We should thank Trump for reminding us that the West has been sheltering under America’s wing for 80 years. Throughout my lifetime and yours, the American military has been the dominant power on Earth and it has dissuaded our enemies from attacking.
The result has been a period of abnormal peace and prosperity in the West. And we have become complacent. We have begun to assume that the human animal may be decent and peaceful.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that people like a despot. A despot offers simple solutions to complex questions. He appeals to prejudice and calls it common sense.
He says shameful things out loud and makes them seem less shameful. He gives permission to people to be their worst selves.
I forget who it was that said there were no Nazis. There were just people.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that principles are rarely any such thing. Republicans in Congress, and in particular in the Senate, love to call themselves principled conservatives. Many of them saw through Trump from the outset.
His current vice-president, for example, called him America’s Hitler. But oh, how their principles shrivelled when Trump took power. Oh, how the senators came to heel. Oh, how they grovelled.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that money is never enough. Look at the billionaires crawling over each other to assume roles in his joke cabinet.
They have all the money they could ever want but it doesn’t quite fill the hole. Only power can do that. It’s the drug of drugs.
We should thank Trump for reminding us of the durability of lies. Trump lies without pause and those lies are easily disproved.
We like to think that a lie once disproved disappears, but it is not so. Trump’s lies march on, because Trump offers people a version of reality that some choose to believe. They prefer it to the truth.
We should thank Trump for reminding us of the importance of a free press. Trump has attacked the press from the start. Despots always do.
Now we see independent journalists being ousted from the White House and replaced by toadies. Meanwhile Trump’s rich cronies buy up the media — Twitter, The Washington Post — in order to bring them into line, even as those same cronies purport to champion free speech.
Never listen to their words. Look at what they do. Soon we shall see journalists in prison.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that democracy is frail. The framers of the American constitution knew all about that frailty and went to great trouble to protect democracy from people like Trump. They shared power among Congress, the courts and the president so that none could predominate.
But even with their experience of tyranny, the framers underestimated megalomania and overestimated people. Now watch Trump as he tries to override the two-term limit for presidents.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that you can tell a man by the company he keeps. Trump openly enjoys the company of Putin, bin Salman, Kim Jong-un. Despots like despots.
We should thank Trump for reminding us that the history of human society is the story of power and greed. It’s the story of bullies like him who wanted everything and got it. Everything means power over others and the pleasures that come with it. Those pleasures may not seem pleasures to you and me, but that’s why you and I don’t run things. To those to whom they do seem pleasures they are the only pleasures.
Thus history isn’t written by gentle Jesus meek and mild. It’s written by people like Trump, Stalin, Nero, Pol Pot and Basil the Bulgar-slayer. After his final victory over the Bulgarians in 1014, the Byzantine emperor Basil II blinded 15,000 prisoners of war. But he left one eye in every hundredth man so he could lead his compatriots home. Basil, by the way, was a Christian. So, as it happens, were the Bulgarians.
Viewed through the long lens of history, Trump is not an outlier. Trump is a return to the status quo.
So we should thank Trump for reminding us that the human being hasn’t changed. We are as our ancestors were: no better, no worse and no wiser.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
