Sandwich Shop

Suppose you are given a profile of a person who has applied to manage your sandwich shop. It tells you that he is a sleazy creep, a bully, a vindictive psychopath, a convicted felon, ignorant, weak, petty, without a shred of self-restraint or ordinary human dignity, incapable of coherent thought or speech but potty-mouthed withal, grossly dishonest, a liar, unstable, mean-minded…well: you have already stopped reading, though the list goes on, portraying someone who should be under permanent restraint. But the employment arrangements in law are such that he has to be given the job; they provide no protections against a manifestly unfit, indeed dangerous, individual getting it. That within days the sandwich shop is a shambles, crawling with cockroaches, the coffee machine broken, the chairs and tables likewise, the windows smashed, and all customers lost, comes as no surprise therefore.

Trump and Sandwiches USA.

Hope flares momentarily! – he said he might go to be President of Venezuela! Meteorologists are anxious about the effect on the weather system of the gasp of relief exhaled by the entire planet at the departure of the shambling bloviating blob of obesity and obscenity from the controls of the world’s largest economy and military, which he has mishandled so badly that in the planet’s remotest corners individuals are feeling the shock waves. But then pity for the Venezuelans floods in, and thoughts return to the obvious, needed, appropriate alternative: handcuffs.

Ah, handcuffs. Of course they should have been clapped on the moment Trump was found guilty in court. But one anticipates – anticipates, note; not merely hopes – that there will be a reckoning. Lying abed on a balmy early morning before rising to the day’s avocations, one can have a Thane of Glamis-like vision (remember his seeing the line of kings that would spring from Banquo’s loins in the Scottish play?) but this time of a line of convicts in orange jump-suits, chained together at the ankles, Trump at the head followed by Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt and a long line of lickspittles, among them senators, congressmen and Supreme Court justices who betrayed their duty to the Constitution, trooping dejectedly through the prison gates, to be locked up and the key thrown away.

Elsewhere the stains of the Trump disaster will be removed – the tasteless glitz defacing the interior of the White House, reconstruction of the East Wing, buildings bearing the name and image of the monster scrubbed clean of his memory, reparations paid to countries violently violated, treaties renewed – though in truth, unless the biggest remedy is applied, viz. adjustment of the US Constitution itself to ensure that a Trump will never again get fat little hands on the levers of power, a weakened and distrusted America will find that its former friends and allies have already turned away, already established new trading partnerships and alliances to secure themselves against perfidy of the kind enacted by Trump.

This in fact has already happened. Realignments are already in place and in process. The US has completely lost its moral leadership of the West, and in a world where more sober-appearing power-holders are merely biding their time strategically, indeed waiting for this moment of US collapse, new arrangements among the ‘middle powers’ are essential. From the point of view of a Brit one happy such indication is the over-delayed realisation by the current British government that the disaster of Brexit has to be reversed. Not that they put it like that – face-saving is such an imperious demand for politicians – but it is as necessary as it is inevitable, the delay to date having sunk the UK further into the mire that Brexit and general incompetence, complacency, and political immorality (this last pale in comparison to Trumpianism) tipped the country.

In the US itself all the good people there must be tearing their hair in despair. They iterate the words of Henry II anent Beckett. But a remedy for their plight is right there, to hand: the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Trump could be turfed out of his faux-gold-plated Oval Office in a trice if a handful of congressmen and senators did the right thing by their country and the world. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this malignant Trumpian episode is the way sanity, rationality and principle have been suborned in the US system. When Trump goes to prison at last, all his enablers should go with him: they have been complicit in doing immense harm to their country and the world; they are to blame for many corpses, gross damage, much destruction; there must be accountability.

History will of course pour oceans of contempt on Trump and each of his enablers. In the court of time he is already in shackles in the deepest dungeon. But history will not be kind to those who – and they include all of us – survive the Trump era and have the responsibility for putting pieces back together if we do not learn the lessons and get the re-piecing right. Bad times are times of opportunity too; harsh lessons should teach not just better but good ways forward. The US institutions have failed, its Constitution has not protected it, it has fallen into the fat little grasping hands of a monster, and if it does not learn the essential lesson thus taught it will be in the same danger in half a dozen years’ time. Post-Trump is a major test for the people of the US: will they have what it takes to ensure, as Hamilton so long ago tried to ensure, that ‘no unfit person will become chief magistrate of the land’ ever again? Will they hearken to the words of Frederick Douglass, ‘We should have our government so shaped that even in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe’?

Meanwhile we wait, with gritted teeth, to see if the US can do something about the mad monster in its driving seat right now. The humiliating defeat it is suffering in the needless war of aggression it launched with Israel on Iran should be the final straw. Will it be?