Trump’s small hands

Magazine The New Yorker publishes a drawing of Donald Trump on the cover with his arms outstretched, waiting for handcuffs to be placed on him, after being sentenced in a sober courtroom in lower Manhattan for buying the silence of a porn actress. The most eloquent detail is that they have drawn those small hands that Marco Rubio, a Republican rival in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination, made fun of with that “You know what they say about men with small hands…” . Well, for now, they serve to illustrate the dubious effect that the sentence can have on a man who has known how to strengthen himself by constructing the narrative of being a victim of a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing him.

Until now, most debates about American democracy focused on the resilience of its institutions in the face of a new Trump mandate. Do you remember that other cover of The Economist with the question: Is America dictator-proof? There are, however, two tests of democratic resistance that we are ignoring. The first, as already happened with Hillary Clinton, is the lack of suitability of the candidate in front of her. Although the jury’s unanimous decision on the facts proven at trial once again confirms that the tycoon is unfit for office, presenting the elderly and hesitant Biden on the other side does not seem the most sensible. Without pretending to be equidistance, American democracy today is experiencing a kind of cataclysm in its two major parties. The crack benefits demagogues and allows phenomena like MAGA, but also, and here is the second reflection, that the parties function with the logic of the movement. Remember that Trump claimed to lead “a movement like the world has never seen before.” Compared to the party, which represents interests, the movement offers a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves, fueling the conditions for total loyalty: “This is bigger than Trump, bigger than my presidency,” Trump has said of His sentence.

This fascist oratory allows him, curiously, to call democrats fascists, who will also present themselves as the saviors of democracy. It makes you want to paraphrase Rorty: you take care of the rules of the game, democracy will take care of itself. We focus so much on the strength of institutions that we forget what is happening to us, the citizens. The influence of public opinion on democratic quality is a phenomenon demonstrated since Tocqueville. Trump is the one who said “It’s not raining” during his inauguration and many people closed their umbrellas; who pointed out that he could stand on Fifth Avenue, shoot someone and not lose any votes, and he did indeed win the election. Saying that the ruling provides valuable elements so that citizens can form an informed opinion and elect their representatives with knowledge of the facts implies ignoring the fact that our democracies are no longer on that screen: we citizens are not. Emotions, loyalty to the leader, mental rigidity fostered by social networks, ideological conformism, weigh much more in our political judgment than the facts themselves. Samantha Rose Hill says that belonging to a movement closes our minds in such a literal sense that the mind stops moving. Because when you lose the ability to think, moving away from yourself, “you are more likely to be carried away by the tide.”