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It was no less a political analyst than Bruce Springsteen who called it in 2016: “The trouble at the moment is you have Donald Trump, who is talking about rigged elections,” he told Channel 4 News, prophetically before the-then presidential candidate returned to his obsession with rigged elections four years later. Springsteen goes on in the interview to predict that Trump would lose. He clearly got that wrong, but it was his next statement that struck home then as it does now with even more purchase: "He's such a flagrant, toxic narcissist that he wants to take down the entire democratic system with him if he goes."

“Toxic narcissist.” Two words that perfectly capture the man who became the 45th President of the United States, and when he did, subjected us to four years of unrelenting madness. You can decide for yourself whether this was real insanity or a form of eccentricity, but madness it has mostly resembled from the get-go, from the all-caps rants via Twitter to the endless revolving door of firings and hirings of cabinet secretaries and key staffers, plus the fanbase-bating dog whistles towards targets as varied as Mexico, Europe, China and even the UK’s “Muslim problem”. 

To his defenders, he’s been a breath of fresh air. “Drain the swamp,” he promised, as he took on Washington’s institutional culture and the mainstream “fake news” media (i.e. any outlet who didn’t sycophantically provide ra-ra for him). Week in, week out, day in, day out, the  “Me! Me! Me!”  tweets and self-regarding speeches have been endless. Quite what Trump actually achieved over these last four years in office is, actually, hard to ascertain. Jobs - at least until the pandemic - are up, they say. The economy - at least until the pandemic - is up, they say. The populist view is that America never had it so good, they say. History will judge.

Picture: Channel 4 News

Later in his Channel 4 interview, Springsteen added the following to his appraisal by saying how Trump was so unreflective: “He simply has no sense of decency, no sense of responsibility about him. The words that he’s been using over the past several weeks really are an attack on the entire democratic process. I think it’s very dangerous. He does have a lot of people’s ears, and I don’t think he’s going to go quietly, gently into the good night, I think he’s going to make as big a mess as he can, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but we’ll find out shortly.” Well, fast forward four years, and we are where we are. Tomorrow Trump will leave the White House, board Marine One and chopper out to Andrews Air Force Base. From there he’ll fly to his own Camelot, Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling but surprisingly modest golf resort in Florida that will presumably be the bunker in which he plots his next move. It's anyone's guess as to what that will be, even if we can optimistically hope for a period of quiet reflection out of the spotlight. Donald Trump, we have seen over these last four years, doesn’t do quiet reflection.

What he does leave behind is a ruptured America, scarred by the events on Capitol Hill and fearful for what might happen now. And well they might be, when you see scenes of heavily armed militiamen, like the 'Boogaloo Boys' roaming city streets with a staggering belligerence. This is not Mogadishu or the lawless reaches of Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq. No, we're talking about streets in the world’s biggest economy and its most powerful democracy. In fact, right now, there are more American soldiers in their nation’s capital city than currently in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq combined. That might be overblown precaution, but then it’s clear that the attack on the Capitol had been strongly hinted at beforehand by chatter on the Dark Web, so a chastened law enforcement establishment will not want to make the same mistake again before tomorrow’s inauguration.

The scenes outside and inside the Capitol on 6 January filled me with genuine sadness. I’ve spent more time in the United States as a visitor than any other country, spending annual holidays and long weekends there, visiting for work and even living there for two years. In fact, I was at home in California during 9/11, the last time the country felt genuinely afraid, but which rallied in the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. 9/11 showed America at its most resilient. Trump has shone a light on America at its most divided. 

He was always going to be an unconventional president, but that, going back four years, would have been a polite way of calling it. Twitter comes in for a lot of attention, but then, rightly so. It’s been his medium of choice. Rather than use conventional presidential mouthpieces, the 140 character limit (later raised to 280) provided unbridled access to his audience. At first it was even amusing: the actual Donald Trump (emphasised by the @realDonaldTrump handle) tweeting, not a team of millennial social media hotshots with Harvard degrees. No, the prez himself, from his very own iPhone, and often at a time of day when many assumed he was sat on the Shanks Vitreous, performing his morning ablutions as he ripped into individual opponents, institutions and topics that raised his ire. This daily, diarrheic river would drive the narrative of the next 48 months or so.

But, even if you regard this as eccentricity or, merely, an unconventional leader at work, another view emerges that goes beyond egomaniacal craziness. Eight months after he was sworn in, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote an excoriating profile, questioning whether he was, in fact, really all there. It was fascinating and frightening. Taibbi’s conclusion was that President Trump had become a very difficult personality to Donald J. Trump, celebrity property developer and reality show host. Irrationality, Taibbi argued, was, on some level, working for him. Until last November’s election result, the daily madness just became par for the course, the Twitter rants more tiresome, the firings and hirings monotonous, and even the brain farts about foreign targets (e.g. “Rocketman” Kim Jong-Un) sinister bluster. Somewhere along the way, however, we’ve gone from a Johnny Rotten figure saying “Boo!” for shock effect, to the apparent marshal of an insurrection. Trump’s leadership since the election has looked more like that of a cult chief, desperate even, with his “stolen election” rhetoric, blatant untruths and conspiracy theories, and even the hectoring of Georgia’s Secretary of State by phone. 

6 January seemed to be the final act. In hindsight, that rally in front of the White House now resembles an effective call to arms, Trump's very own Agincourt speech. The loud post-election grumbling about votes and other apparent injustices - the repeat cycle of 2016's theme - escalated to the point that Trump was now the leader of a fully mobilised militant cult. His  tacit endorsement of the extreme component of the audience assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue, fuelled by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “combat”, lit the blue touch paper. The crowd that stormed the Capitol had more than a wild staring eyed nature about their zeal. One pony-tailed backwoods type who leered into a television camera even resembled Dennis Hopper’s whacked-out photographer in Apocalypse Now (“Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense.”). Trump as Colonel Kurtz? It's not that ridiculous.

The Capitol insurrection might not yet be the final act: the 20,000 National Guard troops, augmented by Secret Service special forces and a beleaguered police, are still expecting more, and even worse. Trump's final day in office is unfolding, and with it the potential for further mayhem, not least of which, the pardoning of hundreds - something in the president's gift - that could even include the president himself. Even this adds further to the exhaustion we’ve all been suffering from. I actually stopped following Trump on Twitter a while ago, as it was actually affecting my mental health. But now, in theory, it’s over. 

Whether you think Joe Biden will be a good president or not, we can’t have anything worse. Regardless of your politics, America was, mostly, doing fine until Trump came along. To return to the punk theme, that musical movement came along, briefly made some noise, shook the tree a little, and then things returned to normal. Trump as America's first punk president? Not so wild an idea. But instead of presenting a refreshing alternative, he's left a legacy of division, drawing out demons that have always been there, but thankfully had been kept hidden. Brexit had a similar effect here, and comparisons between what happened in Washington and the murder of MP Jo Cox shouldn’t go unnoticed.

The way forward, however, is now partly in Biden's hands, and partly in the hands of a Republican Party that made a Faustian pact with Trump to acquire power. Even if the Congressional impeachment vote last week showed a resilient latent support for Trump within his own party, the sentiment more broadly is that he’s a spent force, and a toxic one, too. If an impeachment trial in the Senate does render him unfit for any further public office, thus denying Trump a tilt at the 2024 vote, the party will have to move on and reflect. Right-wing fanaticism, however, didn’t end in April 1945 with a self-applied bullet in the Führerbunker. Acolytes of that particular strain have festered ever since, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's impassioned video the other week drew necessary comparison to.

Like it or not, Trump hasn’t gone for good. Even if he does choose to spend his time now trying to fix his ailing business empire or just playing a lot of golf, the Senate impeachment trial will keep him and his cult firmly in the spotlight. The madness is not quite over. Perhaps, though, America will be given the chance to heal, and return to the kind of political discourse led by intelligent reason, and not the ravings of a glorified bar room braggart, a Homer Simpson character perched on a stool in Moe's Tavern, giving forth his views on anything that enters his noggin.

Clearing up the toxic mess of Brexit

I don't, as a rule, 'do' politics. On this blog and its predecessor, I have studiously avoided an institution I have little time for, one whose practitioners have - whether they like it or not, and whether warranted or not - the reputation of being self-important egomaniacs.

Of course, that's not to say there aren't diligent and hard working politicians who have something to contribute of genuine benefit to the communities they serve. It's just that those are the politicians you rarely see, let alone hear of, largely because they're busy getting on with their actual jobs, rather than trying to position themselves for a job they would very much like to have next.

Taking this further, I've also stayed well clear of the build-up to today's EU referendum. One reason is that I have genuinely been conflicted by sound arguments from both sides. Another is that I've also been revulsed by arguments which have been seriously flawed. A third reason is that I don't, actually, have any formal say in the debate, having lived outside the UK for more than 15 years and am therefore ineligible to vote. But, as Britain goes to the polls, it's hard to resist some reflection, particularly as the referendum is one of the most important decisions my country will have made in my lifetime.

One further reason is that the debate has brought out the very worst of the institution of politics - and its worsening state of being. Neither campaign, frankly, has been particularly impressive. Both sides have overplayed on emotion and frailty rather than hard, stand-up facts. And even when the factual approach has been pursued, Pinocchio's nose has visibly extended. My natural instinct is to support the Remain position - I couldn't really countenance any other view, having benefited in numerous ways from being an EU citizen. My employers have benefited greatly from trade within the EU, as well as employing me in two EU member countries, with the freedom of movement between them. This freedom, moving between the UK, the Netherlands and France (with a two-year sojourn in the US), has enriched me professionally, culturally and socially. And immeasurably.

Later this year I will be returning permanently to the UK, and I worry what country I'll be coming home to. For the last ten weeks it has been dragged into a pit of toxic political division, with towns, communities and even individual families split along rival referendum lines which, in earlier centuries, would have amounted to the conditions of civil conflict. The blame for this must fall on the politicians and the political rivalries at the root of the Brexit debate, who have, from their central positions in their respective campaigns, spun and even lied to achieve their aims.

Twitter may not be the most faithful barometer of rational thinking, but it has also opened the window on the very worst of the sniping, carping and cynical snidery that has been part and parcel of the referendum. Social media has accentuated and worsened its toxicity: to spend any time on Twitter over the last few weeks is to have observed an encroaching, rabid madness, worsened by the extremes of the right and the left in equal measure. I was left in utter despair the other day by a tweet posted from an account festooned in nationalist sentiment which concluded with a call to the new mayor of London and the Remain-endorsing prime minister, "FUCK OF SADIQ FUCK OF CAMERON". That an argument could have been expressed this way suggests both the unrestrained lack of respect afforded by social media platforms as well as truly appalling standards of spelling, grammar and punctuation. EU or no EU, what kind of moron is being turned out by British schools?

I don't wish to trivialise, however. The EU referendum is too important. It will be a decision that will have very real ramifications for British prosperity. Yes, the UK will still trade with the rest of the world if it leaves the EU, but at what cost to manufacturing jobs in Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, Sunderland or Swansea when tariffs impact the business of trading? Will Nissan, Honda and Toyota - Japanese companies all - still want to invest in British factories making cars for export? Will London remain the world's financial capital? I would, though, disagree with the idea that the arts and culture would suffer - The Beatles did perfectly alright in Hamburg before the old EEC came along. But these are the arguments we should have been examining, rather than xenophobic nonsense about Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives or Latvians taking British jobs that British people didn't want anyway.

There's no doubt that the European Union can be its own worst enemy. In my work I've seen at close hand how bloated and bureaucratic Brussels can be; I've bought into the argument that a community formed to facilitate free trade has allowed itself to oversee issues about things it has no need - or right - to be involved in. But as a European citizen in every sense, I've also seen what European political and economic unity has achieved, and what the UK stands to lose if it goes it's own way.

This, however, has been masked from view by the sheer crassness of the Leave campaign, and for that we must lay blame at the feet of its leaders: a former London mayor, who extolled the brilliance of his city's multiculturalism while in office only to dive into the murky waters of immigration control while bumbling his way through the Brexit debate, attacking "the agents of Project Fear" while spreading fear himself. Boris Johnson built his personality cult around his Bunteresque, public school clown persona. It was amusing, seeing him on Have I Got News For You, with his manic blond hair and his classical Latin quotations, but throughout this campaign he has too often let his guard down and shown both his naked ambition as well as his unsophisticated, unreconstructed self.

Then there have been the outright lies that Johnson and the equally duplicitous Michael Gove have peddled: the claim that the UK sends £350 million each week to the EU, apparently; the lazy comparisons with pre-war Germany and Nazi scientists discrediting Einstein; the preposterous idea that 78 million Turkish people are preparing to suddenly leave their homes for the UK (any more so than 81 million Germans or 66 million French would). Worse, though, is the Leave leadership's tacit endorsement of that bombastic golf club bore Nigel Farage, a man whose xenophobia is eclipsed only by the outright racism of the swivel-eyed Little Englanders who dote on his every word.

The immigration issue isn't one that can be taken lightly. I've seen the best of immigration and the worst of it. It's a thorny topic, and no amount of saloon bar philosophising from me will even scratch the surface of how to resolve it. But its presence in the darker pockets of the EU referendum has depressed me, and its manifestation within the Brexit debate by those at supposedly the unacceptable extremes of the Leave campaign has been deeply troubling.

Which brings me to Jo Cox. At the top of this post I said that my disdain for politics is largely the result of those who practice it. I've rarely met or seen a politician I like. But in Jo Cox - an MP I hardly knew anything about since she entered Parliament in the 2015 election intake - you sensed something rare and good. To earn the sort of genuine cross-party outpouring Cox's murder stimulated said more about her than any cause she may have stood for or against. She was just doing her job, and by all accounts doing it well - representing her constituents, helping them, supporting them. 

It is right that the Leave and Remain should not have exploited this for their own interests, and for the most part they haven't. But the sight, yesterday, of a Vote Leave campaign banner being flown over Trafalgar Square, not once but three times, during a memorial rally for Cox, in full, cynical knowledge of the hurt and upset it would cause, is a sign of just how far British politics has sunk during the Brexit debate. We've seen something similar in the US, with a presidential election running along even more extreme lines, with one candidate in particular trading hate, fear, paranoia and division for votes. But the US election is not for me to worry about until November. The more pressing event is today.

I can't vote, but I implore those who will to think as long and hard about their choice based on those who presented it. Because, really, would you want a country to be handed over to the likes of Gove and Boris, their lies and misinformation? Worse, their dirty little secret Farage, yapping away from the 19th hole, pint of IPA in one hand, rancid views about immigrants (of which he is one) in the other? It's not the Britain I want to move back to, frankly.