Donald J Trump, The Sum of All Our Fears

Global polling by groups like the highly respected Pew Research Center confirms that respect for and admiration of America and its president has tumbled into a dreadful trough since 2016, and that it is unlikely to rise much in the next two years, based on patterns that are now well set.

After picking nasty snit fights with both of America’s neighbours, with all of the country’s historic, traditional allies around the world, and with the country’s two chief global rivals (albeit reluctantly with Russia); and after backing away from an entire library of international ties, arrangements, and treaties so painfully achieved since 1945 on everything from mutual defence to keeping the Earth from turning into Venus 2.0, the only real “successes” Donald Trump can point to are distinctly modest revisions of longstanding trade deals with America’s two North American neighbours and long-time ally South Korea.

Oh, and, yes, he has delivered a burgeoning trade and tariff war with China as the way to respond to China’s violations of trade and investment norms and then limited sanctions on Russian leaders in the wake of its continuing provocations against Ukraine. Not quite the raw material sufficient to generate a rousing round of cheers and a hearty hip, hip, hooray, whatever.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, in less than two years, he has helped make America a much angrier, much more divided society. His political modus operandi has been to feed obsessively an already existing culture of resentment by older, white male, non-college educated voters – his core supporters – against pretty much all the rest of the country or those beyond it.

His great selling point has been that he knows the economy better than anyone else and can negotiate better than everybody else on the planet – ever. This political and negotiating mastery has produced a tidy tax cut for big corporations and the very wealthy, all while ballooning the national debt. Yes, his buffoonery had initially pushed the stock market up, but only until it started to drop back down. Despite campaign promises repeated ad nauseam that the country would return to its heavy industrial roots, his policies have instead led to a series of major corporations announcing the closure of manufacturing plants rather than the opening of them, in response to the growing uncertainties of the president’s impulsive remaking of the trade and tariff landscape.

In addition, the moral, miasmic swamp his administration has come to inhabit – rather than the promised draining of the metaphorical swamp he teased his supporters within his promises – has meant he has now been named by his own justice department as the man who conspired with his henchmen to pay off a pair of mistresses (and then lie about it) in the shape of illicit campaign contributions to tamp down bad publicity towards the climax of the 2016 presidential campaign, lest some voters become even more disgusted with the candidate.

This strand of sleaziness goes hand-in-hand with growing evidence that the henchmen and women – now numbering at least 14 – spent time trying to forge sub rosa ties with Russia (including negotiations to build a hotel in Moscow for personal gain), even as he was simultaneously capturing the Republican presidential nomination (and lying about his Moscow hotel dreams). And all of that does not even include the very real chance that his team of miscreants were dancing around – or with – concurrent Russian efforts to push voters towards supporting Trump through a whole swathe of electronic false flag interference and cyberhacking to the 2018 Global Sentient Naartjie’s benefit.

We could go on about his morally slack sensibility in choosing compromised or blithely ignorant senior officials and then changing them as often as the rest of us scrub our kitchens. We could point to his wild, prevaricating, semi-literate rants via social media at all hours of the day or night, or his astonishing total of mistruths, half-truths, or just plain out-and-out lies in his public oratory – a total of 6,420 such utterances at the time of writing this, according to the Washington Post. But really, why bother? It just hurts too damned much to watch this mendacious buffoonery every day, without letup.

Donald Trump’s presence on our global stage could easily be an opera, but not in one of the heroic tenor roles. There is always lots of room in a good opera for the usual evildoing by nasty lead characters, the normal, nefarious double-crosses, the mistresses and jilted lovers, the troupes of scheming subalterns, and the bog standard conniving relatives – think Don Carlos, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Otello, La Forza del Destino – and all the rest.

But the operatic character that comes to our mind first when the subject is Donald Trump must be Canio/Pagliaccio, the vengeful lead clown of a travelling troupe of entertainers in Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Canio eventually kills both his wife and her lover in a jealous rage as the second and final act curtain comes down. By the end of the first act, he is already singing in Vesti la Guibba:

Act! While in delirium,
I no longer know what I say,
or what I do!
And yet it’s necessary... make an effort!
Bah! Are you not a man?
You are a clown!

Put on your costume, powder your face.
The people pay, and they want to laugh.
And if Harlequin steals your Columbina,
laugh, clown, and everyone will applaud!
Turn your distress and tears into jokes,
your pain and sobbing into a grimace, Ah!

Laugh, clown,
at your broken love!
Laugh at the grief that poisons your heart!