He is the most powerful and the most dangerous. He is the world's public enemy number 1. His actions, his retrospective ideas, and his conceited attitudes are a slap in the face to humanity, and more specifically to what we have agreed to call the democratic West. If we had already lost faith in general progress (moral and factual), now, thanks to his work and grace, we are not only no longer progressing, but rather going backwards at forced marches. Straddling frivolity and cynicism, he has set the world collectively traveling in the opposite direction, at full speed, along the highway of history. He likes strong emotions, sharp turns, tough rivals, and implacable power. He despises losers, those who don't take risks, those who show weakness. He is the one who best exploits the era of indignation, nihilism, and tribalism.
You know who I'm talking about, of course: the illustrious and insufferable Donald Trump. He's someone I find more repugnant than a cockroach. My mother-in-law's caregiver would say he has a black soul. He's a human being with zero empathy for the vulnerable. A heartless man who flaunts his vileness, who obscenely exhibits a self-attributed and pathetic superiority. Shouting "kid, don't do a Trump!", children should be given an example in homes and schools of everything they shouldn't be, everything they shouldn't do: no schoolyard arrogance, no verbose spouting, some compassion...
He's public enemy number 1 in the fight against climate change (he's decreed a return to the age of oil), he's public enemy number 1 of feminist Me Too (he has a first lady who's a flamboyant figure). and a history of abuse towards women), he is public enemy number 1 of American democracy (he is eating it away with impunity from within: have we forgotten that he stormed the Capitol?), he is public enemy number 1 of culture and education (he has launched a crusade against academia, despises knowledge and advocates an indoctrinating and anti-pluralist basic education), he was public enemy number 1 in the fight against Covid ("he will leave in April, when the warm weather arrives," he frivolously claimed), he is public enemy number 1 of economic liberalism (he has become a furious nationalist protectionist), he is public enemy number 1 of meritocracy (he consciously prevents equal opportunities that would make it possible for everyone to develop their talent), he is public enemy number. 1 of international diplomacy and justice (he practices a return to the law of the strongest, is undermining the UN and the entire architecture built around it in the 20th century to combat nuclear danger, the spiral of war, and genocidal authoritarianism), he is public enemy number 1 of Europe (he feels an undisguised contempt for the Old Continent, too cultured and civilized, too universalist; without shame or filters, he is promoting the European far right), he is public enemy number 1 of Christian humanism (he talks a lot about God and acts devilishly against the weak and those who are different), he is public enemy number 1 of the nation of immigrants that he presides over (he practices an immigrant hunt that goes against the essence and success of the United States, against its capacity to attract talent and provide opportunities).
I already know what some of you are going to tell me: "But the people voted for him." Yeah, so what? This doesn't make the character or his capacity for political and social destruction any less serious. The Germans also voted for Hitler. Every era creates its monsters. In the 20th century, we had the mass murderers Hitler and Stalin. Now we have Trump and his colleagues Netanyahu and Putin—with the latter, he has a kind of love-hate relationship, the outcome of which we'll see. If in the 20th century, the United States asserted itself as an empire of freedom against the communist dictatorship of the USSR, now Trump is changing the script, seeing that the enemy is a China that has leaped from communism to authoritarian capitalism and is becoming the master of global trade. What is Trump's response? Boycott trade with a tariff war and prepare the United States internally for a less democratic regime that would be ruled, like China, by the whistle of a centralized superpower, by a strong leadership—his own.
