and

we have to say it

I shouldn’t, I know. I probably shouldn’t abandon the two cardinal principles of always being polite and always defending one’s own proposals rather than criticizing those of others, but it’s time to tell it like it is: this emperor has no clothes, he is completely and grotesquely naked.

It is our duty, because by not saying that Donald Trump is nothing more than a dangerous buffoon, we allow the idea to take hold that there is nothing abnormal, shocking, or unacceptable about his behavior and his words, even though he is taking us back to an age that humanity had finally left behind.

Since Auschwitz, it has no longer been possible to publicly claim that the world is divided into superior and inferior races. No head of state could ever have done so without risking dismissal or universal condemnation, but Donald Trump, for ten hours, allowed his website to publish images of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces on monkey bodies. To this day, he has not even apologized, and worse still, this abomination has not sparked a global outcry.

Logically preoccupied with wondering whether or not the United States would go to war against the Iranian regime, the world has written off this latest Trumpism as just another in a long line of such incidents, because this man has accustomed us to accepting the unacceptable. If he allows himself to imitate the Ku Klux Klan by likening Black people to monkeys, it is because he realized that it was entirely possible for him to pardon his rioting friends who, four years earlier, had stormed Congress. He did so just after swearing to uphold the Constitution. Nothing had stood in his way, so why be surprised that he continued on the same path?

Not long after, in the Oval Office, there was the suffocating indictment of the president of a democracy attacked by a dictator, and since then, Donald Trump has never wanted to call Vladimir Putin what he is: the one and only culprit of this war he started. His complacency towards the Russian dictator is such that many wonder if he is not in the pocket of the KGB. But in truth he is very deliberately serving the interests of the Kremlin.

This is because he dreams of a world in which the United States would share power with China and Russia, a world of dictatorships rid of that odious example of social democracy that is the European Union ; because he has so successfully discredited the Atlantic Alliance; because he is determined to break the centuries-old bond between Europe and the United States and did not hesitate to justify his threats to annex Greenland with the same argument – national security – as Vladimir Putin did with regard to Ukraine.

The facts are clear: Donald Trump has made a mockery of international law, that huge step forward that civilization took at the end of World War II, and at the same time has taken the time to divide his country as it has never been divided since the Civil War.

Donald Trump has indeed succeeded in pitting two Americas against each other and plunging what was once the most powerful of democracies into a clownish and brutal decline, with a president who demands that everything be renamed after him, where the press is attacked, immigrants’ children are hunted down as they leave school, vaccinations are devalued, and troops are sent into cities guilty of voting Democrat.

This is no longer freedom. This is no longer democracy.

That America is no longer our ally. Whether temporary or lasting, it is now our adversary, and we must say so because we can no longer allow the values we once shared to be debased, nor can we delay in organizing the countries that want to resist this step backwards. The battle will be tough, but Europe is asserting itself, and only Trump’s cowardice is as great as his obscenity.

Photo : Gage Skidmore @ Flickr