Delusions of Grandeur Without Consequences

Delusions of Grandeur Without Consequences

Here’s something I’ll confess up front: I have never fully understood many Americans’ fondness for the man in the Oval Office. I write to and follow a fair few American subscribers on this platform, and I mean this with genuine, cross-Pacific affection. I respect you all; I just cannot, for the life of me, work out how you got here.

I followed Trump’s first term with the sort of morbid fascination usually reserved for reality television and slow-motion car crashes, and even then there were moments that made me sit up and do a double-take.

Alarming, yes, but survivable.

Then Biden arrived, and for four blessed years the volume was turned down. No speeches telling the country and the world how magnificent he was. America went about its business quietly and competently, without fanfare or setting anything on fire. Things got done.

It was, dare I say it, a little boring.

These days I miss boring.

Unexpectedly, Trump came roaring back in, not so much a returning president as a weather event, a Category 5 hurricane making landfall on his own shores, cheered on by the very people whose houses he was about to flatten.

If January 6th convinced the rest of the planet that America had lost the plot, the past eighteen months have confirmed it, laminated it, and hung it in a museum somewhere.

 The man rode in on a campaign trail, unforgettably soundtracked by YMCA, accompanied by a little dance, presumably a nod to his Scottish ancestry, although I've never seen anyone from Aberdeen move quite like that. The promises came thick and fast: no more wars, affordability for the working man, tax cuts (mostly for people who own more than one yacht), and the chant that now rings as true as a timeshare pitch, Make America Great Again.

Here's a fun bit of trivia for the group chat: narcissism and absolute power make a genuinely terrible cocktail. Yet America's Commander-in-Chief has taken that particular mix and turned it into an art form, the way other men this age take up woodworking or lawn bowls.

You know things are getting a little weird when a president, king, emperor, or whatever we're calling him this week starts decorating federal buildings with his own portraits. To the uninitiated, that's not a red flag; it’s a fire engine driving straight through your living room.

Remember that fellow from Germany in 1938, doing something similar while the good citizens of the Reich found something pretty to look at rather than studying the man himself?

In many ways, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, as the man's surname has been bolted onto the sides of his own buildings in letters so large they are visible from space.

This lifelong self-adoration isn't a new hobby for him. It's just that he’s been given the keys to the Oval Office… again!

 Outside the small, loyal circle of advisors whose entire job description appears to be "kiss ring, nod vigorously, repeat”, even some of the faithful are starting to eye the man's grip on reality with something approaching concern.

His communiqués or tweets to the faithful, whoever they may be, have taken on the tone of a fever dream narrated by a man who has just discovered the wonders of hallucinogenic substances.

Case in point: this past weekend. A positive flurry of memes erupted across his Truth Social account, and I do mean a flurry, in the way a blizzard is technically just "a little bit of snow."

We saw him gallop into the digital sunset on horseback alongside George Washington, the two of them presumably swapping notes on empire-building. Moments later, he'd swapped the horse for a general's uniform, his chest so thick with medals it's a wonder he could still stand upright, medals for wars he never fought and victories that never happened, but then again, why let facts get in the way of a good breastplate?

Then came the clincher: the Resolute Desk fantasy: Trump, day-trading from the Oval Office like some sort of Wall Street wunderkind, allegedly raking in, and I want you to really sit with this figure, "hundreds of billions of dollars on stocks." Presumably, he was scanning the screens between briefings on wars unfolding in the real world.

As Heather Delaney Reece noted in a recent Substack piece, the president's delusional posts ranged from appearing to attack Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney mid-hockey game, standing over him and bellowing "GET UP, GOVERNOR," to renaming New Mexico "New America," to commanding Space Force from orbit while detonating nuclear fireballs across the Earth below.

Here he was, the leader of the free world, alone on his phone late on a Saturday night, commissioning fan art of himself launching a global thermonuclear war from orbit, surrounded by loyal soldiers dressed as Star Wars personnel on the Death Star.  

Oh, and let's not skate past the day-trading gag too quickly, because it isn't really a gag.

This is a sitting president, publicly fantasising about moving markets from behind the Resolute Desk, in a country where insider trading is meant to carry real consequences for real people. 

The Justice Department exists, in theory, to notice this sort of thing. In practice, they appear to have taken a permanent seat in the front row, applauding every trade he makes. Which, if we're honest, has been the pattern long before he set foot back in the Oval Office.

Back in 2016, during his first-term campaign, he told a crowd in Iowa that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing a single voter. Everyone laughed. Nobody, least of all him, seemed to regard it as a threat so much as a preview. 

Nine years and one Fifth Avenue later, he hasn't needed the gun. He's simply demonstrated, week after week, memo after unhinged memo, that the rest of it, the law, the DOJ, the norms, the guardrails, was always more of a suggestion than a system. He can thumb his nose at the Justice Department from the Resolute Desk in broad daylight because, as it turns out, he can.

Nobody's stopping him.

Nobody's even really trying.

And that, more than any horseback fantasy or nuclear fireball meme, is the punchline nobody's laughing at any more. A man told us, in plain English, on a stage in Iowa, exactly what he thought he could get away with.

We assumed it was hyperbole.

We got it wrong. It was a business plan.

Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.