What has become of Donald Trump?
His silence is killing me
By Daniel Alonso Viña
It has been 100 days since the president was suspended from Twitter and somewhat longer since he was forced to leave the presidency. The combination of these two events have plunged him into the mire of insignificance. Without his social loudspeaker and without his nuclear briefcase, the great Republican elephant has been left standing still and lost.
However, when the former president’s defeat was confirmed, everything augured the opposite. With incendiary campaigns like #StopTheSteal he managed to stir up part of the Republican electorate, and all his messages after the defeat were along the lines of “We’re not going anywhere.” The consequences of those last days persist (70% of Republican voters think the election was a fraud), but his deathly silence, together with the radical change of tone of the new President Joe Biden, has allowed a country that had normalized this state of permanent alert to turn the page.
An article in the NewYorkTimes reflects the different reactions in the post-Trump era. Some feel they have regained freedom: “I actually slept better with him off Twitter,” said Mario Marval, a 35-year-old program director and Air Force veteran who now lives in Cincinatti. “It allowed me to reflect on how all-consuming his presence had become.”
Others explain it in a more poetic tone: “It’s like living in a city choked with pollution, and suddenly one day you wake up and the sky is blue, the birds are singing and you can breathe fully and without toxics. So speaks Matt Leece, 29, a music teacher in Pennsylvania.
But not everyone shares these reflections: “I miss his strong, conservative voice on Twitter,” said Kelly Cobes, 39, a business manager in southern Wisconsin. “Other people have been allowed to have free speech and speak their mind, not banned,” she laments. Indeed, his supporters, who are not few in number, miss him. “We need President Trump back on Twitter,” wrote his sperpenetic lawyer Rudy Giuliani on the social network. The post accumulated more than 66,200 “likes” and 21,300 comments. More than a statement, it seems like a veiled plea. Many people had structured their personality around the president and now find themselves at a loss.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said on a radio show that even those who hated the president suffer a kind of withdrawal, their lives emptier now that Trump is no longer around to flaunt the role of villain who obscenely receives all their grievances. “A lot of people miss being able to go after him and talk about him every day,” he said. “We’re tribal beings and we want to choose our tribes, and Trump made that dividing line really easy to draw.” “What do you think of Biden’s infrastructure plan? That already requires more nuance, it’s not the same thing.”
Implicit — though rarely explicit — in all these columns circulating online about Donald Trump’s silence is the expectation of his return. No one wants to wake the beast, but, as Americans say, everyone speculates about his comeback. However, perhaps this comeback will not be as spectacular as we expect. George Conway, a Republican and anti-Trump lawyer (yes, there are still those left), says the former White House occupant “is not conducting himself in a logical and disciplined manner to carry out a plan.” “Instead, he’s trying to shout as loud as he can, but he doesn’t realize he’s in a basement, and his voice ends up sounding like a mouse squeaking.”
I have inadvertently depicted Trump as both an elephant and a mouse at the same time in this article. His manner reflects both personalities. Trump is the elephant that rampages through everything, but not as a result of bravery or courage, but as a result of the fear of a mouse fleeing in terror from reality. His truth disappears little by little, and he is forced to shout more and more in order not to listen and keep his sanity.
DAV
20.4.21
