Steve McGookinWhen Donald Trump departs Joint Base Andrews near Washington DC early on Wednesday morning, surrounded for the last time by the trappings of military symbolism – “Dictator cosplay” as MSNBC’s Joy Reid called it – he will leave with the lowest approval rating of any president, having been impeached twice and with a trial pending in the Senate that could see him banned from ever again holding public office.
He is also facing significant exposure to legal action now he no longer has the protection of his position, while the financial cloud of a mountain of debt hangs over his head.
As he avoids the installation of his successor, Joe Biden, by flying off to an icy welcome at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump may reflect that this is probably not the ending he had in mind four years ago during his own inaugural. The event that set the tone for his presidency is currently the subject of an investigation by the DC Attorney General into an alleged misuse of funds.
In an ominous, jaw-dropping speech that day, Trump infamously invoked the concept of “American carnage,” so it was probably inevitable that he would eventually leave office following the nation’s first non-peaceful transfer of power for more than a century. Certainly, no-one could say they didn’t see it coming.
In The Guardian this week, David Smith wrote about the outgoing president’s dark legacy:
“Trump campaigned as a change agent but millions came to regard him as an agent of chaos. His line-crossing, envelope-pushing, wrecking-ball reign at the White House crashed in a fireball of lies about his election defeat and deadly insurrection at the US Capitol.”
With downtown Washington in the nervy grip of a military occupation – there are many more US troops on the streets than are currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined – and state governments across the country braced for any repeat of the January 6th violence by Trump’s supporters, the last day of this presidential term, like the first, is shrouded in an uncertain foreboding. Anything can happen, and by now nothing would really be a surprise.
And all because a losing candidate continues to insist he won.
If the Trump presidency really were a reality show, this would be its must-see finale, except that the script would likely be rejected as too implausible.
Ironically, those same local capitals that are now installing armed guards for protection have themselves been fertile ground for Trump’s big lie that the election was somehow stolen from him.
As David Siders writes at Politico: “As the Republican Party begins to reckon with the fallout from the deadly insurrection, it’s being forced to confront a disquieting truth: the lie that ultimately led to the violence — that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump — drew far-reaching support from the party’s governing class at every level, extending far beyond Congress and reaching deep into America’s statehouses.”
Even soon-to-be Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell finally – and belatedly – acknowledged on Tuesday the president’s role in using the election lie to provoke the mob that attacked the Capitol. Of course, McConnell’s new tone may be a reaction to the recent wave of corporate donors distancing themselves from Republican politicians.
Looking ahead, it’s because of the effectiveness of such deliberate disinformation that Trump leaves a Republican party that is increasingly – possibly terminally – fractured; not by pro- or anti-Trump factionalism but by a more fundamental and potentially dangerous schism between reality and fantasy.
As our politics attempts to restart under new management, we now have, effectively, a “Sedition Caucus” in the Senate and a “Q Anon Caucus” in the House of Representatives. While those politicians feel there is a Trump base to be exploited within their own party, they will pander to those voters as much as Trump himself did. And with little sign of his core supporters deserting him as yet, they will continue to represent the prize for anyone seeking the GOP nomination for 2024. And again, they will demand to be lied to.
While the efforts to overturn the last election were, in effect, an “insurgency from inside the Oval Office,” the fact that such a lie was deliberate and premeditated – as Axios outlines in their excellent series “Off The Rails” – only accentuates the damage its perpetrators likely knew would follow, and didn’t care.
What now for the new administration?
Leaving aside the upheaval of a potentially scorched-earth political landscape, there are almost unprecedented practical challenges facing the incoming Biden administration, the most pressing obviously is dealing with the pandemic – after the previous administration’s relatively hands-off approach – and the resulting economic crisis.
It is significant that Biden’s new chief of staff Ron Klain served as President Barack Obama’s Ebola response “tsar” during the outbreak of that disease in 2014. On Tuesday evening Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris attended a deeply moving memorial, mirrored in cities nationwide, for the 400,000 Americans lost to Covid so far.
It would certainly be a stretch to imagine the outgoing President doing such a thing.
Biden has pledged to roll out 100m vaccinations during his first 100 days, as well as proposed an ambitious economic stimulus plan. But dealing with the fallout from the pandemic will require a shift towards national unity, which will likely be reflected in Biden’s inaugural speech on Wednesday.
The new Senate, in which Vice-President Harris will represent the casting vote, will not only be dealing with Biden’s initial agenda, but the likely impeachment trial of his predecessor; as well as the confirmation of the incoming Cabinet members who require Senate approval. Along with getting his own team in place, the Biden administration will likely also have to come to terms with a number of Trump loyalists who have been embedded in key posts and who can’t be removed easily or quickly.
As well as ongoing challenges at home, a change of government in Washington always has ramifications beyond the US, and this is particularly true at this delicate moment, with one of Biden’s goals being to re-establish America’s credibility and standing in the world. To that end, Biden has handed veteran foreign policy adviser Antony Blinken the job of restoring the state department.
With Trump’s own former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson telling Foreign Policy magazine that the country is “in a worse place today than we were before he came in” the immediate task requires what Blinken’s associates have described as a “great undoing”.
Along with remaking US policy towards China, Iran and Russia; America’s allies will also require some immediate attention. One that will certainly need some work is Boris Johnson’s government in London, which had been counting on a chummy relationship with Donald Trump to secure a transatlantic trade deal in the aftermath of Brexit, as its chaotic effects are only exacerbated by the Coronavirus.
Johnson’s position now is perhaps not helped by the fact that Biden once called him a “physical and emotional clone” of Trump, but diplomacy being what it is, some transatlantic pragmatism will likely win the day.
At the moment, it looks like the new president’s first foreign trip will be to the UK for the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June. Don’t be surprised if Biden makes a point to his host by finding time to stop off in his spiritual home first.
Dealing with Trump’s legacy
As America finally turns this page in its national story, the unpleasant palimpsest that is the Donald Trump presidency will always be there, just under the surface, whatever might lie in store for the man himself.
Even if he is convicted in the Senate and sidelined from establishment politics, that doesn’t mean his influence is going away any time soon. A recent poll showed that nearly three-quarters of people describing themselves as Republicans do not believe Joe Biden to be the legitimately-elected president.
But it’s fair to argue, as Max Boot does in the Washington Post, that while Trump may have been the worst president ever, “his failures set Biden up for success.”
Prof Pippa Norris wrote recently that Trump has “weakened the legitimacy of the US government” and while the institutions of democracy still ostensibly function, the destruction of the political middle ground will be Trump’s immediate legacy.
On his final full day in the White House, like he did for much of the rest of his term, Trump showed himself to be concerned not with the nation as a whole, or even with appealing to consensus, but only with himself and the people who supported him.
In a video address on Tuesday night he said: “As I prepare to hand power over to a new administration at Noon on Wednesday, I want you to know that the movement we started is only just beginning.”
The beginning of what, exactly, we’ll just have to wait and see.
As Fintan O’Toole astutely observed this weekend in The Guardian:
“You don’t try to rebuild on land that has been washed away. You move elsewhere. In his own mad, intuitive way, Trump has already done this for his followers. He no longer even pretends to occupy the terrain of democracy. He has built his own new piece of real estate in which the US is a demagogic despotism, wholly owned by himself and his family. Even after the deadly debacle of 6 January, a huge part of the American polity is content to up sticks and follow him there.
“Biden has to create an equal and opposite space, with an equally bold departure, away from the hollow promises of the American dream and towards a new awakening of real equality. He has, after all, little to lose, not just in the political sense of having no second term to win, but in the personal one of having already endured so much loss. He has the paradoxical freedom of knowing that nothing that lies ahead of him is likely to be as bad as what lies behind him. In that freedom lies the possibility of a courage adequate to the fight he has promised to engage in – a relentless struggle for America’s soul.”
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See Also:
‘Celtic’ Biden’s Call To Irish-America
Also published on Medium.
