With the recent expected acquittal of ex-President Trump at his second impeachment trial, many of us hope we have witnessed the final act in the whole shabby tale of Donald in the White House. He was spectacularly unfit to hold such high office, and that's without making any judgement on the execrable policies he espoused. No, the fairer but harder judgement is that he is lazy, incompetent and a serial failure, and that's not even mentioning the host of other character failings that have been endlessly mulled over these last few years.
I can't have been the only person in the world who wondered how he found the time to tweet so much, seemingly every day. I suppose he thought he was working, governing, in much the way his many hours spent watching TV and munching cheeseburgers was also progressing the business and welfare of the USA. Let's face it, he didn't get much done either way. Aside from a few early peremptory presidential decrees, like banning Muslims entering the country and withdrawing from the Paris environmental protocols, and some hastily arranged fiscal measures ensuring his rich chums got even richer, he achieved very little. Take his border wall with Mexico, for instance. I haven't checked lately, but the last I heard was that little had been done, and what had, had all been at a cost to the US taxpayer, not a Mexican peso in sight; a few miles of desultory bricks costing millions (billions?) of US dollars, a standing monument to Trump's staggering vainglorious stupidity.
Worse, his rabble rousing keynote policy - if that's not too big a corruption of the word 'policy' - Make America Great Again has self evidently failed, unsurprisingly, since there wasn't any real policy, never mind a keynote one, but it was a keynote slogan in his 2016 campaign, and that's all, a vapid, pathetic whiff of nonsense. Think about it for a second - because clearly Donald didn't - Make America Great Again: what can it possibly mean? The very phrase begs a host of questions. Was America once great? So in what way was America great? What and who made America great? And by 2016, somehow, this greatness no longer existed. So how was it lost and who was responsible? And how was the intellectual giant Donald J Trump going to restore this greatness no one was defining with any precision and no one was absolutely certain was lost, or even if it had ever existed. In this, as in much else, Trump and his administration failed in their own terms. Yes, Trump's a failure, not just a serial underachiever, but an out and loser, by his own lights.
No need to mention the response to COVID-19: Trump failed, surely.
Or, the election: he lost, failure, undeniably.
Or the hopeless post election lawsuits: high profile, highly visibly losses, failures.
Or the attempted coup: botched and lost, failed again.
There's a lesson here; put rich, mendacious, unscrupulous, unprincipled, intellectually lightweight buffoons in charge and absolutely no good can ever come of it, even if we have the small crumb of comfort that they're destined, ultimately, to leave their own dubious and often wicked aspirations largely unfulfilled. They don't, by and large, bequeath a legacy, more like a scorched earth.
Which brings us neatly to the British Trump, our very own Bozo in Chief, the Right Honourable Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He has so much in common with Trump it's frightening, and I don't mean just the weird hair dos. Both men wanted primarily to be the leader of their country more than anything else, to just be at the top of the pile, you know. Both men believed they could wing it in office, dealing with the actual nuts and bolts of the office, the arduous grind of running a government, leading a government, could be outsourced to chums and allies, and the main thing was to look good and sound good in the eyes of the kind of people who were either daft enough to vote for them, or advance their political career in some other way. Both are shameless liars and disseminators of untruths and distortions. Both are overwhelmed by a sense of their own personal importance, a rampant narcissism which is all too apparent. And they both possess the empathy capacity of a psychopath, along with a whole host of other reprehensible attitudes and characteristics: misogyny and racism, rudeness and crudity, a tendency to rush to bombast and bluster as interrogation deflectors.
They are essentially weak, cowardly people, and this is exemplified in Johnson's selection of colleagues and cronies. His cabinet is packed with like minded, narrow minded, nasty minded, Yes-men and women. Crucially, for Boris's survival and peace of mind, most are even more dull witted and ignorant than him. (The jury's out on Rishi Sunak, I guess.) Their individual failings are legion and reported in enough media outlets for readers hungry for details.
The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an utter shambles, the result of a crude mixture of incompetence, dereliction of duty and corruption. The Brexit fiasco is rated a first class cock-up by just about everyone, including some of its most voracious supporters in the right wing press. Health and social care provision, regardless of COVID, is in a state of near collapse. Welfare support is pitiful, miserly and begrudged. Look around: public buildings and structures and roads are crumbling all around us. No matter where you cast your eye, Education, Transport, Defence, everywhere, you see the decay from years of neglect and underinvestment. And, thanks to Brexit, the UK doesn't even retain the respect and admiration of much of the rest of the world it once so enviously enjoyed. Our children stare into an abyss of despair and despondency, a future worth having receding out of sight, as we begin to spawn generations that will be significantly worse-off than their predecessors.
Now, not all of this is Johnson's fault, though a lot of it is. That nothing is being done about it, that nothing can be done about it while he's Prime Minister leading a government of totally useless arseholes is all down to him. The trouble is, he isn't capable of realising he's the problem, that the greatest service he and his miserable power hungry cabinet colleagues could render the country would be to immediately vacate the scene.
In 2020 the American people got the chance to do the sensible thing, and they did - they grasped the nettle and sent Trump packing, hopefully for good, despite what the obnoxious Farage says. In the UK, we will have to wait until 2024 for a sniff of a go at our own version of The Final Act. Let's hope we grab the chance too and bring the curtain down on this miserable episode in our history.
Comments