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It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple. But the simultaneous disasters that befell Boris Johnson and Donald Trump last Friday deserve, at best, two cheers.
To adapt Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, the evil that these men did lives after them. The question is: for how long?
In the grim year of 2016, after Johnson succeeded in leading Britain out of the EU and Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election, I used to joke with my British friends that Trump is for Christmas but Brexit is for life.
The joke wasn’t funny and nor was it meant to be. It merely recognised that Trump could be voted out in 2020 whereas Johnson, even without yet taking power, had inflicted damage that would last for at least a generation.
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This was not a blinding insight – everyone could see it. But now I’m beginning to wonder whether, like so many things that seem obvious at the time, it might have been partly wrong.
Last week, as the political cycle scratched its seven-year itch, the fates of the two masters of political bombast in the anglophone world were even more eerily in synch than they had been in 2016. Johnson fled the House of Commons (“for now”) in disgrace, a mere 3½ years after he took control of it with a landslide general election victory.
Trump, on the same day, became the first US president in history to be indicted for a federal crime – surpassing Johnson’s record in becoming the first serving UK prime minister to be found guilty of a crime in office.
To reinforce the parallel, Johnson, in his resignation letter, went full Trump, dropping his veneer of joshing geniality and going all-in on toxic conspiracy theories. He was brought down, not because he partied throughout the Covid lockdowns while ordering the plebs to stay away from dying loved ones and then blatantly lied to parliament about it, but by “a witch-hunt ... to take revenge for Brexit”.
[ Conspiracy theories: ‘It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. Everyone is susceptible’ ]
This was straight out of the Trump hymn-sheet. Psalm Number 151: Oh Lord look down upon my suffering and tell me has any innocent man ever been so horribly traduced in the entire history of human injustice?
The self-pitying rant is the last refuge of the scoundrel. A friend of mine who worked for many years as a barrister in family law cases once told me that there were no tears on earth like those of the convicted wife-beater crying for himself.
And there is, politically speaking, a certain symmetry. Both the Brexit campaign in 2016 and Trump’s bid for the presidency the same year worked because they successfully mobilised self-pity on a mass scale.
Britain was a mess because it was brutally oppressed by the EU, which Johnson compared to Hitler and some of his fellow-Brexiteers to Stalin. The US was steeped in “carnage” because white people were being oppressed by dark-skinned people.
He who turns on the taps of self-pity ends up drowning in his own tears. The leader who was going to save the nation from imaginary victimhood ends up imagining himself as the ultimate victim.
Yet, for all the parallels, there is an unexpected difference. Johnson feels over, Trump doesn’t.
It’s not just that Johnson is a beaten docket – albeit one that will continue to pay him dividends on the right-wing media and performance circuits. It is that his great project, Brexit, is melting like yellow snow in the merciless heat of reality.
Perhaps its last illusion evaporated last week, when Britain formally accepted that the Holy Grail that would be discovered after liberation from Brussels rule – the glorious trade deal with the US – is not going to happen. It is not, of course, that the UK is free from the costs of Brexit, which will indeed linger for a generation, but rather that, as a political vehicle, it is being cut up for scrap.
The Trump project, on the other hand, is not just alive but apparently indestructible. That which does not kill it makes it more fanatical – and the list of things that does not kill it is becoming ever longer and more incredible. Not killing large numbers of Americans by incompetent handling of the pandemic, not trying to stage a coup against the winner of the 2020 election, not even setting a mob on the Capitol and, on hearing them chant their intention to hang his sycophantically loyal vice-president, tweeting his encouragement. And now, not hoarding military, nuclear and intelligence secrets for his own future use and instructing his lawyers to lie about it to the FBI and a grand jury.
[ Where the other investigations into Trump stand ]
Trump is not, after all, for Christmas – except as that rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem in WB Yeats’s Yuletide nightmare. Having destroyed the working consensus of respect for America’s basic democratic institutions, he will try to do the same to its fundamental systems of law and order.
[ Fintan O’Toole: ‘Yeats Test’ criteria reveal we are doomed ]
Narcissists, when they are brought low, want to bring the world down around them – if the world does not do their bidding, it does not deserve to exist. Johnson is too weak to do that. Trump, like an unshorn Samson, blinded by rage, still has the power to try.