A disgraceful end to the presidency of Donald Trump

The presidency of Donald Trump has ended in disgrace and shame.

It seems that there is not enough will within the houses of Congress to impeach and try him, and so remove him from the White House, or declare him unfit, and so replace him in his last days in office.

Mr Trump yesterday said in a statement (possibly written by someone around him) there would be an orderly transition of power on January 20. He must be aware that he might be ejected and perhaps pursued for crimes after he leaves.

The president clearly incited the crowd to walk from his rally outside the White House, itself a highly inappropriate event, to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are based. Whether or not he explicitly called on them to storm the building is almost a moot point. He has been whipping up his followers with unfounded claims of voter fraud for two months.

While there were clearly irregularities and certainly instances of fraud, as would be inevitable in an election of 150 million voters, with many ballots mailed in due to Covid, no evidence has been produced that comes anywhere close to suggesting that the entire election should be overturned.

The support given to Mr Trump in these claims, including by most Republican members of the House of Representatives, helped lead to Wednesday’s shameful scenes.

The personal tragedy for Mr Trump is that expectations of his conduct are so low that had he showed the slightest degree of grace in defeat he could have emerged from his term as president a more admired figure than he deserved to be.

It is also tragedy is that this end mars some of his sound political instincts, that left a legacy in areas such as helping broker peace deals between Israel and some of its enemies.

A further tragedy is that a man who vowed to make America Great has managed something quite remarkable: his nation, which has long been great and seen as such around the world, so that there are people in every country on earth who want to move there, is less admired than it was four years ago.

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