The Sound and the Fury: the portrait of a President

Paul Éluard said that it is in our heroes that the most beautiful dreams of tomorrow are to be found. If there is one people who can be recognised in this phrase, it is the United States.  A country that has been built on its foundational milestones, or myths, such as the Mayflower or the War of Independence; but which, in the epic and poetics of its heroes, ancient and modern, and the reverential sense towards them, has extraordinarily cemented its union and its most beautiful dreams of tomorrow.  

 On 25 August 2018, with the death of John McCain, considered a hero of the Vietnam War, this feeling was shattered.  The funeral of the Republican senator was attended by former presidents George Bush and Barack Obama, where both Republicans and Democrats paid their respects.  Donald Trump, who considered John McCain to be his intimate enemy as the latter was openly critical of his administration, did not attend, breaking one of the rules on which the idiosyncrasies and collective imagination of the Americans rest: their heroes are sacred. Furthermore, the leader of the Republican Party did not consider him a hero because he had been captured during the war.  This statement of his is perhaps the best portrait of the most powerful person in the world. For there is no better testimony of who Trump is than his own words and conduct.  

This unprecedented performance reveals how far the American president has come and can go. Everything that seemed stable, unquestionable and an indelible sign of the greatness of the soul of the American people has been delegitimized by Trump; or at least he has tried to do so at the whim or to the advantage of his interests and moods. A kind of exterminating revisionism whose aim is to depredate the system and its institutions at his own convenience.  

 Hence its mandate has been characterised by the absence of moral rules and chaos, anything goes. But also, by the sound and the fury. He has not hesitated to add fuel to the fire in the racial conflicts of the last year if he thought it would help him mobilise his voters.  And no doubt he will question whether he can deliver a possible Democratic victory, once again putting the system and the country in check before the abyss. 

 Because Trump's natural state is conflict and confrontation. That is where he wins, because that is his very nature: sound and fury.  And he has used them to connect with the emotions of a part of the American people, primarily white and working class, who are angry and have felt abandoned by the system. He has understood this fact better than anyone, and has not hesitated to use it even though it has meant a moral breakdown and an unprecedented social division in the country.  

It is ironic to think that many of these Americans consider this billionaire, tax-exempt president to be one of their own. And that they also confuse this sound and fury with strength and firmness, when there is only impulsiveness and irrationality behind his actions, which translates into a nation's politics governed exclusively by the president's emotions and erratic behaviour. 

 If, as the forecasts finally suggest, Biden arrives at the White House, he will have to face extraordinary challenges for the future of mankind, such as the return to the Treaty of Paris to combat climate change, the defence of freedoms and liberal democracy and the reconstruction of foreign policy to renew the battered alliance with Europe, the latter being key to meeting these challenges.

But perhaps Biden's greatest challenge will be to leave behind this stage of sound and fury, which has exhausted and disgusted a good part of the American public, and to rehabilitate all the intangible heritage that has made the American people great. The Democratic candidate, if the predictions are borne out, will have to heal the social divide and be the leader of all. A leadership that learns from the past and exercises self-criticism in order to understand what has gone wrong in the system, and in the two main political parties, so that an amoral 'outsider' has reached the presidency and has tried to destroy everything that constitutes the good of the American people's soul.  

 Paradoxically, Trump's mandate and person have represented the opposite of his slogan 'Great America Again': there is no honour, dignity and greatness in him, nor, of course, are there the most beautiful dreams of tomorrow.