Opinion

A jury in New York has unanimously and swiftly decided that Donald Trump sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in a changing room in an upmarket New York department store sometime in the 1990s. They
ordered him to pay her compensation of $5 million.

And thus Trump has at long last been found guilty of a crime that he not only confessed to but even boasted about. In the notorious Access Hollywood tape, he gleefully described how he forced himself on women uninvited and got away with it because he was, in his own vile words, a star.

Trump will not go to prison because it is only a civil case, but it is a start. And there are several more court cases coming his way with far greater penalties attached, and I am both confident and hopeful that they will see him in prison for most if not all of the rest of his life. And when they do, I’ll cheer. Because I hate him.

I am not much given to hatred. Indeed, I cannot think of another human being I have hated with this intensity. So I am interested in working out why.

It is not because he sexually assaults women, or at least not entirely so. Over 20 women have accused him of the sort of assault he was being tried for, and this arouses a sense of moral revulsion and a fierce desire to see him punished for his crimes, but not hatred.

Nor is it for political reasons. If Trump had had his way – and it is yet just possible that he might – he would have effected a coup on the USA, a coup that restored him illegally to the White House. Thereafter, he would have done all he could to stay in power in perpetuity, overthrowing the American Constitution and becoming for the US what Putin has become for Russia.

With the help of the extremists who have effectively taken control of the Republican Party, he would have converted the world’s greatest military and economic power from a representative democracy into effectively a dictatorship. And had he succeeded, one would not hold out much hope for the future of any decent global society, or indeed, for the ultimate survival of our species.

But though I may be vexed by these things, I am not so sufficiently wed to the notion of American democracy or to the long-term future of our species for this to make me hate him.

Nor yet does his narcissism, or at least not on its own. Trump has no concern for anyone but himself. He is a collection of appetites unhindered by conscience. So if he wants sex, he simply takes it without thought to his victim. In business, he fleeces anyone he can fleece. His charity was a scam. His supposed university was a scam. His entire life is a scam. And despite being a self-professed billionaire, he continues to screw cash from his brick-head acolytes.

His presidency had nothing to do with benefitting the country, of course, and everything to do with benefiting himself, gaining status, wealth, prestige, power, fame and praise, especially praise. His sociopathic nature craves praise. He sees himself as a god-king, and he does all he can to bend the rest of the world to the same point of view.

All these things are loathsome. But the thing that stirs me viscerally to hatred is, well, I was going to say his lying. But it is more than mere lying. His only touchstone is his own appetite. So when he speaks, he says only what serves those appetites. And thus he unmoors the language from any link with meaning or thought and sets us adrift on an ocean of limitless greed and malice and stupidity and self-serving cruelty.

I cannot see him, hear him, without being reminded of Yeats’ most famous lines:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Trump is the embodiment of a world towards which the internet was already tending, a world where language is severed from any effort to tell the truth. That’s why I hate him.