Freddy Gray

There is no point denying it — The Trump Show, the craziest comedy the God of TV has ever produced, has been fizzling out. Yes, the ‘Storming of the Capitol’ episode was a dramatic denouement. The absurd sight of ridiculously dressed QAnoners stumbling into an accidental attempt at a government coup was shockingly hilarious. But the violent scenes left people depressed. The divine scriptwriters appeared to have lost the plot, gone off the deep end, ‘jumped the shark’, as they say. The networks tried to move forward by putting The Biden Show, a geriatric version of The West Wing, on prime time. But audiences so far aren’t sure how seriously they should take the storyline.

So endeth the Trump presidency, not with a bang but a long and and predictably hilarious list of pardons and commutations. There’s 143 in total. It’s a last, parting gift for those of us who, in our sinfulness, have always regarded the rule of Trump as a sort of divine cosmic joke. The headline pardon is for Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who has been charged in connection with a scheme to launder funds from a crowdfunding campaign to ‘build the wall’ between America and Mexico. Trump reportedly dithered over whether to show clemency to Bannon. Publicly, the two men were not meant to have reconciled after falling out as Bannon left the administration in August 2017.

In the days following the US presidential election in November, political centrists reached a hasty verdict. Never mind all the squabbling about voter fraud — they had won. The extremes had lost. Donald Trump, the maniac, was out; Joe Biden, the moderate, was in. Yes, the increasingly radical Democratic party still controlled the House of Representatives, but as long as the Republicans won one of two Senate run-off races in Georgia in January, the crazies would be checked by a Republican majority in the Senate. The markets rallied. All was well in establishment la-la land, despite the pandemic. Well, guess what? On Wednesday morning, it became clear that the Democrats had won both those Georgia races.