Donald Trump has not yet been elected president, so my plans to leave the planet are still on hold. I might have to leave soon anyway, but I would rather not have to book my seat on the rocket just because some baroque narcissist in the Oval Office had declared atomic war on North Korea, or South Dakota, or whatever target took his fancy when the hottest patootie in the West Wing typing pool swerved away from the outstretched plea of his tiny hands.
If Trump loses, we will still not be free of his extravagantly coiffed shadow, because the analysis will begin as to why he lost. Nobody sane will ascribe Hillary’s victory to her own command of language. If either of them commands the language, Trump does, by sticking a short finger in its ribs and walking forwards until it walks backwards.
Subjected to such treatment, Hillary was rightly praised for her poise, but she should have told him at least once to go screw himself. As things turned out, the figure who really had Trump’s number was Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Baldwin has the wrong mouth to be Trump – Baldwin’s mouth looks like a mouth – but in all other respects, he was a terrifying simulacrum of the terrifying reality, in which, no matter how much ordnance Hillary hit him with, Trump kept on walking forwards, like the robot Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
In pursuit of his aching pout, Baldwin kept on dialling up the inexorability, thereby tapping into any sane person’s deepest fear about the Donald: that he was built in a fully automated factory whose android engineers had studied no human being except a bilious infant in a cot. Those of us who used to be children ourselves can often only fleetingly remember that “I want” was once not just an imperative, it was an explanation. The world was something that might withhold the breast from us, unless we could threaten it with nuclear war.
But if Trump doesn’t get what he wants, the reason may well have been Michelle Obama. Her speech condemning him was in the rhetorical league of Cicero flaying Catiline, and with better reason. For those few sweet moments of bathing in her reflected glory, her husband looked again to have been chosen wisely.
Add what she did to Trump to what Obama did to Osama bin Laden, and the outgoing administration might be remembered as having been a great one after all. The same might one day be said of Hillary’s administration. As the long-time Republican PJ O’Rourke has been explaining so patiently when asked, we don’t have to agree with her policies to see that she’s got Trump beat.
