SUMMER OF TRUMP

This sum­mer, whether you be hik­ing in moun­tain­ous areas, lolling about in a sea or vis­it­ing the for­eign cap­i­tal of your choice, one thing is cer­tain: you’ll be hear­ing about Don­ald Trump. He has never failed to make daily head­lines, right from the start of his cam­paign (the racist slurs about Mex­i­cans being rapists, neatly coun­ter­bal­anced by his own recorded com­ments about seiz­ing vul­vas as a rec­om­mended method of se­duc­tion) through to al­most every­thing he’s done since he’s been pres­i­dent: ban­ning im­mi­gra­tion from Mus­lim coun­tries where he has no busi­ness in­ter­ests, but hob-nob­bing and sword danc­ing in Mus­lim coun­tries where he does; lying about pay­ing wads of hush money to a porn star with whom he had sex just days after the birth of Don­ald Jr.; slash­ing the size of na­tional parks to allow min­ing; de­fend­ing out­spo­kenly racist demon­stra­tors; im­pos­ing im­mi­gra­tion re­stric­tions that allow po­lice to seize small chil­dren from Latin Amer­i­can moth­ers try­ing to cross the bor­der; im­pos­ing metal tar­iffs that could plunge the world – in­clud­ing the US – into an­other eco­nomic re­ces­sion; prais­ing an un­pre­dictable Ko­rean dic­ta­tor who runs the world’s dead­liest labour camps, keeps a large part of his own pop­u­la­tion at or below star­va­tion level and mur­ders mem­bers of his own fam­ily, in ex­change for a hand­shake photo with said tyrant; and, last but not least, plan­ning to ban abor­tion com­pletely (the only other coun­try which did this was Ro­ma­nia under the Ceauces­cus, with tragic re­sults for hun­dreds of thou­sands of un­wanted or­phans) and pro­mot­ing sex­ual ab­sti­nence in schools as the only ac­cept­able method of con­tra­cep­tion (this is not only odd, com­ing as it does from a se­r­ial adul­terer, but re­search done on ex­ist­ing Chris­t­ian pro-ab­sti­nence schools has re­vealed a marked in­crease in anal sex among their teenage pupils). And as for Trump’s ties to Rus­sia, let’s not even go there (Robert Mueller, the Spe­cial Coun­sel for the De­part­ment of Jus­tice, is doing that for us).

The source of the fas­ci­na­tion which Trump ex­er­cises on so many of us – we tend to gawp at his lat­est blun­ders like peo­ple pass­ing a car crash – prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with the dis­junc­tion be­tween what he pro­claims to be the truth, and the re­al­ity which gives him the lie. In Cat­alo­nia, we know the feel­ing well: the pre­vi­ous Span­ish gov­ern­ment – and, at the time of writ­ing, the cur­rent one – per­sist in ac­cus­ing a cul­tural ac­tivist and 15 elected politi­cians (eight in dis­tant jail, seven in even more dis­tant exile) of vi­o­lent rešbel­lion for or­gan­is­ing a ref­er­en­dum in which the vi­o­lence was all but mo­nop­o­lised by im­ported Span­ish po­lice. The re­ac­tion of many peo­ple here to this is sim­i­lar to that of many Amer­i­cans to­wards Trump: there is some out­rage, some frus­tra­tion, but the top­most feel­ing is one of sheer in­credulity. Hav­ing said which, there is an im­por­tant dif­fer­ence: the judges and politi­cians re­spon­si­ble for the un­likely charges against Cata­lan lead­ers are pro­fes­sion­als who got where they are be­cause they wanted to be there. Ac­cord­ing to the jour­nal­ist Michael Wolff in his book ‘Fire And Fury’, the key to Trump’s in­com­pe­tence is that he never ex­pected to be pres­i­dent: he ran for the post to raise his pro­file sky-high in order to launch a TV net­work. He even guar­an­teed that he wouldn’t win to his wife (who didn’t want him to). It makes you won­der which is worse: an ac­ci­den­tal pres­i­dent who does noth­ing but cre­ate ac­ci­dents? Or a gov­ern­ment and ju­di­ciary that know­ingly and de­lib­er­ately cre­ates a sit­u­a­tion which is patently ab­surd?