Farewell to dishonour, a welcome to hope

Hope on the left replacing dishonour to the right

The old saying has it that there’s honesty among thieves. Like so many ancient saws, it’s mostly rubbish. The men who are disloyal to others are unlikely to show much loyalty among themselves.

Take the case of Rudy Giuliani. A former Mayor of New York, he went way out on a limb to try to reverse the verdict of the US people in voting against Donald Trump in November. The lawsuits he brought on Trump’s behalf lost him what little credibility he had left, and yet somehow, by dint of organising a press conference by a sex shop and wearing hair dye that ran down his face, he contrived to make himself look even more disreputable.

Rudy Giuliani made a fool of himself
on behalf of a man who has since abandoned him

All in the service of a man who is now refusing to pay Giuliani his legal fees. And who, as he pardoned the corrupt and the criminal in his fan base, simply ignored poor Rudy altogether. Unless there’s a secret pardon for him out there, Giuliani will face any legal repercussions of his oh-too-energetic, if ultimately vain, defence of the man who has now cut him loose and turned his back on him.

Trump was as unappealing as ever as he went off into the long goodnight that awaits him. “We did what he came here to do – and so much more,” he told the small group that came to see him off, with hardly a mask in sight.

What on earth did he mean? When he first ran for the presidency, he repeatedly shouted that he would build a wall along the Mexican border, and Mexico would pay for it. Four years later, he’s built a few miles, and Mexico hasn’t paid a penny towards it. 

He promised he’d make America Great Again. Today, America has lost prestige and credibility. As well as withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on global warming and the Iran nuclear pact, he was in the process of leaving the WHO in the middle of a global pandemic. He was even threatening NATO. What’s more,  by pulling out of the proposed trade deal with nations around the Pacific, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he allowed China to gain a decisive advantage in a key region: the Chinese, left out of the original proposal, stepped into the gap he left and are now the dominant partner in a similar agreement brokered with them.

In his commitment to making sure that he would hang on to power, and make himself, if not America, great again, he sent a mob to invade the Capitol building in a violent attempt to overturn the will of the American people. An attempted coup to hold on to power, the first time that’s been tried in US history. Subverting American democracy may have been one of the things he “came here to do”, but if so, he never mentioned it in his campaign literature.

But it’s the ‘so much more’ that is most significant. That would cover the 400,000 American Covid deaths on his watch, a total now set to overtake the total US dead in the Second World War. A stunning achievement, but hardly one to boast about.

That’s significant, but what makes it even more so is that the pandemic is a crisis, and crises are particularly powerful demonstrations of political truth. It’s in a crisis that we can fully assess a leader. On that measure, Trump has not merely failed, but failed spectacularly.

The sting in the tail of Trump’s speech was his final promise, or perhaps I should say threat. “We’ll be back,” he said.

As it happens, I don’t think he will. There’s talk about his making another run for the White House in 2024, but I’m not sure that his health will allow him to. That’s ‘health’ in the physical sense, but also in the financial sense – he’s facing crippling bankruptcy – and even the legal sense, since the lawsuits against him will be starting up in earnest in the near future.

Besides, he may actually find himself convicted in his impeachment trial. I think that’s still unlikely – it would require all Democratic senators to vote to convict, plus seventeen Republicans – but it’s looking a little more possible than it did a week or so ago. After all, it’s one thing to call on Republican Senators to vote a Republican President out of office – something that would be alien to the core of their being – but a maverick Republican who’s out of office? That might just happen, especially now that the former Senate leader, the Republic Mitch McConnell, is saying that he could be persuaded to vote for conviction.

That’s all the more the case since several of those Republicans would like their party’s nomination themselves, so convicting Trump and banning him from holding office would suit them very nicely. And the rest of us too.

This means that we might at last be able to consign Trump to the dustbin of history where he belongs. A thief without honour even to other thieves. And a major vandal to his own nation.

I have no idea whether his replacement, Joe Biden, has it in him to be a great President, or even a good President. What I’m absolutely certain of is that he is bound to be a better President. That’s a low bar, and Biden’s sure to clear it.

He does need to be good. He’s probably facing the worst crisis that any President has inherited since Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, when he entered the White House in 1933, with his country in the throes of the great depression. Biden faces the Covid pandemic, a serious economic crisis, a terribly divided society both racially (those Black Lives Matter demonstration were about real and harsh injustice) and politically (that invasion of the Capitol was just one act in an ‘uncivil war’, as Biden referred to it, which isn’t over yet).

At least he has an excellent team about him, not least of whom is his Vice President Kamala Harris. What a joy it was to see the first woman, the first person of colour, and the first person of Indian descent, sworn in as Vice President, immediately after the first Celebrity TV nonentity President had left the White House.

In his inaugural address, Biden certainly gave us some cause to hope he can rise to the challenges he faces. These words were particularly necessary today:

And so today, at this time and in this place, let us start afresh. All of us. Let us listen to one another. Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another. Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war. And, we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.

But the same sentiments were put even more powerfully during the high point of the entire ceremony, the reading of her poem The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman.

Amanda Gorman stole the show at the inaugural
“A skinny Black girl,” she told us, reciting for a president

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

That’s the antidote to the cruelty and dishonour Trump sowed. America has a huge task ahead. But at least it can now approach it with more hope than at any time in the last four years.