The end of the Veruca Salt President. What’s going to happen now in America?

Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who spotted it? In the first of Trump’s delusional rants to camera in denial of democratic reality, early in the morning after the election, he took to the microphone to claim victory and allege massive Democrat fraud, even as many States were still counting votes. Yet, before he said these extraordinary, constitution-destroying things, he began by talking about having to cancel the party that was all set to start, in his honour. The big showcase adorationfest with him as star guest, in front of fawning, adoring and maskless underlings. A place he loves to be. A place he must be if his entire self-concept is to function. 

It was striking. The four-year-old in action once more, tantrumming his way into ground zero of the election agenda and framing the entire situation around his upset at not being able to have a party in his own honour. That was his opener. To me, the rest of what he said just seemed like the typical psychological reaction of this broken man as he lashed out those trying to deny him the chance to bask, like the God he tells himself he is. Again. 

What happens now seems to me to depend a lot on which Trump we see in the next days and weeks. Trump has always been more Mussolini than Full-on Hitler, but a fresh batch of re-subtitled pieces of the Fuhrer-in-the-bunker-as-the-Russians-close-in masterpiece, Downfall  are already circulating. In the past, reworks of this scene (in which the remaining Generals are forced to give Hitler the news that the one phantom army he was counting on to hold back the oncoming Soviets was neither strong enough nor able to do anything) drew their comedy from transplanting the drama into ridiculously unrelated settings (I once saw one created for the market research industry). Now, the satirists need barely change the script.

We don't need to go Full Godwin to see parallels. Just as in Trump's White House, many of the Fuhrer's staff have started to flee. The remaining loyalists are so incriminated by the whole ghastly four years, have sunk so much personal cost into it all or are gripped by a self-deception so deep that they feel trapped in the suicidal delusion. In the movie, a small number try and get Hitler to face reality. He responds with psychopathic rage, blames the German people, the Generals…anyone but himself.

Soon after, Hitler shoots himself. His body is burned in the Reich Chancellery garden before the Red Army arrives. He could have escaped, just. Almost till the end, there were those urging him to flee to his (at that stage unoccupied) alpine redoubt at Berchtesgaden to fight on from there.

Will Trump do the political equivalent of putting a bullet in his own head, as the last vengeful act on an ungrateful nation of cheating Democrats? Leave the country maybe, blaming Mitt Romney, the lying media, big tech and the legacy of John McCain perhaps? The Final Tantrum directed at those who didn’t deserve him and wouldn’t give him his party?

Or is he going to his Berchtesgaden – Mar-A-Lago – to plan revenge?

There are many who see Trumpism as not the cause of America’s sickness, but a symptom of it. Princeton’s Eddie Glaude sums up why very powerfully here. He, and they are right. But the effect of the personality and particular psychopathy of Trump himself cannot be underestimated. The days of the inept Sarah Palin being expected to carry the banner for unrestrained bigotry are long gone and, for many – the Bannons, the Millers, the Gorkas, the Giulianis, Trump offered the final and vital piece in a bitter jigsaw. A man capable of saying and doing literally anything if it served his own greed or was in service of his own ego. A man energised by trying to remake a whole country in his own sordid image.

The defeat of movements such as the one Trump and his acolytes have created can only be started by political decapitation. Though Trump used - and was used by - a grim ethno nationalist and racist political movement, the person of Trump himself has come to embody so much that the process of healing and restoring the nation to sanity cannot begin unless he is removed from the public discourse completely. As his niece pointed out recently, his remarks following the election amount to nothing less than an attempted coup and there is no doubt that should he not self-destruct, Veruca Salt style, should the instinct to revenge take hold as it so often has within him, that he will focus attention on destroying any chances of Biden pulling America out of this mess. The aim will be to come back, full force, in 2024. To the Republican party he will hold out his personal ownership of the second-largest popular vote in US history, threatening to deny it to them if they don’t keep the faith. It will, of course, be all about him. Forget about him passing the baton to any of his reptilian sons. It doesn’t work like that.

How to respond to this, if this is what he does, will be the question of Biden’s Presidency. Long after the disaster of Covid is behind America, though that in itself is a colossal challenge, long after the economy has begun to recover, there will be Trump. Trump is quite capable of starting a civil war, from inside or outside the White House, and if his ego demands it, he would do so. Healing cannot begin until he is gone. That means jail.

This is a very fraught area of course. The King Across The Water can easily become The King in a State Correctional Facility, the People’s Martyr crucified by Biden’s mendacious Communists. Equally, if Biden’s administration becomes sucked into a quagmire of litigation against Trump, Trump will stay just where he wants to be – on the news channels and all over Fox, as part of a narrative of the Righteous Right versus the Demonic forces of a Democrat Presidency. 

But go to jail he must. You can’t even start to treat the national wound until you deal with the infection within it – Trump is that infection. Despite lawyers being able to pick from dozens of very promising actions against Trump, it makes most sense to go after him at State rather than Federal level. Biden should let the New York District Attorney’s office put Trump away for decades and try and rise above it. Restore some sense of separation of executive and judiciary, just as Trump tried to destroy it. Remember that eventually, after murdering dozens, Al Capone went to jail for tax offences.

Biden’s restraint thus far has been admirable. He has barely acknowledged the toddler in The White House playing with matches. If Trump takes the Berchtesgaden option, Biden will need all the patience and forbearance he can possibly muster in the next four years – in the face of provocation and incitement from the parallel universe of a Florida golf club for millionaires. We can only hope that the repair job of American society can at least begin to start. But this requires the most dangerous man ever to be US President to be put in prison, for many years.