For many people in the US and around the world, Monday marked the start of the greatest era since the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.
As they watched Donald Trump put his hand on a Bible and try not to look annoyed when he noticed it wasn’t one of the ones he’s been hawking, they could finally put behind them four terrible years of being oppressed by the clone Barack Obama made of the long-dead Joe Biden.
For what it’s worth, I think Maga got that one wrong: a clone of 2008 Joe Biden would have been vastly more competent than the moth-eaten shill who has handed the White House to the GOP for the next decade.
Also, I have to admit that I don’t really blame Trump for any of this any more. Over the years he has become entirely transparent as a man-shaped husk twitched this way and that by American capitalism and the ghosts of his awful father and his even more awful mentor, Roy Cohn; a husk described by his niece Mary as someone dedicated entirely to keeping himself safe by keeping alive the belief that he is a big, imposing player and not, as his father made clear to him, an also-ran.
To demand that this man do better is to misapprehend him completely: the fact is that he is a person trained only to indulge himself and be affirmed, and in those respects he is operating at full capacity.
Eight years later, I’m not even sure the launch of his political career was a cynical scam. When he told an audience in 2016 that he could shoot someone in Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, liberal pundits thought he was trolling. He wasn’t. Instead, I now believe, he was acting as instinctively — and therefore honestly — as a deep-sea fish turning on a grim little light over its head, feeling in its genes that there is a certain kind of prey that has evolved to be entirely enthralled by that glow that will swim right into its mouth.
He didn’t even try to hide or deny his pathological lying. He simply showed the US who he was, and millions of Americans said they wanted a piece.
He didn’t even try to hide or deny his pathological lying. He simply showed the US who he was, and millions of Americans said they wanted a piece.
This week, many will still be trying to understand how a country knowingly elected a felon and sexual abuser to high office. Others have a simple explanation. Like former UK prime minister Liz Truss, who marked her arrival in Washington DC at the weekend by tweeting: “The Donald Trump term can’t come soon enough. The West needs it.”
Of course, Truss is an internationally renowned idiot so it’s possible she was just shilling for a hedge fund or arms manufacturer called The West; but it seems most likely she was talking about that geographical, ideological and increasingly vague area inhabited by current or former Western Europeans.
That space, conservatives insist, is being brought low by liberalism opening the gates to enemies of the Enlightenment. I might have thought one solution might be a renewed focus on Enlightenment values, like the gaining of knowledge through empiricism and expertise, or the separation of church and state, but most of the cures I read involve men being Vikings, women being brood mares, the Christian god sitting in on primary school classrooms, and a mash-up of feudalism and late capitalism, where, instead of working all day for your overlords in return for their protection you work all day for your overlords in return for a podcast in which they explain how worm medicine for horses is a cure for cancer.
The specific prescriptions vary, of course, but one thing is constant: there are only a few people in the world who can deliver the necessary dose to “save the West”, and Trump stands at their vanguard.
I know that as a writer I am entirely worthless in the future Elon Musk wants for us, barely good enough to be ground into the Muskies Future Snax Definitely Not Made of People that will feed the colony on Mars as it sickens and dies.
Still, I can’t help thinking the West, and especially the US, needs some things a bit more urgently than Viking bros and Christian nationalism. Like, say, affordable healthcare, and a plan to adapt to climate change, and an economic system that allows people not to just to afford houses and families but also interests and lives of the mind. It needs cities and transport systems that nurture human contact and kinship, not mechanised isolation. It needs to make the rich pay their taxes.
But these opinions will be mostly absent for the next four years, a time of trumpets, unblemished by the tarnish of reality. Now it is time for contradiction to be called rationality; for the muffling and muting of informed dissent to be called freedom of speech; for revenge to be called justice; for grievance and victimhood to be called strength.
Now is the time for the rich to get far richer and complain about how difficult their lot is, and for the poor to stay poor but feel they’ve finally been given a leg up by their besties, the billionaires.
The greatest era is starting. And why will it be great? Because Trump will say it is, and they will gaze at him with wide, adoring eyes and believe it.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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