Trump, the real American hero
They will miss it. If the confused demigods in the polls are not wrong one more time, early next year - is there next year? - the United States of America will no longer be ruled by the Great Evil or Great Jester or Great Shame of the Good Gringos. . They will miss him so much.
They still have a few weeks left to be horrified and feel superior and explain why they are superior: good Americans, good Americans, unblemished Democrats. Trump is a Guggenheim scholarship to the cube: he makes them feel so upright, so right, so moral, so much of those adjectives that it is not clear what they mean - but the gentlemen ditto always brandish.
Meanwhile, few people have done more than Donald Trump to improve America's image in the world. He did so, by assuming, retroactively: his calculated clumsiness, his cunningly idiotic manners turned the country of Obama - and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan - into a garden of peace and harmony and justice and love and peace again.
"We are living in a golden age of American democracy," I wrote in the days of his inauguration, January '17, "but this is not but the one that has just ended: the one that the irruption of Mr. Trump closed with anger and noise" . And he kept saying that it was a classic mechanism and that there was no better way to believe that the United States was a wonderful country than to compare it to the mess that Trump threatened to produce. In the face of what was coming, what had been left behind was a wonder.
And I was surprised by so many columnists, politicians, and intellectuals who cried out loud for the disappearance of that paradise. "It's curious. They speak of a country where social and economic differences are already extreme: where the famous one percent richer owns more than a third of all wealth, where their income tripled in the last 30 years while those of the poorest half of the population stagnated. A country that spent 800,000 million dollars to save the banks that almost collapsed it - leading to a crisis in which nine million people lost their jobs in one year, "I wrote then and, with forgiveness, I am going to quote a little more. It was, remember, the country governed by Obama:
“They speak of a country where more than six million people - two percent of its population - are imprisoned or free on parole. (…) A country that dropped, just last year, more than 26,000 powerful bombs in its military operations on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen. A country that maintains a concentration camp outside its territory where it locks up who it wants when it wants what it wants. A country that so many times intervened in the internal affairs of others, many with extreme violence.
(A country that maintains its power with a million and a half soldiers spread throughout the world, a country that spends more than the sum of the ten countries that follow it on armies and weapons.)
“They speak of an armed country, where half the men have firearms, where some 12,000 people are shot dead every year. A country where mass shootings - random mass murders - proliferated, in which a shooter kills at random the more the better in a school, a church, a bar, a mall: 150 since 2000. A country where two out of three they support the death penalty, where 3,000 men and women await execution.
"They talk about a country whose bills say 'In God we trust.' A country where four out of ten adults believe that a god created man in his current form less than ten thousand years ago, as the Bible says.
“They speak of a country that has been led for decades by family dynasties - father and children, husband and wife - that would be the subject of farces and shame if they happened in any South African republic. A country where the great economic powers legally hire schemers to pressure legislators to get laws that favor their businesses. A country where a racist and misogynistic billionaire can become president by the vote of its citizens.
“They speak of a country that is also full of fascinating people, of great artists and writers, of universities and libraries, of scientific and technical innovations, of generous initiatives. But that is not the model of virtues that they now paint. "
Trump did it, we said, when he took office, and he's going to do it again now that he's gone. Meanwhile, his country remained that country during his four years of power, only with more noise, more rudeness, less cynicism. Don't look at what I say, look at what I do, political magicians often say. And beyond bravado and bullshit, what Trump did is more talk than fact. Or, at least, in practice, his administration was not that different.
Let's take one of his loudest, closest themes: his politics with migrants. Numbers, the famous data: the liberal Obama administration, so kind, so supportive, deported, in its eight years, 2,800,000 immigrants - the majority, Hispanics. Trump came to power by cracking down on them, talking about bad men and walls and kicking their ass and, in his three years in office, deported 750,000 migrants. It goes again: Obama averaged 350,000 a year; Trump barely reached 250,000, down 30 percent. And similar data can be found in a multitude of fields. Just one conclusive example: unlike Obama, Bush and Clinton, Trump did not start any war.
But you can also, thank God, find plenty of scandals and scandals and gross outbursts that keep their flag high. Trump is about to complete his work: he had cleaned up the previous concept of his country; now you are finishing cleaning the back. His administration will be remembered by the world's well-thinkers as a peak of horror, the abyss of American decadence and, from now on, for years, the great merit of America will be not being Trump's America. It will be repeated to us endlessly by the good Americans of the good means and other saviors of that very democratic country that has ruled the world through wars and conspiracies and massacres.
Now, luckily, a sensible man is coming and we are all going to celebrate the return of reason and good manners to the leadership of the West. We are going to be happy, as Riquelme would say, because Mr. Biden speaks reasonable - while trying to regain lost power.
Because if the American - and Western - establishment reproaches poor Trump for something, if for something he is going to have to leave, it is that with his fancy dress and rudeness and patriotism, Big Mac isolated himself, abandoned in different fields the "leadership position" in the world that your country has maintained for a century. And that, under the pretext of making America bigger, it took it out of many spaces that served it for that and made it smaller and allowed China to grow. For this reason, now, they must replace a classic: in a country that uses the adjective unamerican -no-American- as a disqualification, Joe Biden, exponent of the genuine American flavor, an employee of politics since 1970, has above all the work of recovering that "leadership position" that we know so well.
Nothing will be more useful to you, for this arduous task, than to rely on the need to clean up the "Trump mess." Trump, as the good guys are, will be as useful dead as he is alive. There are people who do know how to sacrifice for their country: Donald Trump, the true American hero.
