Donald Trump, the president on fire

In the summer of 2015, the rise of the histrionic builder Donald Trump to Republican candidate for the US presidency seemed so absurd that a conspiracy theory was that the tycoon had colluded with the Clintons to torpedo the campaign of the conservatives and favor thus the victory of the former secretary of state.

But Trump, also a

star

, the son of another millionaire promoter and illustrious resident of New York's Fifth Avenue, came to the White House appealing nothing less than the dissatisfaction of the working class on the back of a speech against the immigration and globalism.

At the start of the presidential campaign, he was exultant, winner before winning anything, provocative.

"I have the most loyal people, I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I would not lose votes," he went on to say that January, when no one really believed that one day he would sleep in the White House.

He was not shooting at anyone, at least in a literal sense, but he did insult Mexican immigrants, he promised to suspend the entry of Muslims to the country, he had made "To jail" against Hillary Clinton the leading chant at his rallies and attacked left and right on his Twitter account.

Meanwhile, the cult towards his person did not stop growing.

The British historian James Bryce undertook a long journey in the mid-1880s to study that young country.

In his resulting book,

, he warned of the danger that American democracy would fall victim to "a tyrant," but not "a tyrant against the masses," he added, "but a tyrant with the masses."

Donald John Trump (New York, 1946) won the elections on November 8, 2016. Many expected that, upon reaching the White House, he would adopt a more presidential attitude.

What happened next will surprise you.

Tweets and lies

On the day of the inauguration, January 20, 2017, it was raining.

It is easy to remember.

In the middle of the new president's speech, in front of the imposing Washington Capitol, the drops of water began to fall on the notebooks of the journalists who followed the act and blurred the notes.

At night, at the gala ball, Donald Trump celebrated with the press: “The number of people today has been incredible.

There was not even rain.

When we finished the speech, we went inside, and then he fell ”.

And thus, at the same time that the presidency was inaugurated, the era of "alternative facts" began — as one Trump adviser dubbed them — that is, facts that are different from the real ones.

Trump frequently lies.

which counts all the Republican's falsehoods or misrepresentations, has calculated that, as of August 27, the president has said up to 22,247 uncertain things.

Of all kinds and conditions, from attributing non-existent statements to other people - such as that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was impressed with his capacity for action and said that no one had done as much as him - to accusing Barack Obama of spy on him or assure that, compared to Europe, the United States is not doing so badly with the pandemic.

In reality, it suffers more infections and deaths per capita than all the major European countries except Spain and Belgium.

Twitter is your most immediate communication channel.

He tweets non-stop, at dawn, at dawn, at any time of day, and sometimes frantically.

On June 5, amidst the wave of protests against racism after the death of George Floyd, he broke his record for publications in a single day: 200. The previous peak, in the heat of

, on January 22, was 142. Through Twitter we have learned of his contagion of coronavirus, on Twitter he has reported the dismissal of senior officials, he has threatened North Korea with “a fury and fire that the world has never seen” or has broken an agreement at the last moment , calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "weak" and "dishonest."

Because insulting, and doing it fiercely, has become the new normal for the world's most powerful presidency.

One of the advisers he fired, Omarosa Manigault, who had criticized him, called her “crazy”, “scum” and “obnoxious”.

Although the most recurrent insult in his vocabulary, regardless of the fault he wants to report, is that of "loser."

At the beginning of his term and for months, analysts and citizens waited for the moment when Trump would abandon the character of the bully with whom he had won the elections and would finally assume the presidential bearing that was expected, but that day never came.

Trump was still the ogre judge of

talent show

;

the tycoon who had started in the business world demanding, door to door, the payment of his father's delinquent tenants;

The guy who can ingratiate himself with white supremacists and prioritize the credibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin over that of his intelligence services.

Show man

But if Donald Trump is as bad as they say, why do so many people vote for him?

If it's so toxic, why are its popularity ratings with Republicans more or less flat?

Beyond the pragmatic conservative vote, which he swallows with his extravagances, why, against all odds, is there a mass of irreducible Trumpists who support him in every fire?

When one asks at their rallies why they like or vote for the Republican, the first thing his followers respond is: "He is not a politician."

Being one, in the Trumpian ecosystem, is equivalent to hiding reality, living off the taxpayer and surrendering to the principles of political correctness.

And the president's attacks, his outbursts, suggest an authenticity that they long for in the ruling class.

In their public criticisms of allied countries, even as stark as those directed at Trudeau that time, they see an open door to the kitchens of diplomacy that are normally closed to them.

One day, Emmanuel Macron was asked about a discussion he had allegedly had with Trump.

The French president declined to respond using a quote from Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

“I've never explained behind the scenes.

Because, as Bismack said, if we explained the recipe for the sausages to people, it is not certain that we would continue to eat them ”.

Trump, by explaining it with this simile, makes his audience think that, for the first time, they are going to know the harsh reality of how those sausages are made.

If something manages to convey Trump is spontaneity.

"He says things as they are", "with him, what you see is what you get," his voters tend to say.

As Lauren Collins recently wrote in

during the 2016 campaign, "If Obama's promise is that he was you, Trump's promise is that you are him."

It all really comes down to the

.

Trump is obsessed with media attention, he follows and publicizes the audience ratios of his television appearances as if they were political achievements.

He attacks the critical press viciously, but is addicted to the spotlight.

See press conferences as rock concerts that sometimes go on for more than an hour.

Once, at the UN, he asked journalists a good question as a final apotheosis.

Remember what Elton John said?

When you play the last one and it's good, don't come back, ”he said.

And there have been unusual situations, such as when in the Oval Office, in a formal greeting with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, he pressured him to answer a question about North Korea.

It is not that it is transparent, because it lies frequently, but such accessible and exposed presidents are not remembered.

Many times, what was announced to the press as a simple posing before the cameras, at the beginning of a meeting, turned into impromptu press conferences in which all the rags were entered.

The rallies are long monologues, full of humor.

In the last June, in Tulsa (Oklahoma), he spoke for almost two hours.

He parodied conversations with Angela Merkel, with the first lady, Melania, and, of course, encouraged fear: "If the Democrats win in November," he warned, "the rioters will have power, no one will be safe again," he said.

A swamp of corruption

On the last campaign night, on the eve of the 2016 elections, this newspaper was at Trump's last rally in the State of New Hampshire.

In his closing plea to get to the White House he promised: "My contract with the Americans begins with a plan to end corruption, I want the entire

corrupt

in Washington to know: we are going to drain the swamp."

By then, in reality, he had already refused to make his tax returns public, was in trouble in court over the diversion of funds from his charitable foundation, and was facing a string of malpractice complaints against Trump University, an educational project that ended up shutting down. after paying a millionaire compensation to the injured parties.

But the volume of what was to be the entire network of irregularities with the Treasury, campaign crimes, conflicts of interest, intervention in the courts and dangerous friendships of these four years was yet to be discovered.

In 2019, the special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller was completing the investigation into the Russian plot, that is, the investigations focused on the interference of the Kremlin in the 2016 elections and the possible conchabanza of the Trump environment.

By then, the president of the United States was dotted with up to 17 different judicial investigations, covering the most diverse areas.

A possible crime of illegal campaign financing to pay two women, the porn film actress Stormy Daniels (stage name) and the

model

Karen McDougal, in order to silence their alleged extramarital affairs.

Another investigation, originated in New York, focused on the suspicion of tax evasion.

A string derived from the Russian plot.

The inquiries about the financing of the inauguration ceremony of his presidency in 2017 were added. And, in addition, the lawsuits for his luxury hotel in Washington, which became a stop and inn for foreign leaders, embassies and republican acts that incited the complaints of improper enrichment.

Some were dismissed, others went ahead.

Because the man who promised to snatch the White House from "the corrupt political class" to return it to "the people" never dissociated himself from the ownership of his companies, he only left the management in the hands of his children.

And the presidency has turned out to be good business: according to

estimates

between official and party acts, Trump properties have received up to $ 8.1 million of public money from political donors since 2017. Meanwhile, as revealed by a journalistic investigation by

, he barely paid taxes alleging economic losses.

In 2016, the year he was elected, he only had to fork out $ 750, the same amount as in 2017, his first year in office.

Trump has created, as Martin Wolf coined in the

, “plutopopulism,” a perfect marriage between plutocracy and right-wing populism.

The investigation into the Russian plot ended without legal consequences for Trump, although the case could be reopened if he loses the presidency.

In 2019, prosecutor Mueller considered Moscow's interference as proven, but did not find sufficient evidence of any collusion with the president's environment.

Regarding the obstruction of justice, another crime for which Trump was investigated, justified that a president is not prosecutable, except by

, that is, impeachment.

This, the third in the history of the United States, would come, months later, at the hands of a different scandal, that of Ukraine.

The case consisted of Trump's pressure on the Kiev government to get the country's justice to announce investigations that harmed its Democratic rivals, even resorting to the freezing of 391 million dollars in military aid already committed.

One of the investigations was aimed precisely at Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, for their business in the country.

Republicans, a majority in the Senate, acquitted their president, but the process left statements for history, such as when a US ambassador, Gordon Sondland, admitted that he had put pressure on Ukraine on the orders of the president.

Or when another diplomat, Marie Yovanovitch, related that they even warned her to "watch your back" and leave Kiev "on the next plane."

The normalization of chaos

That winter of

, the one that saw the year 2019 die and the turbulent 2020 begin, passed in the midst of a strange feeling of calm.

The memory of previous presidential scandals, such as the trial of Bill Clinton, in 1998, or Nixon's Watergate, who resigned before facing the final phase of the process, were remembered as momentous chapters in the country's history, but the Washington of Trump lived installed in distress.

With a leader as unusual as Trump, who always seemed to be riding a mechanical bull, an

seemed like another day in the office.

His Administration became, from very early on, a trail of dismissals, resignations and layoffs, some of them thunderous.

In December 2018, when he had not even reached the halfway point of his term, he had already had more than 30 casualties in two years, a volume of goodbyes that was not remembered from any other government.

The dismissal of John Bolton, his second head of National Security, communicated it on Twitter, without warning members of his Cabinet and with a brawl through.

Pentagon chief Jim Mattis resigned in a bitter public controversy over Trump's Syria policy.

Economic adviser Gary Cohn did the same in disagreement with the trade war and, also, troubled by the understanding that the president had shown towards white supremacists.

He showed the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the door in disgust that he had recused himself in the investigation of the Russian plot and favored an independent investigation by an independent prosecutor.

So, a long list.

Senior officials began to report anonymously the bizarre in which, in their opinion, the White House had become.

One of them, whose identity has just been revealed (Miles Taylor, former Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security), published an article in

in September 2018 entitled “I am part of the internal resistance of the Trump Administration "And in it he said that various members of the Executive conspired to control the" impulses "of the Republican.

"I work for the president but, like other colleagues, I have promised to boycott parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations," he assured, and underlined the "amorality" of Trump.

"Anyone who has worked with him," he added, "knows that he is not anchored to any discernible principle that guides his decision-making."

Shortly afterwards, the prestigious journalist Bob Woodward published

, a book in which he described life in the White House as a Halloween vaudeville.

Through anonymous sources, he related, for example, that Gary Cohn stole a document from the president's desk, which he intended to sign to break a trade agreement with South Korea, and the Republican president never realized it.

Also, that General John Kelly, former chief of staff, came to describe Trump as "unhinged" and that "he was an idiot."

"This is a madhouse," he maintained.

Anyone who has worked with him knows that he is not anchored to any discernible principles that guide his decision making.

Miles Taylor, former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security

Counting the interiors of the Government became a literary subgenre.

Bolton put his grain of sand with some explosive memories.

He claimed, for example, that Trump asked Beijing for help to win the elections, detailed incriminating situations about the Ukraine scandal and exposed the general ignorance of the president, who, he said, when he asked once if Finland belonged to Russia and was surprised that Britain was a nuclear power.

Of these intellectual voids, Trump has often made a virtue, accustomed as he is to identifying academic or bureaucratic elites as symbols of a flawed system.

"I like low-educated people," he said in his first campaign.

To Woodward, a few months ago, he described his first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in 2018 this way: “You know a woman.

In a second, you know if it will happen or not.

It doesn't take you 10 minutes, it doesn't take you six weeks.

It's like: 'Wow'.

Voucher.

You know?

It costs you less than a second ”.

In the Trump era, compliments to authoritarian leaders and old US rivals like Vladimir Putin have become customary, even as the Kremlin is accused of attacking the American electoral system.

One of the most influential figures in the president has been Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump, the president's eldest daughter, and also named an adviser.

The 39-year-old businessman told Woodward that understanding Trump requires looking at, among other things, the Cheshire cat from

.

"If you don't know where you are going, any path will take you there."

More than direction, Kushner was trying to explain, perseverance mattered.

"Controversy elevates the message," he also said.

He was talking, after all, of the same president who had no problem threatening a thermonuclear war on Twitter.

He was, in short, the same guy who had run for office convinced that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and people would continue to vote for him.

Just as then, during the first years of his administration many people wondered: How would Donald Trump respond to the arrival of a great national crisis?

And then the pandemic came

When the coronavirus began to spread around the world, Trump settled into denial.

"We have practically stopped it," he maintained on February 2;

"One day it will disappear, like a miracle," he went on to say on the 27th of that month;

"Nothing is closed because of the flu," he still insisted on March 9.

Then, when the ferocity of the virus became evident and the pandemic was declared, the instinct of the television animal prevailed and, for weeks, it offered daily press conferences to which more erratic.

Less than a year before the elections, and with an unusual crisis that ruined his main campaign argument - the economy was doing rabidly well - he decided to put on the suit of commander-in-chief before a nation in danger, but he did it so imbued with himself that led to some of the most bizarre episodes of his presidency.

Day after day, he contradicted the White House experts live and direct, gave erroneous information about the treatments and rejected the recommendations of his own Government, as when he encouraged the reopening of the country on Easter Sunday, he fueled protests against confinement and insisted on not wearing a mask.

This drift reached a climax on April 23, encouraging Americans to inject themselves with disinfectant.

“I see the disinfectant, it kills it in a minute, is there a way we can do something like that by injection?

Because you see that it enters the lungs and does tremendous damage to the lungs, so it would be interesting to try it, ”he said.

Two days later he assured that he was joking, but he suspended the press conferences.

He soon resumed, yes, the mass events with his followers, in which not wearing a mask was a declaration of principles, and redoubled his schedule of official events.

Meanwhile, he made fun of the fact that his Democratic rival in the elections, Joe Biden, spent the campaign practically secluded at home.

In the early morning of October 2, he reported that both he and his wife had been infected.

At 74 years of age, the president was part of the group vulnerable to the virus and was hospitalized and treated with strong medications.

Whoever at this point in his history in the White House thought that the episode would be a turning point in his relationship with the health crisis, is that he has not yet taken the measures of the character.

When he left the hospital, he recorded a video making a virtue of necessity: "I have learned a lot from covid, I have learned by actually going to school, this is the real school, and I get it, I understand it, it is a very interesting thing" , He said.

"This is the real school," he insisted, setting himself up as an expert.

A few weeks later, he returned to the mass events without masks.

Is Trump natural or does he play a role?

Are your extravagances spontaneous or follow a thoughtful strategy?

Asked about it, John Bolton responded in an interview to this newspaper: “I think it is his way of being, but I am not a madman, I am not going to explain why it is like that, what happened to him in childhood, or anything like that.

I do not care;

what matters is his way of behaving and it has always been that way, according to people who have known him for decades ”.

The

may go on for another four years or end on November 3, but the United States has already discovered a new normal with Trump that will be hard to forget.

At this summer's Republican convention, which crowned him the presidential candidate, his daughter, Ivanka, celebrated before the public: "Washington has not changed Donald Trump, Donald Trump has changed Washington."

And he couldn't sum it up better.