Trump's Three Kings Day gift to Xi Jinping

If there is one thing we can conclude once the dust settles around the Capitol, it is that the truth matters, and that we cannot be complacent about any form of politics based on eroding the truth, because, as we saw yesterday, the flames can lead to actions that obscure democracy and cost lives. As often happens to sorcerer's apprentices, Trump and his nepotistic court lost control of the consequences of their words, and the two consecutive months of disinformation, gaslight, induced chaos, noise and confusion, ended in a scorched earth policy that has left the Republican Party in the picture, and Trump himself with a reputation comparable to that of one of those operetta dictators that Hergé portrayed so well. This Dantean ending has triggered an exodus in his entourage, significantly that of the deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, national security adviser Robert O'Brien and deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, as well as Stephanie Grisham, Trump's former press secretary and current chief of staff to Melania Trump, social affairs secretary Rickie Niceta, and deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews.

Although there was no lack of bad omens before and after the elections, a bias towards normality prevailed among the authorities and public opinion; the confidence that "something like this can't happen here"; the belief that uprisings are things that happen to others. This allowed a mob of lunatics to turn the US for a few hours into a failed state, which had lost material control of the seat of legislative power.  But above all, the sense of legitimacy that the US president had given to the uprisings he had been calling for and encouraging since the very night of 3 November stood out, which in fact cannot be understood other than as the boiling point of the collective imagination created by Trump and his supporters, based on fostering the strengthening of cognitive biases that have led half the American population to interpret the ideas of those who think differently in terms of tribal antagonism and a systematic fanatical rejection of the other in order to justify and achieve their political aims. 

Since he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in 2016, Donald Trump has made an art of appealing to emotions to take precedence over facts, effectively disabling the political dialectic, and creating the conditions for the Capitol Hill insurgents to believe firmly that they were participating in a game without rules in which anything goes, and there is no price to pay; immersed in a maelstrom of beliefs fueled by feelings in the face of which it is useless to invoke objective facts, because Trump had created the conditions necessary for millions of voters to vote by putting their subjective opinions above other considerations. Sadly, the hordes on Capitol Hill acted in the belief that the alternative facts that came to him from the White House were a respectable and preferable option to reality, because it served to shelter them from it in the absolute simplifications and certainties that Donald Trump so effectively articulates. 

Of course, the fate of this policy based on polarisation, on agonism, is to die of success, deeply fragmenting society and leaving open wounds which, far from making the country great again, dwarf it and paralyse it, while giving a moral alibi to despots from half the world.

Consequently, the task that Biden and Kamala have ahead of them will have much to do with therapy; closing wounds, restoring national unity, and strengthening institutions so that it will no longer be possible for a cynical narcissist in the White House to keep the world on edge for two months by exploiting the loopholes in a written constitution before the viruses were discovered, and long before the mass media hatch. Some of these wounds are not new, and have not closed properly for decades; due to laziness or impotence. Both Jim Crow Laws and McCarthyism still reverberate in huge segments of American society, and the existing wells of spoiled poverty, often correlated to ethnic minorities, are a hindrance that will make reconciliation between the two Americas very difficult, foreshadowing a scenario of sporadic and recurrent low-intensity political violence. The latent issue is that at least one-third of American voters refuse to accept the society in which they live and yearn for a past that is as ideal as it is imaginary, in which intersocial relations were clearly hierarchical and compartmentalised.  If these issues are not addressed through an overwhelming political consensus, the quality of American democracy will gradually wear down-a structural weakness that will soon be exploited by other powers. For this reason, Old Europe should eschew any temptation to feel overconfident, and should instead show political leadership, to help give Mr Biden's presidency the geopolitical space it needs to put its own house in order, in the confidence that Europe will help America's prodigal son with generosity and greatness of vision.

But neither should we in Europe fail to learn the lessons of what happened, falling into the same error as them and thinking that this cannot happen to us: Trump came to power by selling the promise that the problem of the Americans lay with the professional politicians and the civil service elites. In the end, it was Pence, a professional politician, who saved American democracy by abiding by its constitution, when he crossed the Rubicon and accepted as legitimate only the votes certified by the official electors and ignored the alternative certificates of unofficial voters, while Trump, an intruder into the world of Washington, is heading for ostracism after losing the presidency and control of the Senate; he faces an uncertain judicial future, and is about to skip all the seams of the rule of law.