The unlikely figure who made post-America's irreparable defilement a certainty

Donald, you've certainly left a legacy

Think back to, say, the spring of 2015. If you were asked at that time to name someone who would seal the deal, who would take post-America’s decline to such a level that no one questioned its irreversibility, would you have answered “Donald Trump”?

At that point, most post-Americans across the spectrum shared the impression of him as a cartoonish self-promoter, a “New York character,” as he’s been described, someone obsessed with burnishing his brand, the sleaziness of which made him proud, someone whose air was a combination of sybaritic abandon, solipsistic self-reveling, lack of shame over the trail of bankruptcies, unpaid contractors, associations with mob-connected lawyers, and two broken homes, and an erratic track record of political contributions that indicated no discernible pattern of ideological leanings. He was an amusing blip on the pop-culture radar screen and little else.

No, you probably - I’m directing this at the conservative reader - would have come up with something that seemed far more obvious at the moment. Barack Obama, whose track record as a radical leftist was well-documented by that point. Black Lives Matter, which was already stoking the tensions between law enforcement and an inner-city subculture marked by fatherless families and awash in drugs and guns. Identity-politics militants, freshly imbued with confidence by Obergefell v. Hodges and the support of Hollywood, universities, large corporations and approximately half of institutional Christianity.

But you were frustrated at that point. The Tea Party phenomenon had not really moved the needle. You may have been boilingly frustrated. The array of possibilities for doing something about the situation seemed to you clearly inadequate to the task.

And then, that summer, came the descent down the golden escalator. He’d been teasing the nation for a while, with I-just-don’t-know-my-businesses-are-doing-so-fantastically hemming and hawing, but now he’d made his decision. He didn’t have to lay out much in the way of clearly defined positions. He could bring the never-settle-for-a-bad-deal rhetoric which was his natural vernacular to the arena, and it would appeal to enough of those in Rust Belt post-America to fire them up with the notion that other nations had taken jobs Americans who worked with their hands were entitled to.

He could turn his rough edges into assets, exciting a certain kind of right-leaning post-American voter with the possibility that his brashness was backed up with an understanding of why political correctness was corrosive. He could, with a tossed-off phrase like “we’ve got to take care of everybody,” provide a balm to the uneasy feelings of a vast swath of citizens that they’d been sold a bill of goods with the Affordable Care Act but that some other type of grand program could shore up their sense of security.

He could offer a sense of some other future to the post-American who was weary of “endless wars” without having to flesh out any details of how power vacuums in the dusty environs where jihadists regrouped whenever keepers of order vacated could be dealt with.

So he got his chance. It’s yielded the good results that have been noted many times: pulling out of the Paris climate accord, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, creating space in the national conversation about education for choice, charter schools and dollars following students, fostering a climate wherein religious liberty can get its breath. And, of course, a lot of excellent federal judges.

But there has also been protectionist trade policy (which didn't bring back too many manufacturing jobs to US shores, but did result in a lot of farm bankruptcies), insulting leaders of allied nations to their faces, calling a roomful of generals "a bunch of dopes and babies", pulling the Bible-waving stunt in front of St. John's church, spending his appearance at the 2017 Boy Scout National Jamboree telling the crowd (mostly teenage boys) that Washington is a cesspool, dissing his predecessor Obama for sending his message via tape to the prior jamboree, telling a story, apropos of nothing, about a real estate developer friend of his, saying, "he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won’t go on any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did," telling a Michigan rally, "You better vote for me, I got you so many damn car plants," which was not only a crude way to put it but not true, strongly suggesting that Joe Scarborough murdered his aide when he was a congressman, and saying that Japan and South Korea ought to pay hefty sums to host US troops.

The drooling, slavish cult has hung in there with him even through the fallout from these follies. My sense is that it’s been a mixture of a degree of investment in their devotion that precludes their being able to walk away, and a not-unfounded alarm about the progressive agenda.

But that devotion’s shelf life expired some time ago. All we are left with is the combination of national damage and national embarrassment resulting from occasions like today’s press conference featuring Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis (who, it came to my attention today, was one of those, like the robotic Kayleigh McEnany, had her head on straight about who the Very Stable Genius was before a rather mysterious abrupt turn.)

The claims of fraud and nefarious intervention that have been building since election night reached a crescendo- at least for the time being - with claims that voting software had been messed with to “run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to . . . Biden,” not to mention allegations of machinations of George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, China, Cuba and Venezuela.

Then there’s the VSG himself, who continues his barrage of all-caps tweets claiming he won by a landslide.

Would you have believed in, say, the spring of 2015 that such a man-child would have been capable of reducing a former New York mayor, who had restored the city’s safety, cleaned up Times Square, and seen it through that history-altering September day early in the century, to a peddler of conspiracy fantasies with hair dye running down his face?

And still there’s a cult remnant that wants to frame this as if the last five years had never happened, as if left vs. right were still all that is going on.

Donald Trump has done some big things in his life - the Grand Hyatt, the Taj Mahal casino, coming back from a slide into irrelevancy to star in a reality show that enjoyed good ratings for years - but who could have imagined that he’d undermine general faith in bedrock national institutions and take the country’s polarization to hopeless levels?

What a guy.