Michael McGuire: Donald Trump is weak, pathetic and corrupt – can the US recover from his disastrous presidency?
Donald Trump conned tens of millions of Americans into believing his lies. Who can say if America will ever recover from his presidency, writes Michael McGuire.
Opinion
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It’s all over, bar the shouting. Not to mention the whingeing and whining, the moaning and the tantrums. Of which there are sure to be many more.
It’s been confirmed that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States after the electoral college confirmed his comfortable win in last month’s election.
It would be difficult to call Biden any kind of inspirational figure, but after four years of the madness and badness of Donald Trump, bringing a little normality and stability back to what used to be regarded as the most powerful nation on earth has to be a good thing.
The question now is what long-term damage the US has done to itself and whether Biden and his vice-president Kamala Harris have the capacity to repair it.
Trump didn’t create the demons that have devoured America in recent times, but he has stoked them, encouraged them, gave them a voice, given them legitimacy. And America was ripe for that exploitation. American politics had failed too many of its citizens for too long, left them feeling locked out of the system, no longer with a grasp on the mythic “Great American Dream’’.
Trump’s great trick was to convince millions of Americans that he somehow was the answer to all their problems, that he cared about their best interests. He was the one that would “Make America Great Again’’.
But even a cursory examination of his life before he became President should have been enough to disprove such a notion. It has never been about anything else for Donald, other than Donald.
This most destructive part of his personality has been on display since he was beaten by Biden in the election. And for Biden, in the end, it was a comfortable win, stretching beyond seven million votes.
Since the election Trump in his usual petulant, narcissistic fashion has lashed out at all those who would deny his view that he somehow was re-elected. Even as his country has been ripped apart by COVID-19. Even as the death toll climbed past 300,000, even as new daily cases gallop tipped over 200,000 a day, Trump concentrated on the injustice he was personally suffering. On Tuesday, he even dispensed with his long-time enabler, Attorney-General Bill Barr, who had expressed an opinion that the election wasn’t rigged.
The circus that were his attempts to prove apparent electoral fraud became wilder and sillier. His increasingly bizarre legal team which featured a melting Rudy Giuliani and an unhinged conspiracy theorist called Sidney Powell, floated gems such as the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez playing a role in electing Biden.
In courts up and down the land this “elite strike force’’ was laughed out of court. Even the 2020 Crows would have beaten them.
And then, as Trump had long predicted, it all ended up in front of the Supreme Court. A court which Trump had taken great pride in appointing three of its nine justices. His great white hope. Nope. The Supreme Court wasn’t going to countenance throwing out millions of votes cast by Americans in four states.
The state of Texas led the charge to the Supreme Court for Trump. But that this baseless claim was backed by 126 Republican members of Congress shows how far some are willing to go to undermine the institutions which have built America.
There was a time, believe it or not, when Conservatives, not only in the US, but in Australia, Britain, built their political cause on ideas such as respect for institutions such as courts, such as democracy itself.
When any president goes, talk turns to legacy. Trump’s will be defined by the last five weeks rather than the last four years.
It will be defined by his heartlessness and selfishness as so many of his fellow Americans died.
It will be defined by his efforts to destroy American democracy by encouraging so many of his followers to believe in fanciful theories that the election was somehow rigged and stolen from him.
Trump is a weak, pathetic, corrupt creature. It remains to be seen if and when America will recover from his presidency.
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