Goodbye Trump

 In 1929, René Magritte painted The Betrayal of Images. A simple image, of a pipe, with a caption written below that said, “this is not a pipe”. When one sees it, one cannot help smiling half mockingly, knowing that the intention is to generate some sort of cognitive dislocation for a few seconds, until your conscience recovers and says to itself “obviously, that it is a pipe”.

On Wednesday the 6th of January, in Washington DC, a mob loyal to Trump stormed the Capitol, convinced there was massive fraud. They wanted to write on the electoral certificates of each of the States of the Union "this is not an election." The public experienced some form of massive cognitive dissonance. How could a certified, audited process, not mean that the president-elect was Joseph Biden? This time though, there was no smile, but rather a feeling of anxious apprehension. The image of a mass of people living alternative realities and acting accordingly had a chilling effect.

The attack on the Capitol ended a presidency that systematically tried to discredit common sense and puncture the confines of the reasonable. It attempted to falsify the correct representation of the facts and blur the boundaries that separate the real from the unreal. Its most terrifying project was to prove that, eventually, truth can be overridden, substituted. That belief could trump evidence in decision making, and that power can create alternative realities that mobilize and generate violence.

For four years that aberration undermined the bases of the country's political and social cohesion, with serious consequences when facing the pandemic and climate change, among other realities. The “post-truth" culture was enabled by the president’s lack of a moral compass.  We are all aware that the boundaries that divide the true from the false are sometimes difficult to clearly identify, but in this case, there was a malicious intent in the handling of such ambiguities. There was no will to responsibly determine what could be an honest conclusion, despite the gaps in the information. That moral foundation was lost with Trump.

However, the moral compass of the leader would not have been able to cause so much harm if it were not for his followers. During the four years of Trump's presidency, we saw how the Republican Party was given in to a personality cult, its leaders and base endorsed that behavior. Attitudes so close to the famous folk tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which no one dared to say that the emperor had no clothes. Nor can one forget the obsequiousness of the "ideological apparatuses'' that supported him, the Fox network and so many other media that dedicated themselves to echoing the Trumpian imaginary.

All this happened in the brave new world of social networks, where everyone finds moments of glory and fame. Where everyone can reaffirm their illusions, and nobody edits the content. The “realDonaldTrump” twitter created and recreated realities, while a mosaic of strange subgroups retouched them with their own supremacist, evangelical, anti-vaccine, natalist, anti-immigrant, militia stamp. There was an arrogant reversal of civility, brandishing weapons, calling for the wall to be built, while the fossil fuel industry, unscrupulous investment funds, the military industrial complex, and others reaped the profits.

On Wednesday the 6th of January 2021, the manipulation of the truth lost a battle, but the war continues. The four years of siege could not bring down the institutions. Officials, professionals, journalists, citizens, people of science, individuals with criteria and moral strength did more and better. The question is if this was the beginning of the end, or if it is only a pause until the next, more terrifying, season begins.