Dance with wolves

The date of 6 January 2021 recorded in the annals of American history has been left for posterity, the day on which a violent mob stormed the Capitol, harangued by an irresponsible, narcissistic and arrogant president who considers his personal aspirations and ambitions above an entire nation. 

Far superior even to the very foundations of democracy. Donald Trump can be considered a political accident, an outsider who came to the highest power a person can aspire to as a leader.

Trump is just the epitome of the bad times we are living in, because the 21st century is carrying many of the greatest evils of the past century, with a huge bag of miserable people and dreamers who die without achieving even the slightest of their desires. 

Characters like him are the fruit of social resentment, of unhealthy bitterness, of contained anger and of frustration amalgamated with other traumas such as hatred of the other, above all, of the different.

Trump was hailed by all the demons together as if he were the fable of a bad tale, right in the country that has elected itself at the height of democracy, a defender at all costs of freedom, human rights and the laissez faire and laissez passer written with golden lines in economic liberalism. 

He, a defender of precisely the opposite, was awarded 63 million votes in 2016 and, in the last elections on 3 November, still managed to secure six million more votes despite the huge differences in his government's performance with controversial and controversial decisions both at home and abroad; if Joe Biden had not secured 73.7 million votes to become the "most voted" candidate for the presidency, then Trump would have easily been re-elected. 

At this point, the big question is why the tycoon won more votes despite the pandemic and his disastrous management; despite imprisoning and separating families of illegal immigrants; despite disregarding multilateralism; and despite opening up-and deepening-old historical social, cultural, and racial and colour wounds in a nation that is trying to look to the future without atavism.

I am not wrong when I say that Trump has been voted into the spotlight by the resentment, the grief, the spirit of revenge and many failures who believe that the establishment itself has robbed them of their dreams, their hopes, and they feel as wronged as if they are owed something. 

His success as a politician is based on profiting from these broken dreams, on becoming a salesman of illusions, with the face of an old-west bully, who imposes his will reluctantly because he considers that power, exercising it, is an all-embracing and unquestionable activity.  

Trump emboldens and empowers that mass of aggrieved millennials who have been unable to become another Zuckerberg and the Ninis who have no choice but to remain at home with their parents playing video games and sucking on the stench of social networks plagued by criticism, puerile disqualifications and grotesque insults and hatred more hatred.  

In the era of the coronavirus pandemic there is another equally dangerous pandemic that comes and goes at certain times, orbiting in its own dialectic: nationalism and totalitarianism. 

The writer George Orwell, in his 1945 essay 'Notes on Nationalism', points out that nationalism is a 'hunger for power' fuelled by self-deception; it is one of many meanings in an interesting book that strips away the personality and obsessions of nationalists. 

What is Trump? He is a wolf in sheep's clothing, capable of profiting from the feelings of badly wounded lambs, he takes advantage of their dissatisfaction to obtain power, which is what satisfies him most. 

The seizure of the Capitol has remained in our collective memory, the European leaders have been nervous about the tragic event but also fearful that something like this could happen in a continent that, after the fall of nationalism and totalitarianism, defends democracy and freedom with all its might in times when wolves stalk the groaning lambs.   

The chain reaction of the various European leaders was very striking. They were the first to make an instant statement on the news itself via Twitter, beginning with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, followed by the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, and then practically all the representatives of the European institutions and even the NATO leader, Jens Stoltenberg, who also condemned the situation, and hours later came the statements of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the video of the French president, Emmanuel Macron. We must defend democracy and the institutions. Watch out for the wolf!