The World

The ultimate jeopardy of Daesh focused Putin’s support: the mayhem was the fault of ‘a single centre of domination [that] emerged in the world after the Cold War’, he said in September 2015, meaning America. ‘The export of revolutions, this time of so-called “democratic” ones, continues … Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got … extremists and terrorists.’ While America armed Kurdish Peshmerga, who began to fight Daesh on the ground, Putin bombed Assad’s opponents.

As Obama finished his term, the confidence of the unipower America withered. America’s world crusade, governed by rules and morals developed by the chastening struggle of the Second World War, confirmed by the victory of 1989, was the most ambitious programme in world history, backed by its most potent ever state. Yet even this massive and supreme technarchy could be foiled by bands of mountain warriors in an iPhone and dagger state. And despite it all, its twenty years as the unipower of a globalized world had failed to deliver peace abroad or prosperity at home.

In one of his last trips, Obama flew to London where Cameron was holding a referendum on British membership of the European Union, the trade organization with aspirations to become a federal state. If it left, he warned Britons, ‘The UK is going to be in the back of the queue’ for a US trade deal. But on 23 June 2016, rallied by a haystack-haired maverick, Boris Johnson, the British did just that.

In Syria, America joined the mayhem to bombard Daesh. But the winners were Assad and his backers Russia and Iran.

‘We don’t have victories any more,’ said Trump on 15 June 2015, riding down the golden elevator in his eponymous auric tower that almost matched his hair, skin and style. ‘We used to have victories, but we don’t have them … We’ve got to make America great again!’

THE DYNASTS

Revelling in his outrages, Trump commandeered a populist disdain for the self-righteous, often illiberal orthodoxies of liberals and progressives in big cities, old universities and famous newspapers – and the venal networks in the ‘swamp’ of Washington. He was a coarse but effective communicator, gifted with comic timing, capable of speaking live for hours authentically playing himself and expressing the prejudices and rages of his white, lower-middle-class Christian base, convinced that somehow, someone had given away their American birthright. Many of them believed that Latinos and immigrants were stealing their jobs. Trump promised a Wall to seal the Mexican border and a ban on Muslim immigrants. He announced, ‘The American carnage stops right here, right now. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.’

No one senses the weakness of others as acutely as the man who fears his own. Trump’s malice was implacably on target, his playground nicknames on the nail, as he brushed aside his Republican rival John Ellis Bush, Florida governor and brother of W, as ‘Low-Energy Jeb’ and forever tainted his Democratic opponent, wife of a former president, Hillary Clinton as ‘Crooked Hillary’. Like Trump himself, she also personified the tiny, elderly circles of America’s elites, wherein power was often passed via family links.

The Obamas were downhearted by Trump. ‘Both of us’, wrote the president, ‘were drained’ by the rise of ‘someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for’. They asserted the old decencies: ‘When they go low,’ said Michelle Obama, ‘we go high.’ But Trump was oblivious to such distinctions. Personality, wealth and television were all as serious for Trump as statecraft and geopolitics: projections of power.

Inadvertently he was promoted relentlessly and breathlessly by the very TV networks that despised him. Trump’s bombast immediately created its exact opposite: his progressive opponents aped his mendacity and righteousness, printing unsubstantiated calumnies, endorsing untrue scandals and fabulistic conspiracies, redoubling intolerance in witch-hunts and ultimately even banning stories critical of their own candidate. The open world had never been richer or more secure, yet America – emulated by the other comfort democracies – started to consume itself in vicious, self-mutilating schisms about history and nation, virtue and identity, every bit as demented as the christological controversies of medieval Constantinople. Some of it was the result of the comfortable tedium of bourgeois existence. ‘When we look at history,’ Mao had written, ‘we adore times of war; when we get to periods of peace and prosperity, we’re bored.’ Television and internet inevitably brought entertainment closer to politics: Trump channelled something of Nero, Commodus and Wilhelm II.