When I was preparing for my School C English exam I knew I needed some quotes to splash through my essays. But remembering lines was never my strong point, so I tended to look for the low-hanging fruit. We’d studied Shakespeare’s King Lear that year and perhaps the lowest hanging fruit of all was a line that symbolised his descent into fury and then madness, stripping away his power, then his very humanity.
The line was: “Howl, howl, howl, howl”.
As I said, low hanging fruit. But it’s a line from when Lear has lost the plot completely and it has kept coming to mind in the months since Donald Trump lost the US presidential election to Joe Biden. There is much of Lear in Trump. The power, ego, corruption and conniving children. And ultimately, the impotent raging as all around him falls apart.
I have long suspected Trump’s final scene will be played out in a New York courtroom, as the city that spawned him and the institutions that he so sought to corrupt, finally overwhelm him. We’ll see. But for now we are still in Act 3, with Lear wandering the heath, raging impotently at the storm that even a king cannot overcome. Except with Trump we see him roaming the internet raging at an election that he lost. And, in the past 48 hours, has lost in a historically bad fashion, with Republicans having now lost control of the senate as well, with their losses in Georgia. He is fixated, losing control, ignoring those around him. But most of all, he is a once mighty man who is now powerless.
And as with Lear, the internal madness is playing out in very real, destructive ways. Today, Trump supporters have raided the US Capitol, temporarily stopping elected representatives as they sought to ceremonially count the votes from November’s election.
It’s yet another terrible and defining stain on a terrible presidential term. And it lays bear the contradictions, the pros and cons of America and the American idea.
What we are seeing today is a democracy that is so fragile, yet still strong. And ending so predictable, yet still shocking. A president so irrelevant, yet still able to make history.
On one hand, the first storming of the US Capitol Building since British troops broke in back in 1814 is a dark day in US history and extreme reaction to a comprehensive victory by a moderate candidate, in President-elect Joe Biden. The Capitol is an almost sacred symbol of American independence and democracy, which is why the US media reaction has been one of gob-smacked disbelief. The mob has crashed into the holy of holies. On the other, in terms of mobs and insurrections, it’s a mostly mild event. To see the flag-waving protestors milling around rather aimlessly and mostly dispersing when the curfew arrived, some characterisations of them as ‘domestic terrorists’ seem over-egged. While we know woman was shot and died, no-one went in with guns blazing, no buildings were burnt, and no hostages taken, as we’ve seen in other political riots around the world.
On one hand, we see how tenuous democracy can be if the rule of law and the will of the people is ignored by those in power. Even the proudest democracies are one leader and a mob away from demagoguery and chaos. On the other, we have seen how even an electoral system as deeply flawed as America’s has held free and fair elections and is, through the work of its courts, public servants and most elected officials, negotiating a transition even as a sitting president lies and openly defies the rule of law.
On one hand we see that deeply narcissistic president focusing on his own plight, while more than a thousand Americans die every day from Covid-19. We see that his failure to do his job makes him irrelevant to the future of the country and the big issues it faces in the weeks and months ahead. Yet we also see that a few lines here and there from him and still spark a riot and give permission for chaos and destruction.
So let me indulge one more ‘on the one hand/other hand’ thought.
It is a dark day for America, but far from its darkest. To draw comparisons with the attack on Pearl Harbour, as Chuck Schumer did, for example, is not the dampening down that’s required today. Biden hit the right note when he shared his sorrow and shock, but did not escalate the already ripe rhetoric. Let’s keep this in context.
Today’s mob attack on the Capitol was sparked by one man and that man has two weeks left in office. He is a one-term failure as president. He has done all he can to overthrow democracy in recent weeks, and despite my fear of widespread violence, the most he has been able to achieve is the delay by a few hours of a procedural vote. While we don’t know what these final 14 days will bring, the simple fact is that we are down to his last 14 days of power. He has lost and is being removed regardless of his desperate, undemocratic attempts to stay in power.
But let’s also be clear how dangerous this man has been as president, so that we remember to the very end that this is not normal and not OK.
We’ve known who Donald Trump is for years now and that he only serves his own interests. We know his tantrums and his corruption. We know he mocks people he does not understand, be they disabled or servants of their country. We know he views decisions as deals to be won or lost. We knows his favourite weapons in making those deals are fear and bullying. We also have seen his political powers used to exacerbate divisions in US politics, to a degree seldom seen before. We know he will indirectly urge violence before directly pulling back at the last minute. We know he will praise people breaking the law and undermining democracy, if they are his supporters.
We know he tried to be ‘double Dick’ - attempting to out-Nixon Nixon (but without Nixon’s decades of political know-how). He used race and fear to stoke contempt for his political opponents and then, when people fought back against that, he tried to harness the promise of restoring law and order to win an election. He stoked fear, then promised to save his people from the fire he started.
So today is just another raw reminder of who President Trump is and what he stands for.
But here’s the hope. Let us not forget this. As Trump played all these political games, looked to exploit the weaknesses of democracy and US politics, he failed. He lost. When his advisers told him to focus on a strong economy at the 2018 mid-terms, he talked about division, the wall and the dangers of his opponents. And he lost.
By 2020 he had bet all his chips on the division he had created and ran on ‘law and order’. But rather than turn to the ‘strong man’, a majority of Americans voted for the other guy. Record numbers of Americans turned out in a landslide win for Joe Biden. Polls showed a strong swing towards an understanding that racism is real and ruins lives in modern day America and that police forces are failing to protect all citizens equally. They saw the lack of care for all Americans when a pandemic hit and how Trump made sure he survived even as tens of thousands died.
Voters in western and southern states turned away from Trump. As of today, Trump has even lost the senate. Democrats control the presidency, House and Senate. Republicans who saw him as a winner to emulate, now see just a loser raging in the storm, howling at facts and to no political gain.
Where Shakespeare’s Lear ends in death and gloom, America now gets to draw the curtain on its own Lear period and begin again. Such is one of the great strengths of democracy. For all the madness of these final days of Trump, is end is a new beginning for the United States.