Of course, He still is more dangerous than a monkey with a knife. In fact, for his favorite villains-Mexicans, immigrants, women, religious minorities, and so on-he poses an even greater threat than he did last January when, with his fist to front, was proclaimed as the 45th President of the United States of America.
However, it took four months to make it very clear that Donald Trump is a character completely congruent with himself: his thing is the circus. As he has done for decades, the character lives for and from his ego. Whether as the protagonist of a television show, or from the Oval Office in the White House, Mr. Trump has been able to build himself as a spectacle that captures media attention, practically at any cost. If as a candidate, could talk in public about the size of his penis, as president he dares to face the world hand in hand with Mr. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and has no qualms about betraying allied countries reveling to the Russians top secret intelligence or trampling the law of his own nation.
When he is 38 months away from completing his first (?) term, Trump has made it very clear that he has great capacity to generate major disasters; yes, as promise, they may be “Great” and “Spectacular”. In less than 15 weeks President Trump has generated a social mood that could be illustrated with a single piece of data: To search the term “impeach Trump” Google needs 0.59 seconds to offer 20,800,000 results.
But beyond showing his nature – which he never really tried to hide – as a character in the show business, what has happened in the United States since the night of Tuesday, November 8 when he was declared the winner in the presidential elections of his country, allows us all to appreciate two really important facts: First, the end of the Pax Americana and therefore, and second, the decline of the United States as the largest economic power of the world.
After little more than a century of self-proclaiming the U.S. as the Paradise of Democracy and Freedom, Mr. Trump’s dizzying accession to power unveils a reality much closer to an oligarchic system in which elections are a great market in which results are bought with money and people like the Koch brothers, or organizations like the National Rifle Association, or Trump himself, can purchase any seat in the House, the Senate, Governorship, or, of course, the control of the nuclear codes.
Today the media and experts say they are surprised of what President Trump has become and flood the screens with any number of explanations centered on the childish and egotistical character of the President of the United States. If they had read The Politics, a book that Aristotle wrote seventeen centuries ago, they would be less surprised by the overvaluation we now make of concepts such as democracy. Understood by the Greek thinker as “the government of the many,” a scenario when “crowds and mobs” seized power by assault (vs ruling by virtue). In the specific case of the last U.S. presidential election, it would be even worse, due – to top it all – in fact was “the government of the less”, because the more millions of people voted in favor of the defeated candidate.
If modern democracy is a spectacle, it should not be too surprising that a clown was proclaimed as the winner.
