The Donald is a soft target, but seeing as he’s a man seemingly on a crusade against fake news, I’ll take him at his word…. In his post-indictment rambling, the former president said the following
“While we are living through the darkest hours of American history, I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits.”
Assuming that ‘the darkest hours’ refers to his (possibly politically motivated – let’s give him some slack) indictment on a range of fraud charges relating to the alleged payment of hush-money to ex-‘adult’ film star Stormy Daniels, the yet-to-be-adult Trump places his predicament as worse than the following (in approximate descending chronological order):
- his previous indictment for insurrection relating to the attack on the Capitol
- his own mis-handling of the coronavirus epidemic which needlessly cost the lives of several hundred thousand Americans.
- the abrupt withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan
- the killing of George Floyd
- the US-led invasion of Iraq
- the fall of Saigon
- the Jim Crow laws
- the American Civil War
- the genocide of native Americans
Even if we were to say, OK, maybe he was talking specifically only of political history, then Trump still places his own (re) exposure as an (alleged) tawdry, deceitful, infantile narcissist as somehow a darker day than:
- his own allegations of US politics being a ‘swamp’ of corruption and of Hillary Clinton being ‘crooked’.
- the assassination of JFK
- the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Still, we should be cautious in our mockery: Trump’s melodramatic invocation of ‘the darkest hour’, is not so much about the place he is in now, as the place he will soon be, because, to complete the phrase, ‘the darkest hour [not ‘hours, Don] comes before the dawn’. The depth of Don’s rather histrionic complaint is only really to make his comeback seem the more magnificent. This is about resurrection and conscious myth-making.
I am surprised though, that amongst all this re-visiting of the Stormy Daniels did-he / didn’t-he business, no-one seems to have mentioned the most obviously ego-deflating meme of the whole sorry chapter. But that’s not going to stop me wringing one bit of glee out of having to see his jowly orange visage and listen to his hyperbolic diatribes again, so here you are:
