RIP DJT

Donald Trump, Who Presided Over the Chaotic But Ultimately Quite Entertaining Dismantling of American Global Hegemony, Is Dead at 84

November 31, 2030

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States who claimed credit for a period of unprecedented peacetime economic growth and enjoyed no other substantive policy achievements, died in his home at Trump Tower, the post-modern architectural masterpiece that many consider to be the most beautiful building in New York City, on Friday evening. His death followed a violent tumble down the escalator in the lobby of Trump Tower, the site where he famously announced his candidacy for President of the United States in 2015. He was 84. Mr. Trump is survived by his children Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron, and his estranged third wife, Melania, whose whereabouts have been unknown since the spring of 2021, though she is not currently presumed deceased.

Mr. Trump, a Republican, was a transitional figure in the White House, guiding the nation from a period of imperial overreach, staggering inequality, and pervasive but easily dismissed racial discord, to one which saw the wholesale dismantling of trust in the federal government, broad based international humiliation, and an all-purpose solipsistic rot take hold of the American body politic in slightly less than four years. The Trump years, to many on the left often seemed to be a “coming undone” of the norms that had previously constrained American political life, while to those on the right, the era represented a thrilling return to an idealised moment in American history where practically socialistic government intervention guaranteed prosperity for a narrow cross section of bland heterosexual white men and no one else, while also encouraging them to view their ill-gotten economic gains and near-total cultural supremacy as the product of some inherent personal virtuousness. For the approximately forty percent of the country who remained in thrall to Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, the opportunity to understand their bleak lives and personal mediocrity through a prism of grievance and cheap, bedazzled patriotism proved irresistible, while the rest of the country, largely prosperous liberal enclaves that had somehow benefited from a grotesquely unequal economic order, thrilled to the opportunity to engage in an epochal battle against tyranny while still enjoying ample leisure time, steadily increasing economic gains, and the ability to cultivate elaborate personal wellness practices.

Scandal-plagued and truth-averse from the start, Mr. Trump’s presidency was decidedly unorthodox when compared to his predecessor’s, yet entirely consistent with the blustering, dick swinging managerial style with which he had run the Trump Organisation for more than four decades. One of only four sitting presidents to be impeached, Mr. Trump emerged from that ordeal unscathed, somehow consigning what should have been the battle of his political life to a curious, infrequently remarked upon, and utterly inconsequential footnote in his personal biography. Though a political outsider for the majority of his life, in his disregard for truth, his rampant personal corruption, and his titanic ego, Mr. Trump was in some senses the most natural of politicians, and a quintessentially American one at that. 

Squandered Fortunes, Boundless Chances

Born into privilege — albeit the gaudy, striving, tacky-tacky, outer-borough sort — in 1946, Mr. Trump was the fourth child of Fred and Maryanne Trump. The elder Mr. Trump was a successful real estate developer while Mrs. Trump was a stay-at-home mother who chafed at the constraints of post-war domesticity but nonetheless could never have imagined that her absentee parenting style would have resulted in low-grade Hiterlian trauma in her youngest son. 

While both parents expressed open and perhaps justified disdain for all of their children, Maryanne’s ire was particularly trained on Donald. She only ever very thinly disguised her disdain for the child whom she felt, according to a diary entry from the early 1950s “lacks morals, lacks principles, but most damningly of all lacks any interest. I’m bored by him…except for when he’s pleading for my love and affection, but even then, the appeal is rather short-lived.” 

Maryanne mocked and needled Mr. Trump relentlessly about numerous issues. Throughout his adolescence, Mrs. Trump repeatedly forced a young Mr. Trump to strip naked while she critiqued his appearance and obsessively editorialised his development of secondary sexual characteristics — or, by her characterisation “the very marked lack thereof.” Mrs. Trump was known to mock and jeer at her youngest son for any number of reasons, but perhaps the most frequent target of her ire was the appearance of the young Mr. Trump’s genitals, which she would characterise to her friends, her husband’s colleagues, her son’s schoolmates — really anyone who would listen — as “strangely bulbous on top with a thin, listing stem…like a foul little fungus you’d notice on the forest floor and instinctively crush to mulch with your heel so that no one else would ever have to look at it” — a description that entirely aligns with the accounts of adult film actor Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford who famously likened Mr. Trump’s genitalia to “Toad,” the squat, non-verbal anthropomorphic mushroom character made famous by Nintendo’s “Super Mario” video game series. 

Though the general nature of the late Mrs. Trump’s unloving and even cruel treatment of her son had been hinted at for decades, a more complete revelation of her behavior was only made public in recent years, and when it was, it provoked an outpouring of sympathy and armchair psycho-analysing that ultimately served to launder Mr. Trump’s reputation, and to broadly affirm in the American psyche, that women — even mothers — are uniquely dangerous, unpredictable, and on some level, at the root of every serious societal ill.

A Young Man of Extraordinary Mediocrity

Mr. Trump came of age during a starkly different era in American history, one that was marked by its lavish rewarding of lowest common denominator non-achievement — namely, that of white men. Mr. Trump, writing in his 2024 autobiography “Huge Presidency, Small Government” characterised the era thusly: “in 1970 when I first started out in real estate, you would go to the office and just kind of sit there until something happened. Most days someone would come into your office and ask about something, or maybe your phone would ring a few times, or there’d be a meeting about something, but really, in terms of what we were actually doing, day to day? It was kind of nothing. At least nothing that you couldn’t shunt off to the next day, or the next, or the one after that. And if someone specifically requested something that they had previously asked of you, you could just blame your secretary for not giving you the file, and then the whole song and dance would start over again. But since we all had a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” that everyone would keep doing the same type and volume of nothing, it sort of ended up becoming something? I don’t know. I’m sure my secretaries had something real to do. And the janitorial staff. Good folks. Decent folks.”

With a natural showman’s flare, Mr. Trump quickly leveraged his father’s immense wealth and industry connections to pursue a series of headline-grabbing, money-haemorrhaging real estate development deals that would have substantially blighted the New York City skyline had the vast majority of them not imploded due to Mr. Trump’s egregious mismanagement. All the same, in scarcely more than a decade, Mr. Trump succeeded in elevating himself in the popular imagination to the idea of a successful real estate magnate, if not the thing itself, a move that would have a brilliantly post-modern gesture had it been undertaken with any degree of self-awareness or self-effacement. But as it was, Mr. Trump became a totem of Reagan-era America: a chintzy, ersatz “billionaire,” whose sole concrete accomplishment was playing himself in a string of lowbrow comedies that dominated the box office for a brief period in the late 1980’s.

Soul Searching and Pu**y Grabbing

Following four bankruptcies, two failed marriages, and a steadily diminishing streams of films and television shows in which to make a cameo as himself, by the end of the 1990’s, Mr. Trump found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life with no clear path forward, and with that, the opportunity to take stock of what his life had amounted to — and to consider what it might yet become. But instead of engaging in any meaningful introspection, Mr. Trump occupied himself by harassing, groping, and raping literally dozens of women, including, at least in a sense, his own daughter, who was then, and remained for many years, a frequent target of his bizarre, leering objectification. It was also around this time that Mr. Trump first meaningfully arrived on the American political radar when, in the year 2000, he publicly toyed with running for president on the Reform party ticket, an opportunity that he ultimately passed over in favour of pursuing his fifth and sixth bankruptcies and licensing his name to poorly made consumer goods, pyramid schemes, and mail order steaks. 

An initial supporter of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008, Mr. Trump ultimately soured on Mr. Obama late in his first term upon realising that disseminating patently false conspiracy theories about America’s first Black president to a gullible and immiserated audience via conservative cable news programming was perhaps his only remaining viable career path. This realisation would prove to be a sort of “a-ha!” moment for Mr. Trump that would lead him to seriously consider pursuing the presidency, while the ongoing appeal of his grotesquely racist and fact-free ramblings would arguably be the thing that most helped him secure it. To a nation accustomed to politicians from both sides of the aisle speaking in cheap platitudes and papering over deep structural issues with vague allusions to America’s inherent greatness, albeit absent any evidence, Mr. Trump’s brash, combative, deranged, and largely incoherent fourth-grade level oratorical stylings proved irresistible, not to mention deeply familiar to a broad swath of the American public. 

Mr. Trump’s eventual run for the presidency in 2016 as the Republican Party nominee, and his ultimate victory over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, were both understood at the time as deeply improbable flukes, rather than as the inevitable byproduct of one major American political party transforming into an agglomeration of lobbyists who have perused “The Fountainhead” once or twice, and the other committing to the non-existent policy goals of anti-charismatic septuagenarian patricians in perpetuity. With the gift of a decade’s hindsight, it’s now clear that Mr. Trump’s ascension to the presidency was both the culmination of a certain confluence of forces, long in the offing, and the beginning of new and unprecedented chapter in American political life. It is also abundantly clear that Mrs. Clinton was then and remains today oddly unlikeable in a way that no one can explain and even fewer people care to honestly interrogate — a woman both far too much, and somehow, never quite enough.

A Long Shadow, Widely Cast

Broad and sturdy, but still markedly lithe and lean, standing at six feet two inches, Mr. Trump cut an imposing silhouette and was imbued with an undeniable sexual charisma that most women found irresistible. Though he was the very image of a true American sportsman, Mr. Trump avoided any form of strenuous exercise, in accordance with his belief that human beings are born with a finite amount of “energy” and vigorous physical activity needlessly depletes these reserves — a theory and a practice that has enjoyed steadily increasing popularity among many Americans in recent years.

Though astonishingly energetic and virile, Mr. Trump was hardly invincible. After a youth characterised by enormous vigour and considerable athletic achievement in spite of his largely sedentary lifestyle, in his senior year of college, Mr. Trump was abruptly stricken with shin splints: a chronic and debilitating condition that he would privately grapple with for the rest of his life. This tragic development robbed Mr. Trump of the eagerly-sought opportunity to serve his country during the Vietnam war, and left him with an altered but highly distinctive gait: a sort of slow, plodding shuffle that most simply understood as a manifestation of Mr. Trump’s innate masculine elegance. In but one of many instances of astonishing resilience and resolve throughout his life, Mr. Trump cannily transformed his disability into a charming and highly distinctive personal signature that added considerably to his graceful but masculine mien.

Following this early misfortune, Mr. Trump’s steely constitution rewarded him with a nearly unblemished track record of perfect health for the rest of his adult life, a streak that was only once interrupted by a mild case of seasonal flu that Mr. Trump contracted after a chance encounter with the notoriously slovenly and ill-kempt comedian Rosie O’Donnell at New York’s La Grenouille restaurant in the winter of 2006.

Just the Flu, Folks!

This run of uninterrupted good health was however tragically arrested in October 2020, when Mr. Trump inexplicably contracted COVID-19 following a small, socially-distanced outdoor gathering to celebrate the nomination of judge Amy Coney-Barrett to the Supreme Court. In just one of the countless instances of perverse irony to emerge from the waning days of the Trump presidency, Justice Coney-Barrett, the guest of honour, was in fact the only attendee that day who succeeded in avoiding illness or death. 

Though initially a mild case, Mr. Trump’s health rapidly deteriorated after his diagnosis, a dizzying turn of events that threw the White House — and the nation — into disarray. Mr. Trump’s abrupt decline was initially characterised by the president’s physicians as “medically impossible given [his] objectively perfect physical condition,” though they subsequently conceded that the president may have been sicker than initially thought, while still maintaining that it was an extremely mild case, “as are all COVID-19 cases” they helpfully reminded the American public. Upon being admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Mr. Trump’s condition seemingly stabilised, though a miasma of contradiction and misinformation also emerged from his team of physicians, a trend which admittedly seemed to stalk Mr. Trump in all arenas of his life, in spite of his deeply disciplined managerial style. At one point, attending physician Dr. Sean Conley provided an update where he explained that Mr. Trump’s vitals showed the president fully recovered and in possession of the immune system of a teenage male, but then, only hours later, Dr. Conley was forced to issue a statement of retraction, admitting that his team had confused the president’s blood and urine samples with that of his fourteen year-old son, Barron, explaining “there’s a lot going on right now.”

Mr. Trump’s hospitalisation followed a particularly scandal plagued week, even by the standards of his life and administration, leading many commentators on the left to speculate that his illness was being overplayed, or perhaps even manufactured outright in a bid to win sympathy and detract from the revelations that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in recent years, and that Mrs. Trump hated both Christmas and children. And while these revelations, coupled with Mr. Trump’s shambolic first debate performance opposite Vice President Joe Biden (an episode subsequently revealed to be a temporary bout of psychosis that resulted from consuming seventeen Diet Cokes on an empty stomach during debate prep) were widely touted in the press as disastrous and even disqualifying setbacks for Mr. Trump’s re-election chances, these conspiratorial theories quieted once it was revealed that nearly every person in the president’s immediate orbit contracted the virus, and a broad consensus emerged that neither Mr. Trump nor anyone around him was disciplined enough to pull off a deception of this, or frankly any scale. 

Throughout the early days of his ordeal, Mr. Trump laboured to offer reassurances to the nation that he was still able to faithfully execute the office of the presidency. After an unprecedented twenty-four hour period where the president was neither seen nor heard from in any capacity, the fears of an alternately nervous public were put to rest upon the release of images and video footage that showed the Mr. Trump diligently attending to the usual matters of state, such as signing his name to blank pieces of paper and riding in a hermetically sealed motorcade to greet the members of the accidental death cult that had emerged in his name. 

Yet this relative return to normalcy was to be tragically short-lived. On the sixth day following his initial diagnosis, Mr. Trump’s health took an abrupt turn for the worse. While watching a segment on an unspecified cable news channel that detailed plummeting polling numbers for his re-election bid, Mr. Trump reportedly grew irate, which caused his heart rate to dramatically spike, only to abruptly fall moments later, at which point he lost consciousness. Throughout the rest of the day, despite the valiant efforts of his team of physicians, Mr. Trump remained unconscious, and his blood oxygen levels began to drop precipitously. After hours of tireless efforts to revive Mr. Trump, near midnight, the heart-rending decision was made by Mr. Trump’s wife Melania — also afflicted with COVID-19, though asymptomatic — to place the president into a medially-induced coma.

Mr. Trump’s sudden illness set into motion an unprecedented crisis less than thirty days before the scheduled general election, one that saw a dizzying succession of four different individuals assume the powers the presidency over an ensuing 120 day period. Upon receiving news of Mr. Trump’s incapacitation, Vice President Mike Pence immediately assumed the responsibilities of the the presidency, promising a panicked and fearful public to be a faithful shepherd during a time of enormous tumult. Though his quiet, stolid disposition did much to calm the nerves of an addled nation in that moment of acute crisis, and while his ascension to the presidency seemed to many to be a welcome salve for the scandal-plagued administration of his immediate predecessor, Mr. Pence’s tenure as commander-in-chief was to be cut short by a brewing scandal of his own. 

A Vice President, Bound For Scandal

On the morning of October 31, video footage surfaced that seemed to show the Vice President as party to an extra-marital erotic congress (colloquially known as a “throuple”) with the Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr., and his wife, Becki. In the approximately forty three minute video, Mr. Pence first engaged in a variety of light sado-masochistic play with the Falwells, then subsequently acted as the receptive partner for a group of young men, later identified as members of the maintenance staff at the upscale Miami Hotel where the footage took place(a position and practice often referred to as a “cum dump”). As soon as the first unidentified gentleman arrived in the hotel suite, Mr. Pence, already loosely bound with Mrs. Falwell’s undergarments and lying face-first on the bed, “presented” himself to the strangers, seemingly with great enthusiasm. Throughout what can only be characterised as a thrilling but unsanitary fracas, Mr. Pence could be heard remarking variations of the phrase “I am just a hole sir” — though his words were often muffled by the rolled up dress socks that Mr. Falwell had placed into his mouth as something of a makeshift ball gag prior to the arrival of the first gentleman. At the conclusion of the video, Mrs. Falwell memorably remarked that [Pence] had been “rode hard and put away wet,” a characterisation that the Vice President seemed to non-verbally concur with through a rather graphic redistribution of the group’s accumulated emissions. 

Quickly confirmed to be authentic, the fall-out from the release of this video footage was swift and complete. At the urging of his aides and his wife Karen “Mother” Pence, Mr. Pence, shame-faced but also somehow lighter in bearing and sporting an undeniable post-coital glow, resigned his office at midnight on November 1, 2020, thus clearing the way for Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, to assume the presidency merely two days before the scheduled general election on November 3, 2020. 

Though Mr. Pence earned much deserved ire from both conservative and liberal factions for the depth and shamelessness of his lifelong hypocrisy, in a curious example of unintended consequences, following these revelations, his approval ratings actually starkly rose among younger voters, a trend which has culminated in recent years in Mr. Pence’s ascension to something of a Gen Z folk hero, a role that he has since embraced with considerable zeal and verve. 

Arguably, this chaotic episode in American history had the potential to be a far more acute emergency, and likely would have descended into a full-scale constitutional crisis had more Republican senators and members of congress been present to object to or otherwise challenge Speaker Pelosi’s ascension to the presidency. But as it was, fully one-third of Republican legislators were at that time incapacitated with, or deceased as a result of COVID-19, and thus were unable to mount any serious or sustained objections to Ms. Pelosi’s assumption of the presidency.  

A Woman, President?

Ms. Pelosi’s short-lived tenure as President was, perhaps unsurprisingly, contentious and broadly unpopular. A clear, bipartisan majority expressed disapproval of her performance as president, with voters citing most often “I don’t know, there’s just something about her that I find difficult to like.” Though in fairness and in deference to Ms. Pelosi, it should be noted that a similarly sized segment of voters did commend the colour and texture of her so-called “rich lady” hair, while also expressing approval of her deft mixing-and-matching of bold jewel-tone patterns and prints. 

All the same, Ms. Pelosi proved to be an entirely adequate custodian of government at a time when what the country arguably needed most was a stern but still sexually viable women to shepherd it back to sanity. And so she did: on November 3, 2020, the American voting public delivered victory, albeit slimly, to the Democratic Biden-Harris ticket, and on January 20, 2021, president-elect Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-eighth president of the United States. And with that, a much speculated-upon transfer of power was completed peacefully, and without incident, albeit under a most exceptional and unprecedented set of circumstances.

But like his two immediate predecessors, Mr. Biden’s presidency was to be short lived — indeed, it would come to stand as the shortest presidency in American history. Upon completing the oath of office and returning to the White House — a journey of fifteen minutes that was, for Mr. Biden, the symbolic journey of a lifetime — the newly elected president reportedly sat down behind the Resolute desk, performed what he later referred to as a “gut check” and in his own words, “simply thought better of it.” He then made the astonishing decision to cede the presidency to his Vice President, Kamala Harris less than four hours into his term. 

In his infamous “Here’s the Deal, Folks” address that aired to the nation that evening, Mr. Biden began to explain to the American public that he could not, in good conscience, accept the enormous responsibility of the presidency on account of a mild but persistent case of narcolepsy, but mid-way through his heartfelt address, he became confused and disoriented by an admittedly clunky mixed metaphor, and his aides abruptly cut the live feed. Several hours later, Ms. Harris took the oath of office surrounded by a collection of entertainment and tech industry friends and well-wishers, the momentous event live streamed on Ms. Harris’ personal instagram account. With that, she became the second female president in American history in as many months: a historic feat that engendered a national mood best described as “sure; okay; whatever.” 

Though this moment of protracted upheaval ultimately settled into the kind of bland, numb, centrist resignation that the country was well-accustomed to, there remained for many Americans the looming fear of Mr. Trump awakening to contest the election results, or to somehow attempt to wrest the powers of the presidency away from Ms. Harris. Yet this scenario would ultimately not come to pass — Mr. Trump did not emerge from his coma for another year, finally awakening on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2022, by which Time Ms. Harris’ boldly incremental policy agenda was well underway, and the nation had by and large simply moved on. 

A New World, An Old President

Upon emerging from his nearly fourteen-month coma, Mr. Trump found himself occupying a vastly different world than the one he had last known. No longer president, his party swept from power, his closest aides in jail or in exile, and served with divorce papers by his estranged wife, Mr. Trump surely must have felt as though the world, as he knew it, had ended. And indeed, in a sense, it had.

In the time that he had been incapacitated, the Justice Department, at the behest of Attorney General Elizabeth Warren, had embarked upon a massive effort to ferret out the most egregious instances of criminality among his cabinet, colleagues, and even his immediate family. Though Ms. Warren had tried valiantly in that time to make some — or any — charges stick to Mr. Trump, ultimately this proved to be a quixotic quest, and she eventually conceded that Mr. Trump was, by virtue of his complex network of fall-guys, plausible deniability, and idiocy, in effect, “unprosecutable.” “Honestly; I’ve got to hand it to Donald. He’s good at what he does” Ms. Warren conceded during a subsequent press conference in which a buffet of nearly four dozen other indictments were announced, implicating numerous high-ranking Trump administration officials and Trumpworld hangers-on, including — most sensationally — Mr. Trump’s three adult children, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. 

Of the many high-profile convictions that Ms. Warren secured throughout the eight months of what came to be referred to as “Nuremberg on the Potomac with JUVÉDERM®,” perhaps the most infamous — and troubling — case was that of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, who, facing near-certain conviction on a raft of charges that all but guaranteed life in prison, disappeared suddenly in what national security experts now agree was an expertly orchestrated faking of his own death: a complex scheme that bore a more-than-coincidental degree of similarity to the boating accident featured in the 1991 Julia Roberts erotic thriller “Sleeping With the Enemy.” Though numerous reports have emerged in the years since suggesting that Mr. Kushner has in fact been living in Riyadh as the lover and informal co-regent of King Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, these reports have never been conclusively verified.

A Political Dynasty, Interrupted

As late as the autumn of 2020, Mr. Trump’s political legacy seemed secure: if not through a second term himself, it seemed likely that one of his adult children could or would successfully pick up the torch of Trumpism, buttressed by their natural attention-seeking tendencies, unmoored approach to morality, and ability to speak in largely complete and grammatically correct sentences. Yet this emerging political dynasty was not to be. 

Ivanka Trump, perhaps at one point the likeliest candidate to carry on her father’s political project, is currently serving her eighth year of a fifteen year sentence for fraud, racketeering and a bunch of other shit at the Danbury women’s correctional facility in Connecticut, and seems disinclined to (and is perhaps constitutionally barred from) ever seeking elected office. When reached for comment, Ms. Trump’s representatives at United Talent Agency provided the Times with the following statement: “Ms. Trump is heartbroken over the loss of her beloved and devoted father. But even in the depths of her immense personal grief, Ms. Trump’s focus remains, as ever, keenly trained on developing tools and platforms to allow girls and women to reach their fullest potential. With this life-long mission of female empowerment in mind, Ms. Trump is thrilled to announce her forthcoming endeavour “GirlBox” — a cross-disciplinary experiential platform and next-generation digital content aggregator conceived in partnership with acclaimed businesswoman, environmental activist, tireless advocate, and fellow federal inmate, Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Mr. Trump’s two youngest children, daughter Tiffany from his second marriage to Marla Maples, and son Barron, from his third marriage to Melania Trump are also both currently facing jail time, albeit not for charges stemming from their father’s business interests or administration. The younger Ms. Trump was arrested last year and is awaiting trial in what she is now claiming to be a case of mistaken identity with a Tampa-area real estate agent, while this summer, the younger Mr. Trump was arrested and charged with battery and assault following a violent altercation with his then-fiancée, the hospitality impresario Lindsay Lohan, with whom he had a brief but highly publicised May-December romance this year (though the couple broke up in early November).

Though many political commentators, not to mention much of the American public, expected Mr. Trump to swiftly return to his old ways upon recovering from his ordeal, the man that emerged was, in many senses, a profoundly changed one. Though still frequently inflamed by perceived slights from former president Barack Obama, Mr. Trump was notably far more willing to reach across the aisle to forge common ground with old political rivals — arguably as much an act of genuflection as an expression of his ideological leanings being entirely tethered to the dictates of his ego. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s post-presidential rolodex would come to include a staggeringly wide array of former foes from across the political spectrum. 

Of the many surprising and unlikely friendships that arose in Mr. Trump’s post-presidential life, perhaps the most commented upon was that which emerged between Mr. Trump and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Following Mr. Trump’s reemergence into public life, a chance encounter on Larry Ellison’s yacht spawned an unexpected reconciliation among the three, and both former presidents, along with Mrs. Clinton, managed to find much common ground in their love of sudoku, their frequent abstention from alcohol, and their shared memories from the many trips made to the vacation home of a since-deceased mutual friend in the US Virgin Islands in the early 2000’s.

In response to the news of Mr. Trump’s passing, Mrs. Clinton had this to say: “while Donald and I had numerous disagreements over the years that we were unafraid to air out in public to wildly un-constructive ends, what in the end ultimately united us was our shared conviction that America will always benefit from the permanent hegemony of a natural ruling class. I’ll be forever grateful for the unlikely friendship that has emerged over the past few years, built on a foundation of mutual trust, respect, and disdain for the working classes. For all of his flaws, foibles, and rough edges, no one can ever say that Donald was anything other than quintessentially American. God bless him, and God bless America for making a man like him possible.”

But the most notable instance of bipartisan grace in Mr. Trump’s post-presidential life was undoubtedly his shocking, unplanned endorsement of Ms. Harris during her 2024 presidential bid — a stunning ideological flip-flop that reportedly resulted from Ms. Harris’ ironical complimenting of his “innate sense of comic timing” at the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was arguably Mr. Trump’s ringing endorsement that handed Ms. Harris’ her decisive re-election in 2024, although the implosion of her Republican challenger, Senator Mitt Romney’s campaign following a widely circulated meme that depicted Mr. Romney as an adorable but accident-prone white-pawed kitten named “Mittens” surely also contributed to her historic margin of victory. 

An Unlikely Successor

In her second term, with Mr. Trump’s imprimatur and by extension the support of the approximately forty percent of the country still in thrall to his inchoate ramblings, Ms. Harris was free to pursue her most daring progressive policy priorities, a project that was unfortunately arrested and then undone by the — for lack of a better term — “Bolshevist insurrection” mounted on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. That weekend, the so-called “Squad” attempted to nationalise a Walmart Supercenter in Fayetteville, North Carolina — a chaotic imbroglio that Ms. Harris handily put down by sending in five thousand troops to restore order to the already-beleaguered suburban enclave. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez later tried to explain away the terrifying events as a “thought experiment gone awry” but nevertheless, the shock of this incident decisively shook the political left out of its socialistic fever dream, and returned the country firmly to its natural pragmatic centre. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, to her credit, did eventually admit that supply chain management was “harder than she had expected,” and conceded that it was probably best to “leave [it] to the market — and the men!” 

With the spectre of communistic tyranny hanging over the country, President Harris, under the close advisement of Mr. Trump, executed a sharp rightward turn in her policy agenda, which, in keeping with the template of governance provided by the past five decades of Republican rule, simply involved doing nothing and arranging photo ops in the Oval Office with credibly accused sex offenders. “Well Donald, I guess you were right!” gushed Ms. Harris at the time, a compliment that was returned in kind by Mr. Trump’s effusive characterisation of Ms. Harris as a “hugely effective leader,”a “helluva negotiator,” and “really quite attractive, if I’m being totally honest with you.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Harris’ era-defining rallying cry of “Moving Forward, Feasibly!” electrified a nation yearning for plausible half-measures that neither pleased nor benefitted anyone, but seemed somehow inevitable, and in that sense, correct and appropriate. For the remainder of her second term, President Harris widely won plaudits for this steady, assertive, yet entirely non-committal brand of centrist politics — “the balm for a weary country yearning for a return to decency, a return to decorum, and a return to the affectless recitation of focus group-tested platitudes” as the activist and civil rights icon Angela Davis so aptly put it in an interview last year. 

A Legacy, In Flux

In many senses, the years immediately following Mr. Trump’s presidency served as both a decisive rejection of his vision for America, and as a resounding validation of some of his gravest warnings about the perils facing the country. While Mr. Trump’s legacy is surely contentious and contested, what cannot be denied is that the nation now finds itself, in ways large and small, bearing Mr. Trump’s imprint — and will for many years to come. And while we will undoubtedly grapple with the precise contours of Mr. Trump’s influence for generations, possibly forever, the scope and scale of his impact is, to borrow one of Mr. Trump’s favourite turns of phrase, huge. 

Perhaps the most significant achievement of Mr. Trump’s presidency lies not in any one specific policy goal, or even in the epochal shifting of political and cultural mores that his presidency engendered. Perhaps, instead, Mr. Trump’s signal achievement is to be found simply in his holding up of a mirror to the nation. In Mr. Trump, America, and Americans — each and every one of us — found our essence, for better and for worse, distilled and refined to its purest form. In that sense, and in so many others, he was, and always will be our most American of presidents. ⧫