Once Trump goes, who’s left to blame?

Donald Trump has just days before his presidency ends.

Here’s my prediction: On January 20, the No. 1 video on YouTube will be “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” from “The Wizard of Oz.” Go ahead, play the song in your head. I’ll wait.

This hope for mass emotional relief was best summed up by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who, according to Politico, told her leadership team: “I’m counting down the hours ’til he’s gone … I plan to pull him out of there by his hair, his little hands and his feet.”

I guess tearing up the State of the Union speech wasn’t therapeutic enough. Nor is there any peace for the mouth breathers who stormed the Capitol and sat feet-up on her desk. Or the quixotic and psychotic contesting and protesting of the 2020 election — or 2016, or 2000 for that matter.

Nancy Pelosi in the Capitol after the riots. Picture: AFP.

What a mentally unnerving four years. We’ve all heard, “I cried with my daughter that morning.” Some folks actually sent me books on Hitler so I could brush up on what they were convinced would come — but never did. Universities offered therapy dogs and breathing spaces — some with colouring books. “Resist” jewellery jumped off shelves. NBC’s “Today” show seemed to open every day, as did many casual conversations, with “Did you see that tweet?” And we added to the vernacular “Orange Man bad,” “El Cheeto” and the Bidenism “C’mon man!”

So many seemingly functioning adults needed someone to blame. A literary agent told the New York Times: “Trump doesn’t want to let go of his job, and a shockingly high number of us don’t want to let go of him.” Author Douglas Coupland smartly noted that “blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.”

Years ago, I believe the comedian Dennis Miller nailed it by saying — and I’ll clean it up — that blaming cigarette companies for getting cancer is like blaming your Members Only jacket for not getting dates in the ’80s. Blame yourself! Mr Trump or Mrs. Pelosi may not be to your liking, but they weren’t the cause of all your problems. Everyone ought to stop projecting and look inward. Especially the dude in the horns and animal skins.

Washington National Guard members at the Washington State Capitol. Picture: Getty Images.

According to Salon, “Trump is a psychopath. He has all the defining characteristics in spades: narcissistic, sadistic, anti-social, paranoid.” OK, whatever, but it sure feels like this “malignant psychopathology in the embodiment of our president” also managed to infect his detractors. Though I’m not a fan, I do admit to being afflicted with more than a tinge of merriment when I encountered these Trump-critical mental meltdowns. I’ll miss them. Feel free to diagnose me as well.

We can debate the merits of his presidency — walls, judges, regs, the Middle East. Tariffs were a bust. He never took on public-sector unions. But c’mon man. It was his persona that bothered most, more than his policy.

Alas, so end four-plus years of, um — shrinks call it borderline personality disorder but that’s too clinical. How about “blame-it is.” Or even better, “blame-itosis,” related to halitosis; it’s bothersome, and while the sufferer can function, you don’t want to get too close or hang out for very long.

Both left and right were loopy: Blame someone else for your problems, get angry, lash out on social media and stage a “peaceful protest,” repeat. That wasn’t healthy. So now what? Go long therapists? If Mr Trump has been, as the expression goes, living rent-free in people’s heads and now moves out, this new empty-headedness seems dangerous to me. Sure, Covid offered some respite. A woman walked through our neighbourhood wearing 6-foot pool noodles on her head. Scolds are still rampant.

But what’s going to replace him? I doubt people will go from blaming Mr Trump or anti-Trumpers to blaming themselves. It’s almost as if we need a Department of Homeland Insecurity. We need new enemies, and quick. Russia and China are old news. We already blamed Big Tech. Joe Biden told the New York Times, “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem.”

With the new cultural rules, it appears that you need oppressors and victims. In “Star Wars,” the rebels were cool while the empire was evil and the Imperial Forces dastardly. We blame the police, the system, the establishment, the Electoral College, the Man. (So why again is big government always the solution?) Victimhood is a psychological treasure trove.

Best to keep things vague. A (spoiled) rich heir disavowed, in the New York Times, the outlet malls he inherited because they cause “intersectional oppression.” Perfectly nonsensical! And I can help — please send cheques c/o WSJ.

OK, 85-year-old spoiler alert: There was no wicked witch, west or east. It was all a dream. The wizard — actually the man behind the curtain, who kinda looks like Joe Biden — said you could always have awakened from the nightmare and gone home. Good advice. So after joyful ding-donging, blame-itosis may subside, but what comes next? With single-party rule, I hope blame doesn’t give way to retribution.

The Wall Street Journal