A Shame and a Woe and a President in the Dock

On 21 January 2017 a knitted pink hat became a global symbol of female solidarity and the power of collective action. Known as the Pussyhat it was worn by many of the half a million people who took part in the Women’s March in Washington DC.

Some commentators on Trump’s criminal indictment stress how sad this is for the U.S. that one of their presidents should be taken into custody, photographed for mug shots, fingerprinted and arraigned — how bad it makes the country look in the eyes of the world. But the fact of the matter is that this was an utterly sad, indeed tragic, situation from the start.

Every single day Trump inhabited the Oval Office and formally represented the nation constituted a degradation, insult and injury to the United States.

The minute the serial miscreant descended the elevator and announced his foul malformed intentions, his execrable nomination by the Republicans, his reprehensible campaign and his utterly nonsensical election to the highest office in the land and the most powerful seat in the world it was to weep. It was to wail in the street and heap ashes upon one’s head for shame like biblical Tamar after her rape by her sick brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13). It was abomination, an atrocity. It was a crime.

This episode was reprehensible, a travesty — the image of the U.S.’s elevation of Trump to presidential office and his inevitable fall can’t possibly garner more scorn, more dread, more opprobrium globally than it already has — than it did every day of his misbegotten reign of calumny. When he ‘scolded’ the NATO summit and revealed his atrocious ignorance of the organization’s role — or history, or purposes, or structuring, or workings — dozens of delegates from the European democracies looked at each other and laughed — beyond embarrassment for him or for America — just genuinely gobsmacked at the man’s idiocy.

When he had no idea why he and his perfectly oblivious First Lady were going to Hawaii to mark commemorative services at Pearl Harbor, his Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had to explain it all to him. He didn’t know! Which effectively meant that he had no idea how or why the U.S. ever even entered WWII.

When he was pressured to travel to the graves of American WWI dead in France during the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I he resisted as he feared the bad weather would mess up his hair. He also felt the cemetery was, in his estimation, “filled with losers,” and that the nearly 2,000 Marines buried there were “suckers” for…