We were pulling into a parking space outside the supermarket when Daughter Number Four pointed at the car in front of us.
“That’s a Tesla,” she said. “We don’t like them.”
When I quizzed her further, she was unable to tell me why, or who the owner of the Tesla company is: just that it had something to do with Trump; and we don’t like Trump.
Before you jump to conclusions, I’m pretty sure she didn’t get this at home. We don’t sit around the house being conspicuously woke or indulging in competitive outrage about the American presidency. We tend not to mention him at all, like the T-word itself has been worn out. And I suspect many people in Ireland have fallen into this habit. I hear people say a version of this phrase all the time: you know, with the way things are in the world.
That’s all they need to say. It’s clear what they mean.
We’re all exhausted by the endless drama. We’re sick of hearing his name endlessly repeated on the radio. I’m certainly sick of it. And I work in radio.
It’s a shame that all the tech bros have taken residency in Donald Trump’s backside. Because if they ever peeked out, they might notice a huge moneymaking opportunity: an app that erases all mentions of him on social or any other media. Even a day off would be nice, just for our sanity.
Yet here I am writing about him. Because even though daily exposure to the Trump personality cult is draining, it’s also compulsive. When the acronym Gubu was coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien, it was in relation to events that are humdrum by today’s standards. What we are living through now is truly grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. And it’s getting more Gubu-ish by the day.
In the decades to come, if humans are still around, academics won’t know where to start, there will be so much to examine about the era we live in now. But one aspect will have to be the astonishing phenomenon of how one individual managed to project his will and ego on to the entire planet; even down to the playgrounds of national schools in Ireland.
It’s easily arguable that Donald Trump is the most well-known person in the world, and that every single person on our planet is, to some extent, feeling the effects of his actions.
If there’s one thing DJT is good at, it’s selling himself; making himself the central character in all the storylines. They are Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s war on Woke, Trump’s mass deportations. Because of his pretensions towards being an American Il Duce, that’s just the way he likes it. But the focus on the individual somewhat masks a more profound change.
Donald Trump might like to fancy that he has bent the American state to his will, but the truth is that it was headed that way anyway. Trump just happened to be the right guy at the right time, a symptom of the cancer in the American body politic that had metastasised enough to produce the votes for what we are witnessing now.
What the societal factors were to bring about this change will be another massive area of study for those future academics. The psychology of the people around him, however, probably won’t attract as much interest.
In the previous Trump presidency, he spent much of his time fighting with his own staff. Many of them seemed to think he would be a useful idiot. Turned out he wasn’t that useful. This time, there appears to be far more unanimity.
But outside this inner circle, there is a sizeable cohort in the US – in politics, business, the arts, the media – who have managed to convince themselves that what’s happening in their country is perfectly normal. The academics probably won’t study that phenomenon. Historically, they’ve seen it before.
