We’ve just found out the core message of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. It is the same as his original election message: I’m not Donald Trump, who, if re-elected, will be Hitler 2.0. This is a message destined to inspire the Democrats’ base and MSNBC viewers but suffers from one obvious constraint. The truth is that we already had four years of Trump, and he wasn’t Hitler 1.0. He was, rather, a Mel Brooks version of Hitler, performative, reactionary and, ultimately, lazy and toothless. All the grim authoritarian threats – his pledge to deport 11 million immigrants, to prosecute Hillary Clinton, to reinstate torture, to abscond with Iraq’s oil – fizzled out in office. He had golden opportunities to go full-dictator: a global pandemic and massive unrest on the streets in the summer of 2020. His response was to hand Covid to Tony Fauci and let the cities burn.
His threat to the republic stems from his belief that he should be above the rule of law; that, as president, he can do anything with ‘TOTAL IMMUNITY’, as he recently said on Truth Social. So he incited mob violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, tried to use the Justice Department as his personal tool and refused to be accountable to Congress because it violated his delusional self-image of the greatest human being ever. This is a man who would destroy the rule of law not, as tyrants do, to seize power, but as a celebrity does, to protect his delusional vanity. The choice in 2024 therefore is not between repeating history as either farce or tragedy but whether the country wants to endure, once again, the tragedy of Trump’s farce.
I used to flatter myself that my rather niche biography – grammar school boy goes to Oxford to study history, falls in love, gets dumped and eventually becomes a lonely old gay – was rare enough to be a narrative absent from most popular culture.
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