Much of the world will hold its breath until about 1 p.m. Atlantic today, hoping the hour brings an end to the ugly America that emerged under Trump and the beginning of that nation's return as a reliable, rational liberal democracy. Dream on.
When Joe Biden takes the oath of office today as the 46th — and at 78, the oldest — U.S. president, he becomes the leader of a nation that's as dangerously divided as it's been since the Civil War. That is Trump's legacy.
The Biden administration is left to pick up the pieces and try to fit them back together, but some of those pieces — the rotten core of Trump's famous base — neither fit nor want to fit in any other America but the white nationalist homeland they heard Trump promise and promote in word and deed these past four years.
Trump leaves office – the full military send-off he demanded is one final act to feed the narcissism that's the single motivating force of his entire presidency — having convinced tens of millions of Americans that the election was stolen from him.
He didn't accomplish that alone but had help from amoral acolytes and political opportunists in Congress who repeated the lie. Trump lost and Biden won, by the book and by the votes and that's a fact.
What the world watched with horror a week ago when, stoked by Trump's lie and incited by Trump's rhetoric, a maddened mob attacked and, for a time, took the American Capitol, we can only hope was the last dying gasp of the repugnant so-called MAGA movement.
We can hope, but if we believe it, we are as delusional as the MAGA hat-wearing mob itself.
Trump's base — that fairly reliable 40 per cent of votingage Americans who stuck with him through four years of lies and maladministration — is not a monolith, and elements of it are dropping away from their former leader in the aftermath the Capitol siege.
Trump's approval ratings fell to the lowest level of his presidency after the attack, with Pew Research pegging it at 29 per cent, but most other pollsters coming in somewhere in the mid-30s.
That it took an attack on the seat and symbol of their nation's democracy, directed by Trump himself, to shake loose some of the saner elements of his base is a sad testament to how far down the rabbit hole too many Americans were willing to follow the 45th president and worldclass conman.
From the day he announced his run for the presidency, Trump traded on the xenophobia and racism that has marked and marred America from birth and continues to scar it more deeply than most other nations with similar sorry histories.
Through his words and his deeds, Trump legitimized and liberated the white supremacist nationalists and militias that had been hiding in dark places before he arrived.
They are emboldened by a president who looks upon them — as he did on the neoNazi mob that descended on Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 — and sees “some very fine people.”
Others were recruited to the cause — radicalized into far-right extremism — by their own president's words and deeds.
He banned Muslims and warned that immigrants from “s--- hole” nations, meaning those with black and brown populations would, if given a chance, take over the country. Those are just a couple of overt examples. Trump sounded the racist dog-whistle almost non-stop for 1,460 days in office.
The result is that in America today there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, whose grievances include what they believe is a stolen election and so the demise of their democracy.
They combine with the growing legion of looney conspiracy theorists and Trump's liberated, guntotting white supremacists, to form the toxic mix that Trumpism has become and will remain, with or without The Donald out front.
Trumpism is fascism, pure and simple — the same political doctrine that Americans, Canadians, Brits, Russians and others fought and died to defeat in the 1940s.
Joe Biden may succeed in restoring America to somewhere near its place among the community of nations, as a rational, liberal democracy.
It is his battle on the home front that will be the more formidable fight, because today America is fraught with fantasy, conspiracy and white supremacy, planted or nurtured by Donald Trump.
