The US president's exaggerated individualism remains a romantic excrescence, a counterfigure halfway between the misfit, the satanist, and the man of genius, taken to an involuntary and grotesque self-caricature. If he knew who Caspar David Friedrich was, Trump would imagine himself as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the painting of a man with his back to the top of a mountain in front of a cloudy sky that for many is the icon of the romantic individual. Although in reality, and if he knew who Goya was, he and his demented executive (Elon Musk, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem) are more like an engraving by the Spanish artist titled They are hot, from the series of Whims: We see gluttonous monks, with cadaverous heads and wild, wide-open mouths, obscenely and stupidly gobbling up their bowls of soup. Applied to Trumpist policies, this imagery translates like this: if Trump loses the election, he instigates an assault on the Capitol—a coup d'état—and then manages to emerge judicially unscathed. If he wins, upon completing his hundredth day in office, he delivers a speech in which he once again challenges the entire world, after having claimed that the governments of every state are kissing his ass. With his spoiled-child rudeness and insecure ego, Trump represents the failure of romanticism, just as his deep-throated capitalism represents the failure of politics and liberal democracy.
Logically, the Trumpists out there represent minor but palpable failures: Vox is the consequence of the PP's failure to establish itself as the main force of the Spanish right (it briefly achieved this during the rise of Aznarism), while the Catalan Alliance represents the agonizing extreme of the fray. Agonizing and ridiculous, although with significant electoral prospects in the short and medium term, if it manages to make a dent—and it seems it will, according to the polls—among those disenchanted with Junts. The intellectuals who try to portray themselves as bad guys by acting as local Trumpists personify the failure of a couple of curricula and a certain generational expectation, but that was already there.
They also have the avaricious and greedy tics of their reference, the gluttony of the Goya-esque frarotes: the Court of Auditors has just imposed a fine of almost nine hundred thousand euros on Vox for irregular financing, and also detected, in a first examination in Aliança Catalana, donations and bank transactions that did not comply with electoral regulations, during the municipal elections that led Sílvia Orriols to become mayor of Ripoll, which exceeded the permitted limit. Retail Trumpism, Mr. Esteve's Trumpism or meson Spanish on a winter Sunday afternoon, before or after visiting the brothel. These are the alternative governments being prepared in Spain and Catalonia, and they have—just like their inspiration—a chance of success.
