Deplorable-In-Chief

Instead of striving to be disciplined, dedicated and presidential, Donald Trump is flitting between seven characters that have no place in the White House.

- Paul Thomas

Shortly after the death, in November, of George HW Bush, the Sacramento Bee newspaper ran a cartoon depicting a group of his predecessors greeting the 41st US President upon his arrival in heaven. A slightly exasperated Ronald Reagan asks Bush, “No. Seriously. Who’s president now?”

Two years have passed since Donald Trump was sworn in. He set the tone for his presidency with an inauguration address accurately characterised by George Bush Jr as “some weird shit”. Trump told the American people that “I’ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you live, you’re not going to be shot. Your child isn’t going to be shot. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Needless to say, he hasn’t delivered on this preposterous undertaking. School shootings continue to occur with numbing regularity. Eight months into the Trump presidency, the worst mass shooting in US history took place in Las Vegas: 58 people died, 851 were injured. American carnage indeed. “Trump had no plan to stop such an attack,” wrote Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, “nor did he do anything after the fact that would prevent a similar attack.”

The lack of follow-through on this and other similarly grandiose vows doesn’t seem to have reduced Trump’s standing in the eyes of his hard-core supporters. Perhaps their sense of grievance and paranoia makes them prefer apocalyptic rhetoric that “projects strength” to the earnest endeavours of conventional politicians. Or perhaps it just shows the resilience of a cult of personality based on the notion that Trump is the only person who can prevent picket-fence – and trailer-park – America being overrun by murderous illegal immigrants.