Donald Trump is living through a long humiliation -- mostly by his own doing. Doug Saunders writes:
The past six weeks have provided many of us the enjoyable experience of watching Donald Trump losing – badly – in a drawn-out series of public humiliations and serial self-abasements.
This spectacle has grown tiresome to some, especially to Americans who face the constant horror of more than 3,000 daily deaths resulting from their President’s incompetent pandemic response. They’d like someone to shut him up, or cancel his social-media feeds, or at least teleport us to Jan. 21, when he will once again become part of the U.S. background noise.
It's natural to feel that the sooner Trump goes the better. But Saunders believes that prolonging Tump's humiliation is absolutely necessary:
It is vitally important that the entire world witnesses his loss and humiliation, his embarrassing tantrums, and his flailing displays of impotence and weakness.
To see Donald Trump as a pathetic loser is the most effective imaginable challenge to the phenomenon that’s become known as “global Trumpism.” It has nothing to do with political beliefs or actual leadership styles; strongman leaders drawing on distrust and intolerance have been a 21st-century phenomenon for a decade, most of them inspired and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But electoral support for such leaders, in those countries that still have functioning democratic systems, has been given a serious boost by Mr. Trump’s ascent. A vote for whatever party in your country that believes in a byzantine global conspiracy of immigrants, media, elites and religious minorities was previously a fringe protest move, a withdrawal from the mainstream. After 2016, it felt as though you were joining the winners.
The best way to send Trumpism to an ignoble end is to let Trump have his long ignoble goodbye.
Image: The New Republic
