Donald Trump: America’s 1st Martyr

Alarming Signals from Washington

“In war: resolution, in defeat: defiance, in victory: magnanimity, in peace: good will,” wrote Winston Churchill, who himself didn’t flee from battles or wars, who had seen and lived through a lot, and who found himself in various, sometimes very dramatic circumstances.

In those few words he left an important code of conduct for the civilized world on how to treat ourselves, as well as our defeated opponents. Naturally we can decapitate the conquered enemy, but it’s far better to treat him with magnanimity — after all, we never know what the future will bring. One would even like to think that this code in our civilization is binding. But is that really still the case? The signals coming from political Washington show the contrary.

When we read about the subsequent moves and planned sanctions against 45th U.S. President Donald Trump — now in fact, a former president — it’s difficult to dismiss the impression that the last two of Churchill’s rules. “In victory: magnanimity” and “in peace: good will,” which would heal the country’s wounds, are of no importance to his many opponents.

Trump got under the skin of many people. And he certainly has a few sins on his conscience. It was hard to tolerate his antics, but if he broke the law, he should be tried by independent courts, not by his political rivals in sight of the whole world. By showing that in the zeal, fervor and resourcefulness to paralyze Trump his opponents have no bounds, they do not give the best testimony to their own decency and political tradition.

They are also hurting the very system of American democracy that they wanted to defend from Trump and failing to repair the damages that he had done to it. It is not befitting for a country as large as the U.S. to demonstrate such petty power and boundless contempt for the defeated president who stood at the head of the country and whose citizen he is — not an enemy captured on a battlefield.

Who Will Lose in Efforts To Impeach Trump?

The way Trump left is in line with his style — the style that for four years amazed and irritated America and the world. But the explosion of political revenge is unnecessary, and it will make him more memorable than he deserves. It will be harder to erase his image; he will be a warning and a challenge both for his allies and for his opponents. Very soon we will forget his crudeness, his evident lack of proprietary, nonchalance and unpredictability.

But we will remember the dismantling, his practical eviction from the White House, a settling of accounts with the president that was not much better than he was himself, and which called to mind his rowdy arrogance. This is the image, and not his masquerades, that will dominate the memories of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the U.S.

The crusade against Trump is, obviously, about him as a person, but not to a lesser degree it is about the presidency, which he won in a democratic election and attempted to win again. The anarchistic and astonishing way he held this office undermined, according to many American and non-American critics, its integrity, dignity and significance.

Nonetheless, the attempt to remove Trump legally through impeachment is also harmful for the office of president itself. It borders on personal acts of vengeance, which in democracies as old as America’s should have been buried in a political cemetery a long time ago. Trump is leaving anyway, but the office of the president remains, and the humiliating restrictions against the defeated president will not restore its dignity or significance. His successor Joe Biden’s clear and readable return to those codes that Trump consistently ignored would.

Trump’s second impeachment, right before the end of his term (there have only been four other impeachments in U.S. history, one of them against Trump), which is symbolic and therefore ineffective, was welcomed in many circles in the U.S. and around the world with undisguised satisfaction. The extent of this satisfaction is not surprising, since Trump tread on the toes of many a politician.

In politics, vengeance combined with schadenfreude is, of course, a gladly served dessert that tastes even better when it involves the defeat of the president of a superpower. A majority of its consumers see it as the necessary (and deserved) humiliation of a man with a nuclear briefcase who shook lots of things up, not only in the U.S. And this is his biggest sin: He mocked the political establishment that had been in power in the U.S. for decades, evidently wreaking havoc in it. The final and unforgivable error that Trump made was questioning the results of the recent election and his battle for its annulment.

Yes, it’s true; Trump, an egocentric, didn’t miss a single opportunity to systematically increase the circle of people waiting for his demise. He was also diligently preparing the ground for his second impeachment. The fact that now he is leaving in disgrace, dishonored and stigmatized, is viewed by his rivals as political justice, settling outstanding accounts, deserved lifetime banishment that will find its expression in merciless history textbooks entries.

Trumpism Will Not Go Away

The delight with which Trump is accused of insanity is astounding. This accusation, however, should cause fear; according to this logic, our life for years was hanging by a thread and depended on a madman who in a fit of blind insanity was capable of pressing a certain button. The fact that Nancy Pelosi consulted generals on that matter is a surprising and, to be honest, dangerous precedent. It only confirms that a madman can become U.S. president, and madmen in power is seen as something that only happens in fallen countries.

However, if Trump were really insane, the dignity, significance and world position of the U.S. would instead require the guardians of American democracy to hide such a phenomenon with shameful discretion and embarrassment, rather than hoping to make it public or even propagating it.

This degrading humiliation of Trump, an attempt to symbolically remove him from the office by impeachment a few days before the end of his term when we know that he was leaving anyway, is a politically unwise move since either way the judgment that history will pass on him will be catastrophic. It’s rather an attack on the office and not him as a person.

It is also politically unwise since Trumpism will not go away after Trump moves to Florida. This phenomenon, which a few years back didn’t even have a name, not only brought him to the presidency, but from the moment the Republican Party had endorsed him, became an official, political trend for millions of Americans. Today, Republicans must pay a steep price for it: Trump has been defeated, and they have lost the House of Representatives and the Senate while the political experiment with Trump’s reelection campaign fell through.

But Trump has left them a legacy of 74 million voters, the highest number for a losing candidate in history — hence the Democrats’ efforts to deprive him once and for all of a chance for a do-over. The problem is that Trump’s voters cannot just be banished from the political scene along with him.

Trump Begins His Career as a Martyr

If the Democrats didn’t lose political wisdom and the capability to make a generous gesture, if they let him leave without humiliating him and millions of Americans by the efforts to impeach him, then the “post-Trump period” in wounded America would begin with style and substance, which would make a beautiful and unequivocal contrast to Trump’s own style, egocentrism and destructiveness.

It would be a gesture of American greatness, the generosity at its historic core and quintessence of values that have made this country great and powerful — the qualities that Trump practically lacked. They would be the manifesto of rejection of and distancing from his unruliness, irritability, unpredictability and dangerous nonchalance. True magnanimity of American democracy would let him leave office for the place where he feels best — a golf course — without the unnecessary excitement and sensationalism, and it would make it easier to forget him.

That’s not what happened. This is why, even if Trump does not rise from the ashes like a phoenix, he will put on the garments of the first martyr in U.S. history; the more time elapses from the day of his political crucifixion, the more the minds of his followers will be filled with time with desire for revenge — even without him, but for him and, in fact, for themselves. This does not bode well for the situation in the U.S.

Humiliation in politics always produces bad results. That way of bidding farewell to a peculiar troublemaker who lived in the White House not giving a hoot about anybody does not help the drastically divided nation to heal. It will become the source of the myth and legend of a man who took on the elites, who led millions of Americans and expressed their interests — and more importantly, their longings — who reminded them of the “American Dream” and who wanted to make America “great again,” not for himself but for them. In their view, everything that is happening now to him only confirms that he was right — and more crucially, that they are right as well.

Trump’s presidency has come to an end and his career as a martyr has begun. The effort to impeach Trump is an attempt to impeach his voters, and sooner or later it will prompt their reaction. This is the kind of eventuality that Churchill warned against when he called for magnanimity toward the defeated. But who listens to the long-dead classic of political nuance these days?

As we all know, former American presidents regularly write their memoirs. Because of the names of the authors, these often become bestsellers, though they rarely reveal anything essential. This is simply a peculiar ritual and an opportunity to earn millions of dollars in royalties. We can already imagine Trump’s memoirs and the publicity they will get — that is, if he finds a publisher in the U.S. who will take the risk of dealing with a virus that infected the American political system and who will remain a threat in the years to come, even if only in the pages of his book.