Fortunately I have not experienced it firsthand, but we have all seen it in the movies. The little boy who has just suffered a family trauma and takes refuge in fantasy. He doesn't talk about what happened. He plays intensely with his bears. Or Lego.
Donald Trump reacted like that child the day after the electoral humiliation that he and his Republican Party had just suffered in the famous midterms. Meeting with a group of journalists to show them the vast ballroom he is building in the White House, the last thing he wanted to talk about was politics.
“Marble is really magnificent marble,” he explained. “It's a vein that people have been looking for for 50 years and the owner of the quarry didn't want to sell it, but he liked me.” Trump then drew reporters' attention to another reform he has implemented in the presidential house. "Have you seen the new helipad from above? How beautiful it is?"
It was Nero playing the lyre while Rome burned.
The question now, the big question, is whether Trump will remain lost in his childish world for the two or so years that remain in office or whether he will regain his status as a crazed old dotard and react with his not unusual vengeful fury. Whether it will be a lame duck or a rabid duck.
The response will affect the United States less than the rest of the world. Now that the United States Congress is no longer an emasculated body and control of both chambers has passed to the Democratic opposition, Trump's options in domestic policy will be more limited. But in international politics the Constitution grants him a capacity for action that has almost no limits. Remember that the start of the war in Iran caught Congress just as off guard as it did the readers of this newspaper.
Another advantage is added to its constitutional powers. The average American doesn't give a damn about what happens outside their borders. The Wall Street Journal analyzed voter polls this week and concluded that Trump's international policy was a deciding factor for only four percent of the electorate.
In international politics, the Constitution grants Trump an almost unlimited capacity for action
Nothing new. I have been repeating for years that the presidential elections in the United States will only be truly democratic the day when all citizens of the world can vote in them. The influence of the president of the imperial superpower on the lives of foreigners is equal to or greater than that of his compatriots.
Look: Trump's decision to ally with Israel to bomb Iran gained weight with voters not because of the suffering caused to real people in Iran, or in the Gulf region, but because of the impact it had on the rise in the prices of diesel, Doritos, and the cost of living in general.
We can go further. I react with less joy than others to the electoral debacle that Trump suffered this week when I reflect that the main reason that the voters of the richest country in the world gave for repudiating him was that his personal economy was suffering. If inflation in the US was a little more under control, it is assumed that the majority would have continued supporting the criminal buffoon they voted for for the second time in 2024, even after he had tried to steal the 2020 election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power when he incited a horde to invade the Capitol.
The US will continue to abandon Ukraine to its fate, even more so with Miller as chief of staff
Were the midterm results “the victory for democracy” that so many celebrate? Let's be generous and say partly yes. But above all, what they confirmed was that in the United States all roads lead to money, which consists, marginalizing everything else, of that “pursuit of happiness” that the declaration of independence of 1776 proclaims as the founding principle of the republic.
The happiness, of course, of the Americans. Except for that honorable – not to say aberrant – four percent, few care that Trump has eliminated billions of dollars in international aid, condemning countless human beings in Africa to death from curable diseases. They care little that Trump has given the green light to his war ally Netanyahu to slaughter Palestinian children like they were ants. They care little that their president is allying himself with Russia in the war in Ukraine, or that hundreds of thousands have died at the whim of a tyrant with whom he maintains warmer relations than with any other international leader.
They care little that Trump's friends are dictators in general; his enemies, the leaders of countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom or Japan. They care little about the trade war that Trump has started against Canada, or that he has proposed integrating the neighboring country as the 51st state of the United States, or Greenland as 52. They care little that Trump has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and imposed a puppet, basically colonial, government in his place. They won't care if he invades Cuba now. And, while we're at it, Trump himself will care little if China invades Taiwan.
So what is the answer to the big question? I'm afraid there isn't much cause for optimism. At the very least, Ukraine will continue to be abandoned to its fate in the war it is waging on behalf of Europe and the world in defense of democracy. Why do I think that? For the first clue that Trump has given us since his electoral debacle: naming Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff.
Miller is the closest thing Trump has to an ideological brain. His main confidant in the White House (forget the opportunists Vance and Rubio), Miller is the most fanatical extremist within the court of the orange king. Racist like himself in immigration policy, he reveres Putin and hates Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Miller maintains that the Russian invasion was not Putin's fault but Joseph Biden's. On Fox TV, Miller described the time Trump humiliated Zelensky in the White House as “one of the great moments in the history of American diplomacy.”
As Ukraine trembles, many celebrate “the beginning of the end” of the Trump era. No. Rather, to quote Churchill, it is the end of the beginning. He said that in November 1942. There were still more than two years of horror left.
