(Washington) A New York businessman with questionable morals, who became a huge television star. A cynical alliance with a tabloid, which covers its scandals in exchange for money and exclusives. A presidential candidacy that no one takes seriously but which triumphs. A sacred alliance with Christian fundamentalists.
The story of Donald Trump is an incredible summary of all American political contradictions. An American fable more cynical than House of Cards which, unlike the Netflix series, does not run out after four seasons.
Who would have imagined this story, which pulverized the entire American political scene?
The super-rich attacking the elite with whom he once associated. THE draft dodger pistoned having escaped the Vietnam War, but became the champion of the military. The pornocrat, playboy, disbeliever, reinvented as a seller of Bibles and pairs of golden sneakers in his name…
Even in The pyre of the vanitiesTom Wolfe didn’t go that far.
It must be said that Donald Trump went further than Sherman McCoy, the New York financier of the novel, who believes himself to be “master of the Universe”.
Trump really was. No human being on Earth can claim to be more “master of the Universe” than the leader of the greatest army, even today. Donald Trump has genuine reasons to believe he is all-powerful.
But as in the novel, the invincible character, at the top of the social pyramid, encounters humiliation. The sewers are rising.
Quietly, he is caught up in his sulphurous past – sexual assault, extramarital affairs with a playmate and a porn actress, rigging of accounting books, inflating his assets…
And as in the novel, it takes place in a New York court in the eye of a media storm.
Donald Trump has lost four times in a row in the past year before judges and juries in his city. The city that gave birth to him and on which he left his indelible mark, even in the architecture. It has long been an icon, a symbol of all-American success: financial, social, family, sexual…
He said that when you are such a big star, you can kiss the first person who comes along without asking permission, take her genitals: everything is permitted when you are master of the Universe. He said it. He proved it.
Since last year, two juries have convicted him of sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll. He did not even deign to give his version to the peers who judged him – except through out-of-court testimony. His own Trump Organization is under judicial supervision, and he has $454 million in fines to pay.
And when his first criminal trial comes, who is the judge? A guy named Juan. Born in Colombia. Of these people who “poison the blood of the nation”, coming from “shithole countries”, as he says.
Except that in the end, it’s a jury of New Yorkers who decides. As in The pyre of the vanities. McCoy at least got a mistrial because the jury, divided between whites and blacks, was unable to reach a verdict. For Trump, 11 hours of deliberations were enough to declare him a criminal. Felon (“ felon” in Old French: the disloyal subject, the traitor).
Humiliation aside, little seems to have changed so far for the felon Trump. He could once again become the master of the Universe. He is convinced to have remained so, moreover.
In 2014, Republican Senator Rand Paul again denounced the sexual “predatory behavior” of Bill Clinton, who had had a sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky 20 years earlier.
He denounced the hypocrisy of Democrats, contradicting the ex-president’s abusive sexual behavior and his speech that Republicans are waging “a war on women”.
Ten years later, the conservative Kentucky senator was among the first to denounce the conviction by a legally constituted jury.
In a sarcastic twist of the story, the most clearly irreligious and openly libertine president in American history is supported by all the ultra-conservatives in the political class. He became the man of family values and the guardian of Christianity.
Unlike Sherman McCoy in The pyre, therefore, Trump-the-character has not experienced decline so far. Only a series of legal and media humiliations, for which he is immediately repeatedly absolved by those who want him at the top of the Universe again. Everything slides, everything passes.
But unlike McCoy, if he falls, he won’t fall to the bottom of a book alone.
The epilogue is not written.