Freddy Gray

'Every great cause,' said Eric Hoffer, 'begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket’. So it is with Trumpism, though the categories blur. It began as a great movement — a vigorous rejection of the fetid elites, Republican and Democrat, who had enriched themselves at America’s expense. But the Trump movement always gave off a whiff of grubby profiteering itself; a suspicion that ‘draining the swamp’ really meant replacing it with the Trump family brand. He was a businessman, after all. Still, Trumpism coopted and energized the so-called ‘conservative movement’, which by the Bush years already conned far more than it conserved.

This is the end, my only friend, the end. The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Texas’s legal bid to challenge Joe Biden’s election. Donald Trump said the Court ‘really let us down’, but the truth is that the case was a legal Hail Mary. It has failed. Now the quixotic campaign to challenge the official 2020 election result really is all over, bar the tweeting. It’s actually been over for a while, but a lot of Trump supporters refuse to see it. There’ll be more cases and many more allegations. But whatever the truth of any claims, the fact is the Trump campaign and its Republican supporters have failed to make a sufficiently powerful argument to do something as dramatic and unprecedented as overturn an election.

These days are fraught. On November 3, Donald Trump won 71 million votes. He still lost. Now, the whole 2020 presidential election, taking place as it did during a pandemic, feels weird and wrong. The candidate who generated absolutely no visible enthusiasm got more than 78 million votes, more than any other presidential candidate in history. Do people really hate Trump that much? Maybe they do. But the mechanics of the election process — what happened in those mysterious hours between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Wednesday — invite suspicion. Take those charts, which Trump has been tweeting, showing the late ‘data dumps’ of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.

It’s all so infantile isn’t it? Antifa jackals harass Donald Trump fans during their ‘Million MAGA March’ on the streets of DC. The ‘protesters’ steal Trump caps and set them on fire. They throw fireworks at people. Skirmishes break out, some people get hurt. There’s a stabbing. Underpaid online reporters stalk the scenes with their iPhones, trying to record the violence and make it go viral. Social media users dutifully share scraps of aggro-porn. President Trump, sounding not unlike a teenager reporting on fisticuffs in high school, tweets: ‘ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.’ Which hills?