Whether Donald Trump succeeds in Making America Great Again – Again – rests, as it always has, on the fundamental tension between the man’s political ambitions and his personal avidities. His achievement, his legacy, his ultimate impact on America’s history will be defined by the unending interplay between his effectiveness in making radical and necessary changes to the nation’s trajectory and his irresistible, seemingly ineluctable tendency to use his office to promote his own interests, burnish his ego and nurture his grievances.
Americans voted for him last November in great numbers, giving him a mandate for change. Not just from four years of an atrophied, inept and ideologically extreme Biden administration, but from decades of a decaying political order that combined bipartisan embrace of the intolerable – open-border immigration, failed foreign policy interventionism, a socially destructive, profit-seeking corporate and cultural globalism – with a kind of soft tyranny of postmodern progressivism that compelled submission to its orthodoxies on race, gender, language and pretty much everything.
Yet the risk with Trump is – always was – that to secure the revolution required to overthrow this deeply established malignity you have to put up with an awful lot of repugnant behaviour. And the question is whether, in the process of relying on the energy and unorthodoxy of this man to make vital change, you also get irreparable harm to the institutions and even the soul of America wrought by a leader of deplorable character.
We didn’t even have to wait beyond a day of his second term to see this tension played out in vivid force. The inaugural address followed by the dozens of executive orders included both substantive and symbolic assaults on the rotten established order: tough border controls, action to remove criminal migrants, promotion of domestic energy production, an end to “diversity equity and inclusion” units in government and an affirmation that “it is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female”.
Some orders, such as one outlawing “birthright citizenship” accorded to infants born to parents here illegally or on a temporary visa, almost certainly overreach the constitution and are likely to be overruled by courts, but the emblematic zeal helps to underscore the seriousness of Trump’s reforming intent.
But with the needed clean-out came the other stuff. The decision to pardon almost all of those convicted of crimes in the January 6 Capitol riots of 2021 is deeply repugnant. It’s true that some of the more than 1500 men and women charged were harshly punished with long jail sentences for doing nothing more than protesting against the 2020 election result on the misguided belief that it was fraudulent. But Trump has also pardoned many who committed abhorrent, violent crimes.
Among those whose criminal slate has been wiped clean are men who, according to their indictments: plunged an electroshock weapon into a policeman’s neck; used reinforced brass knuckle gloves to repeatedly punch an officer under attack from other rioters; and used a hockey stick with a Trump 2020 flag attached to attack police as though “he were chopping wood”. This after Trump said before the election that the January 6 convictions would be reviewed case by case, and just a week after Vice-President Vance told an interviewer: “If you committed violence on that day obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
For context, this action may be laid alongside, but not be excused by, Joe Biden’s order, in the last few minutes of his presidency, to issue a blanket pardon to members of his family for any crimes they may have committed. This came amid widespread allegations of Biden family corruption and his son Hunter’s earlier conviction and pardon late last year.
The January 6 pardons stem entirely from the Trump ego, which insists that he won the 2020 election on the basis of no evidence and that all those attempting to overturn the result were acting as his personal devotees.
To his vanity we can add cupidity. Days before his inauguration Trump and his wife, Melania, launched their own personalised versions of so-called “memecoins”, cryptocurrency tokens, whose value is essentially underwritten by the support of people willing to pony up for them. This was a breathtaking and ethically dubious attempt to monetise his popularity and authority as he took office. Trump and Melania have made billions of dollars on the issue while those who “invested” are already on the hook for similar amounts in losses.
It is not simply a question of whether pardoning criminals who appeal to his vanity, or cashing in financially on his office, are unworthy actions that demean the presidency. The challenge for the republic is the precedent these actions set. The January 6 pardons essentially legitimate acts of political violence. The crypto grift opens up new fields of corrupt opportunity for those who hold high office.
The case for Trump by his most cold-eyed, shall we say, cynical supporters is simple. He is surely a deeply flawed man of dubious character but in the end it’s the same qualities that make him a scoundrel that give him the necessary personality to make change. The mess in the stables they say, is so great that we can’t look too closely at the morals of the man we hire to clean them or at some of the things he does while he’s in there.
We can only hope that when the stench has gone and the stables are clean the excreta have not stuck indelibly to the rest of us.
The Times
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