An exorcism

It was at some point in watching the images pour in from this weekend's MAGA protests in DC, reading about self-declared "Proud Boys" tear down and trample a Black Lives Matter sign, flashing each other three-fingered "white power" salutes along the way—any last flimsy pretense of there being a firewall between the President's MAGA movement and his most openly far-right, white supremacist supporters completely abandoned.... 

At some point in seeing this last most grotesque and dangerous mutation of the legendary Millennial unwillingness to grow up on display: these man-children who—as a friend of mine remarked with disbelief—"have named their group after a song that only appears in the Broadway version of the Disney Aladdin musical"... 

These overgrown boys who are outraged by how "woke" their pop culture touchstones have become, and who—because they are fundamentally concerned with trivial things—think that all of politics is really about trivial things, and who therefore think that their words and actions don't matter; who think that openly delegitimizing an election, trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric, and eventually becoming outright fascists don't have consequences...

At some point after seeing that the sitting President had suggested members of his own party—conservative Trump loyalists all—ought to be jailed simply for following the rule of law in the course of certifying the results of a democratic election... 

At some point after seeing that our entire electoral system was hanging on the thread of a few state officials, for whom the most basic procedural tasks had now become acts of exceptional moral courage, because Trump was committed to destroying them personally and professionally if they did their jobs properly... to raising the costs as much as he possibly could, to make it as difficult for them as he possibly could simply to follow the law and certify the election in accordance with the will of the voters in their state...

At some point in all of this, I say, it really hit home for me that Trump will stop at nothing to hurt us—the people of this country—before he can finally be removed from power... that he will ensure he makes us as miserable as he can before he is finally ejected. 

A powerful image from Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh came into my mind: "If a man has been possessed by devils for long enough," Butler writes, "they will rend him as they leave him, however imperatively they may have been cast out." 

Butler here is speaking of a young man's effort to escape his dysfunctional relatives, but the same applies to a country trying to escape its abusive, megalomanic, narcissistic president. We may be able to exorcise this particular demon, but he will leave claw marks in our flesh on his way out. 

He is like Mildred at the end of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage—realizing Philip does not mean to return to her, and therefore trashing all his personal possessions before making her final departure. 

If Biden was elected, as he said, because the nation's soul was in peril, then Trump is the demon who had possessed it. And just like in all the movies, as soon as the demon realizes that its ingratiating tricks are no longer working, it shows its true face. 

The mask, thin and unconvincing as it was, has been discarded. We are seeing him, if somehow we did not see it before, for who he truly is. Trump does not believe in democracy; he does not believe in our Constitutional system; he will empower and normalize any expression of racist ideology, any conspiracy theory, no matter how dangerous, so long as it allows him to entertain his fantasy of power and adulation and control....

With the Supreme Court's ruling this weekend and the electoral college vote on Monday—with not a single faithless elector—we can say it is all but certain at this point that Trump will be gone from office on January 20. He will eventually be replaced by his duly-elected successor, and the crucial checks-and-balances in our system will—this time, for now at least—manage to hold out. 

But good God... he will leave us bleeding.