The impeachment of Donald Trump for the second time is the climax of an astonishing post-election meltdown which will be discussed by presidential historians for generations.
Trump’s trajectory from election night on 3 November, where he seemed the likely winner in early counting to the ignominy of his current predicament is a riches to rags tale.
Trump’s impeachment is the direct result of an appallingly misjudged speech that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
But that speech and the crowd’s violent response to it at the Capitol building was also the culmination of months of bad behaviour by Trump which has bordered on loopy and deranged.
There will be so many questions that historians will try to answer as they seek to piece together why it was that Trump behaved as he did during these few months, all but squandering his legacy during the lame duck period of his presidency.
Did he really believe in his heart that the election was rigged? Did he really not understand how mail ballots would impact on the result? Did he really think that it was all the co-ordinated work of crooked Democrats? Did he really expect that Republican officials in Georgia would overturn that state’s result for him? Did he really believe that Americans would accept Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally overturning the election vote to install Trump for a second term? Did he really believe that the US Supreme Court would help overturn the election result to repay him for appointing three conservative judges to it? Or was all of this an elaborate cover to hide a bruised ego and to project the image of a wronged martyr to his supporters?
What can be said for certain is that losing the election caused Trump to lose his judgment and common sense in a way that we hadn’t seen before despite his volatile presidency.
It makes you wonder whether the advisers surrounding him also failed him badly. After all, they were the B-Team, having been the replacements for a longline of predecessors who Trump sacked. Were they also yes-men and women who told him the delusions that he wanted to hear? His decision to keep conspiracist Rudy Giuliani to spearhead his election fraud fight and, for awhile, the truly loopy lawyer Sidney Powell, suggests Trump was living in a parallel universe on the issue of election fraud.
Trump’s misjudgements on the fateful day of the Capitol siege went far beyond his fiery speech in which he urged people to march on the Capitol and fight for America.
Even when the mob stormed the building, Trump is said to have just stared at the TV screen in ‘borderline excitement’ refusing all requests to call for peace or to call in the national guard.
Where were Trump’s advisers at that critical moment – were they forcefully warning him of the gravity of the situation? Or did they try and he ignored them?
There is so much that historians will want to learn about the mystery of Trump’s mind in these past few months. How did a president, for all his faults, suddenly turn into King Lear?
The looming Senate trial may uncover a little more about what Trump was really thinking as he descended into these few months of madness.
When the history of the Trump era is written, the great mystery will be the final chapter. Schoolchildren, decades from now, will ask their teacher the simple question: What went wrong with him at the end?
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