Historical sensibility tells us it is the barbarians who storm the gates. In today’s America, it is the other way round. Inside the citadel, the hordes are incinerating America’s traditions of law, civility and restraint. The civic-minded cry in the wilderness. Measured by the old era’s conventions, US President Donald Trump’s bonfire is only a quarter of the way through. Like so much else — the US Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center, the Versailles-style White House ballroom, other people’s Nobel Prizes — Trump is rebranding the US as his own. As America prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary, the republic is flirting with its own funeral.
Exaggeration? Since Trump descended that escalator in 2015, loyalists have diagnosed critics as suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome”. In line with the president’s core trait, they project their own condition on to others. With Trump, accusation is confession. He calls his opponents corrupt, unpatriotic, dishonest and much cruder things besides. Trump’s apologists — a more numerous crowd than true believers — work round the clock to sane-wash his policies into something coherent. Alas, Trump’s caprice makes it impossible for his explainers to keep pace.
One day Trump is a restrainer paring back America’s role in the world. The next, he is a true nationalist asserting his country’s domain over all he surveys. Tomorrow, he could revert to libertarianism. Today he is a pragmatic statist taking bites out of the shiniest bits of the private sector. Some make heroic attempts to depict Trump as a 21st-century reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. They get an A for effort. Like the fable of the naked emperor, he is imagined in all sorts of finery. More’s the pity that he is not playing along.