Trump Train

Now I’ve been crying lately
Thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating?
Why can’t we live in bliss?

– Cat Stevens, Peace Train, 1971

Trump. Donald Trump. Everything about this man is grotesque: his dribbly lips, his thin tuft of second-hand hair, his never-ending well of anger and hatred, his money and even his name. It is hard to think of any public figure more repulsive than Trump: Benjamin Netanyahu is hard to beat with his thug physique and his endless siege of Palestine, Putin is reviled by all for his stink of machismo and Stalinism, Gadhafi’s hydrophobia had him beaten to death by his own people, and then there was the moustachioed Saddam, the bearded Bin, the round little Russian dolls of the Kim-Jong-whoever set. And of course, we cannot forget Bashar Al Assad with his pencil-thin moustache and bloodthirst, but soon this maniac will be placed in the goodies camp to fight the other badies.

Yes, the human race seems set on making sure that there remains a lot of competition for any new-comer to the old race to the bottom of power, but Trump is off to a good start and seems ever more intent on trumping (ho!) the extravagance and egocentricity of his many competitors and predecessors. He may prove to be one of the most repulsive leaders since that other spitting, racist megalomaniac that ruined it for everyone in the twentieth century. And make no mistake, should this man rise to become the President of the United States of America (if little George could do it than big Donald can too), there would be little to differentiate his own brand of fascism with the fascism of the Third Reich: surveillance and expulsion of religious and ethnic minorities, the reinstatement of torture, foreign policy belligerence, dreams of empire and so on. Fascism is fascism by any other name, and Trump is a fascist.

But he will not win, of course, he cannot. It is now only a matter of time before this man spontaneously combusts in some fit of hatred, and day by day he gets closer and closer. When he declared that all Mexican immigrants are rapists, it was then that I thought he had reached his moment of explosion, but he just kept on going. Then there was his slurs against woman-kind, his inciting of violence against a Black Lives Matter activist and his subsequent condoning of thuggery, and then came his latest insult against a disabled journalist who he imitated as if he were still in the playground. There’s no doubt about it, Donald is the Little Trump That Could, forever puffing out his pollution that sickens us all until the day comes – ad it surely must – when the Trump Train derails.

The near certainty that it will derail, that it must derail, makes it bearable – hilarious in fact. To be quite honest, I love each and every Trump headline, because the man makes me laugh. I laugh at his blatant racism, sexism and capital-ism like you laugh at 1990s hairstyles: they are so terrible and out-of-place in the modern world that you can’t help but laugh. And besides, the man is, for now, incapable of causing any harm with his bubbling, overflowing bitterness. If anything he will help the cause of political humanism by so thoroughly discrediting himself, his friends and his ideas that many millions will flock back to the holy trinity of emancipatory politics: liberty, equality, fraternity; ideas which, despite the solemn post-Paris declarations of ‘freedom’ and ‘values’ against terrorism (as if we don’t ever or haven’t ever practised, supported or turned a blind eye to terrorism in, for example, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Laos, Nagasaki, Guatemala…), are so obviously absent from our world. So let’s raise a glass and give a toast, a toast “to Trump, for helping usher in the long-awaited Age of Aquarius!”