned around and shared the news with my company, then the others standing closest to me on the harbour, and it rippled backwards through the small crowd before we all crossed over the bridge.
I leant down towards my daughter and revelled in sharing the moment with her, tweeted Donald Trump to tell him that he’d been fired (I doubt I was the only one in the world to do this at this time), and we headed towards the shoreline to breathe in the fresh sea air and the taste of hope again, long hidden, long suppressed.
I was 18 years old when the Berlin Wall came down. Three months later, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Two rock-solid certainties, two immutable and profoundly unjust realities from my youth, crumbled within moments of each other and the world changed in an instant in each case. Not that in either example the inevitable trajectory was of a guaranteed positive direction for all — Germany very much still bears the scars of its division and South Africa bears its apartheid scars even more so — but things changed all the same. All that was solid melted into thin air, and in both cases, paved the way for better national politics in each country and for powerful symbols of freedom and progress in the hearts and minds of all that cared about a ‘greater good’ for humankind. The certainties that had been so hard to imagine ending at the time suddenly became ghoulish warnings from history.
The fall of Donald Trump, by no means inevitable until it happened, is one such marker in our story. I believe we will collectively come to use this moment when we look back from a vantage point of later in the 21st Century to recognise how much of a collective bullet we have dodged, provided we now seize this particular moment and steer the ship away from the rocks and into calmer, clearer waters. Provided we all do genuinely ‘build back better’, everywhere. The democratic defeat of National Populism by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, whatever their own personal imperfections and the remaining scale of the stain of Trumpism, feels right now in the white heat of the moment like the first taste of global hope in many dark years.
I remember once talking with a Canadian colleague at the university where I work about whether he feared a second Trump term. He didn’t seem particularly troubled by the prospect, commenting that America has a political pendulum that it swings between, in order to right itself when it goes socially astray. Once it goes too far in one particular direction, it tends to swing back pretty strongly in the opposite direction as a counter measure. The disasters of the second Bush presidency, for example, led to the election of the first President of African-American descent — a fact once deemed impossible, given the original sin of the Atlantic Slave Trade on which the country was founded. And the catastrophes of the Trump era have now led to not only the first female Vice President in American history, but the first one with both Black and Asian heritage. Harris will be a heartbeat away from the presidency herself, and symbols matter.
Tonight, there have been bells ringing in Berlin, Paris, and fireworks over London. On the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, crowds have gathered in jubilant celebration at the downfall of a very American tyrant, and a narrow escape from an almost inevitable collapse into fascism and societal breakdown.
Trump and his administration will go down as one of the darkest periods in modern American history. He separated immigrant children from their parents and caged the children. He presided over the pandemic-driven deaths of a quarter of a million of his own citizens — more than the sum total of soldier deaths in all of the country’s most mythologised wars. He was impeached, yet continued to act like a petty crook and grifter, fleecing public money for personal gain at any given opportunity. He lied repeatedly and incessantly, devaluing public office in the process. He emboldened American Nazis to come out of the shadows and proudly take to the streets. He teargassed and disappeared American citizens that protested his autocratic actions, and sucked up to autocrats and despots elsewhere around the world. And yet, although he may well have been a symptom of the rot at the heart of the American body politic, rather than the sole cause of it and he can undoubtedly do a lot more damage on his way out, the emperor has been exposed as having no clothes and he has met his inevitable downfall.
Perhaps you have to really break a system in order to be able to truly fix it. Perhaps, without plumbing the depths of the past four years, it wouldn’t have been politically possible to be able to truly tackle the massive challenges of climate disruption, social inequality, and racial justice without the horrors of the past four years to pivot in the opposite direction away from. Perhaps the United States would never have got a non-white female Vice President without a Pussy Grabber White Supremacist as Commander in Chief. What we can all at least hope for is that, with the United States having hit the very bottom, the only way is up.
It seems that in this moment, we are all Americans now. America is a more diminished creature than it once was, and the once unipolar power has humbled itself. However, unlike the poor murdered George Floyd, we can all now breathe a little and can dare to cast our eyes ahead to a possible better tomorrow.
No longer need we fear a nuclear war triggered by a tweet. Whatever the massive challenges they face, may Biden/Harris help steer the world — at last — in a better direction than the one it had been heading in.
