11/07/2020 18:24
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 11/07/2020 18:24
At the end of
Gabriel García Márquez's
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, the infamous general who stars in the novel is alone in his palace facing death, like
Donald Trump
today in the White House facing the
twilight of his presidency.
“
… It had been when he least wanted it… he had primed himself in fallacy and crime, he had thrived on impiety and disgrace and had overcome his feverish greed and congenital fear… he had known from the beginning that he was deceived to please him … But he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered over the course of his countless years that lies are more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more enduring than truth…
”.
It is difficult for Trump to be able to delve into the sterility of his egomania with the heartbreaking lucidity of the fictional tyrant of García Márquez.
If it were, if he could see himself in the mirror as he really is, he would see the
impotence of his barking
against the electoral result, the falsehood and cynicism of the flatterers who today abandon him, emptying him of values and principles and nobility that he has been his presidency and his life.
To be against Trump does not mean to defend an ideology, or to identify vaguely with the left, as some outdated people insist on believing;
you don't even need to be a supporter of your elected successor's Democratic Party, Joseph Biden.
Being against Trump means having a modicum of humanity and good taste
, nothing more.
The outgoing president has offered us
a
vaudeville
of aesthetic, moral and intellectual antics
.
But beyond his childishness, his lies and his chronicle of tweeting or, more recently, his hysterical midnight press conferences, howling at the moon, there is an episode that portrays with special clarity the qualitative difference between his way of being and the of any other American president of the last century, perhaps of all history.
In August 2018, Republican senator and former presidential candidate John McCain died.
Trump had mocked McCain for being captured, and later tortured in jail, during the Vietnam War.
We are talking about Trump himself, remember, that in the sixties a medical problem of the heels of the feet was invented to avoid the conscription.
McCain was a great guy (I met him in the 90s) who
knew how to laugh at life and at himself
, firm in his principles to the point of sometimes voting in the Senate against his own party.
Former Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, former Republican President George W. Bush and the famous Republican hawk Henry Kissinger attended his funeral.
There was a notable absentee:
Donald Trump
.
He had not been invited, which he surely appreciated because, first, he could not have borne having to give the center of attention to the deceased, second, because if the McCain family and the rest of the congregation had dared to appear, the cream and The cream of
the
American
establishment
, would
have yelled him out of the room.
Trump is not a loyal Republican, he is not really left or right.
He is Trumpian
.
It's true that the only meaningful bill he signed into law in the last four years was a tax cut for the wealthiest, but that was a gift to himself.
They say he is a racist
.
Maybe
It would be more accurate to say that he is a misanthrope.
Well, neither.
To say that he hates humanity would be to suggest that he is capable of feeling any emotion for someone other than himself.
Rather, it does not take the rest of humanity into account, regardless of the color of their skin.
Of course, he connected with his famous "base".
I'm not going to fall into the stupidity, common in the more frivolous left, of calling him a "Nazi."
Among other things it would mean a regrettable lack of respect for the victims of the concentration camps.
But he
does have
something
in common with Hitler
.
Both resentful against the world, Trump channeled and personalized the resentment of his followers as the Führer with his own.
History will see these last four years as a surreal episode in politics.
As an instrument to conquer minds and hearts, resentment is an effective weapon.
The friend of Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin also knew how to turn to the most powerful emotion of all to sow faithful:
fear.
The invented fear of "socialism", mainly.
I forget how many times I saw banners announcing that Trump was the only defense against socialism during a trip last week to Trump country in Pennsylvania.
The reality, and if his followers do not know it, he does, is that
hell will freeze
before the United States, the most conservative country in the West,
succumbs to the dictatorship of the proletariat -
the same proletariat, by the way, who deceived and obsessed to vote for him.
As a demagogue, Trump has been a crack.
As a person, repellent.
As president, an aberration.
History will see these last four years as a
surreal episode
in American politics, half nightmare, half comedy.
Not even García Márquez could have invented such a character in such a position of power.
It is a relief and a joy for half the United States and for the entire thinking world that is leaving.
Let's celebrate it by evoking the symphonic finale of
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, when at last the “
tyrant of mockery who never knew where the reverse was and where the right of this life was… because we knew who we were while he was left without knowing forever ... oblivious to the clamors of the frenzied crowds that took to the streets singing the hymns of jubilation of the jubilant news of his death and alien forever and ever to the music of liberation and the rockets of joy and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the countless time of eternity had finally ended
.
Look also
American democracy survives its brush with death
Donald Trump, the one-term president who fueled racial tensions