Brendan Hoban: America’s nightmare could become its reality.    

Western People , 5.3.2024

When the novelist Philip Roth wrote The Plot Against America in 2004, alternative history fiction was not regarded as a very credible literary formula. Roth imagined an America in which Charles Lindberg – an American hero who, in 1927, made the first non-stop flight of 3,500 miles from New York City to Paris – was elected U.S. president and suddenly began to enact anti-Semitic policies.

More recently, Paul Lynch, the Irish novelist who won this year’s prestigious Booker Prize for Prophet Song, imagined an Ireland where, in the words of the judges, ‘Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism’. The Guardian newspaper described Lynch’s book as ‘powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real’ and ‘as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across.’

Having survived reading the 300-plus pages of Prophet Song, I can vouch for that, not least the build-up of tension, terror and dread in a chilling fable that needs to be taken in small potions. Even despite that, Prophet Song seems to linger in the mind like a bad smell.

Of course, in today’s world, we don’t need to imagine in literary form such anti-democratic plots that sneak up on us and attempt to limit our freedoms to such possible devastating effect.

In our present strangely fragmenting world, Vladimir Putin and Donald J. Trump lead a gallery of totalitarian types, prepared to use almost any means to inflict their immoral and indefensible policies on unsuspecting innocents with little or no regard for anything approaching a sense of right and wrong.

Putin is happy to eliminate any credible opposition (as recently with Alexei Navalny) with murder as an unapologetic method of choice in responding to criticism; and Trump consistently and unapologetically telling lies and raising mendacity to unprecedented levels. For both, a moral compass seems spectacularly out of reach.

Putin is invading his neighbour’s land, using might to determine right, and Trump makes up policy on the hoof with, apparently, the only determining factor whether it resonates or not with the needs of his egomania. Corruption, theft and vanity without any perceptible borders are shared ‘values’ – if that is not to diminish and corrupt that word entirely – of both Putin and Trump.

What’s clear now is that, even though Trump seemed to most observers a clown who had convinced other clowns to follow him down what appeared to be his own version of a yellow-brick road (with apologies to The Wizard of Oz), the January 6 attack on the Capital building in Washington wasn’t a case of Trump pointing his troops in a particular direction but, in the words of The Tablet, ‘the botched culmination of a plot that came close to toppling the American democratic system and replacing it with an unscrupulous dictatorship’.

What makes America’s long commitment to democracy so important is that, to a large extent, the democracies of the world depend on it. It is the template that inspires other democracies and is the wind beneath their wings. And when America is under threat, other democracies feel the knock-on effects.

What is clear now, behind the Trump bluster and the patent lies that have convinced millions of his followers to take their lead from him, is that Trump and those around him devised a plot to wrest the presidency from Biden by convincing his followers that, though Biden’s victory was vindicated in the courts, somehow it was stolen from Trump!

From the perspective of our own little island and a democracy that is still in many ways in its infancy, we mostly look with respect and often something approaching awe on a land where so many of our people and their descendants are proud to be its citizens. And yet, we often find it difficult to understand how the USA actually functions and how unsophisticated its electorate can be in their reactions to what to most people is utter nonsense.

From the perspective of the limited world of Irish politics we find it hard to imagine, for example, how Trump could even put himself forward as a convincing candidate for the American equivalent of a County Council, not to speak of the highest office in the land and as the leader of the free world. 

In judging Trump’s minus-CV, the following are indisputable: 91 criminal charges against him; a conviction for rape with damages assessed by a court of $83.3 million in a later defamation trial; barred from involvement in business dealings in his native New York for fraud; found guilty of paying hush money to cover up his involvement with others of ill-repute; a man described in The Atlantic as ‘a demagogue, a xenophobe, a know-nothing and a liar’.

In our small island, even one of the above incomplete list of negative qualifications for public office would be sufficient to disqualify anyone. And yet, the more court cases Trump has to face, the more outrageous his utterances, the more bizarre his threats of what he will do if he becomes president again ­– and, incomprehensibly, the more he rises in the polls.

How did such a man – a proven narcissist, idiotic in his pronouncements, hypocritical in his assumed values and with no moral filter to speak of – how did he insinuate himself into a position of trust that allowed him to harvest 70 plus million votes in the last election?

And what is that saying about the electorate in democratic America that such a huge percentage could so easily be conned into believing that Trump could lead them to a promised land when all the evidence is that he believes in nothing but his own self-aggrandisement?

Trump, it is clear, is not America’s answer to anything. But, if elected, he will become America’s (and the world’s) worst nightmare.