USA : THE FUTURE CATHARSIS WILL BE POIGNANT...

If the EU looks blase, the US feels "exhausted/exhausting".

It seems as if the horizontal breakdowns of political mores and behavior are in free-fall, presided over by a president who is breaking the morale of the whole country. His occupation of the media by sheer strategy or by leaking successive scandals does not leave any room for decompression. After almost three years of this descent into chaos, the TV series, the shared vocabulary, the arts are all infected by this Trump plague which covers now the remains of the "normal heart" under the ashes of bad intentions. One can no longer see or represent Macbeth or Julius Caesar without Trump as understudy. Shakespeare deserves better.

Europeans, rightly so, are asking if it might not be better to distance themselves from such a lying, untrustworthy "partner".  Putin's breaking of the rules is another perverse way of recognizing their legitimacy. Trump tramps on them like some beast out of a Marvel script. The president-elect of the EU spoke out in favor of the need to defend European values. She is right, since these were the core of the Atlantic shared DNA. The former was attractive for so long, for so many, because it was open to "otherness" which was often slow to catch on but never lost its appeal.  The United States became in a fortnight a model scorned, distrusted and, in the end, a self-defeating aberration for now. No one Republican isn't somewhere a "client" of the Trump Syndicate.  No one Democrat looks in the short term to be able to smash the statue of the gold-plated traitor/idol to pieces. The polls are not good for the president but the mano-a-mano is a sport he excels in and wherein no Coubertin or Queensberry rules apply. Only Senator Warren gives the impression to be a match...almost. She has the intellectual drive and stamina, driven by sincerity and decency. She is not (yet) an international known commodity, but better to choose a newcomer than trust a swindler .

Other countries have lost empires, their soul, their self-esteem but here we witness the first post "artificial intelligence" suicide en direct.  Even Nero would stop playing the harp if confronted with the magnitude of the catastrophe he unleashed. Other countries recovered, regretted, changed course. This one now sticks with the curse over the remedy. The elections in 2020 will be a guaranteed horror show. Trump might lose, but win or lose, America will for a long time have lost the often hapless but universally envied dream of the past.  Another unknown is to try predicting what Trump might do if he loses. His surprises never end and there are not enough Chinese cookies to hold the answer for what comes after November 2020.