With the benefit of hindsight, Donald Trump pulling a full John Terry as Chelsea lifted the Club World Cup was almost poetic. After all, Chelsea is the Trump of European football – a nouveau riche arriviste with no continental pedigree, desperate to buy its way into aristocracy, and yet forever one dodgy deal away from financial ruin. And like Terry, Trump likes to take credit. But analogies aside, it has been quite a spin around the sun for Donald Trump since he dodged a bullet.A year ago, Donald trumped death, defying the laws of space, time, physics, politics, and logic as he did something that had been done only once before in American history: return to the White House after a hiatus. And not just any break — a five-year, scandal-scarred interregnum that included two impeachments, a Capitol riot, multiple indictments, and that gloriously capitalist moment when Trump, now with his own mugshot, began selling it as an NFT and framed it in the White House like it was a Warhol.From Butler, Pennsylvania to MetLife Stadium, Trump went from bleeding candidate to emperor’s chaos world. On that fateful day in July 2024, the bullet grazed his ear and, in true cinematic symmetry, killed a firefighter standing behind him. The photo — fist raised, blood trailing — was pure American mythology: Rocky meets Revelation. Most people, when shot at, duck. Trump posed. “Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture,” he later mused, “but I didn’t. So, it’s even more iconic.”If the picture was iconic, what followed was surreal, which included banning the photographer who took it from AP from the White House because the news organisation refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. After the bellicose belligerence of his staff in Trump 1.0, this time he made sure he was surrounded by MAGA sycophants whose only question to being asked to jump would be: how high?Read: Why Washington is the new St PETERsburgSo we had an Education Secretary who thought AI was steak sauce, a head of Homeland Security who can’t protect her own bag, an NSA who added a journalist to a secret war chat, a children’s author and conspiracy theorist who became FBI chief and learned that there was no conspiracy, and a billionaire BFF who was going to cut billions from federal spending but left after realising politics isn’t rocket science.
The last year has been an odd headcount of controversies. There was a reverse tariff formula based on an asinine equation that threatened to tank the global economy as the administration chased imaginary deficits, even against penguins. There was a war on illegal immigrants that turned major American cities into pitched war zones, random detentions and deportations based on tattoos, a protracted battle against the institutions of higher learning, peace prize nominations from nations known for their war-seeking tendencies, a gift plane from a nation often associated with its numero uno enemy, and inter-Atlantic strikes on said enemy that brought us much closer to World War III than we have been in years. NATO, meanwhile, short on funds, decided to call Trump ‘Daddy’, which is fitting given America is that particular organisation’s sugar daddy.However, the promise to end major global conflicts didn’t go as planned, leading to some angry tweets for not paying enough attention to the matter. All major promises during the polls, including the release of the Epstein List, getting America out of other countries’ conflicts, stopping various global conflicts, and keeping the fiscal deficit tight, have been forgotten. USAID — which taught us that post-Perestroika America has been funding all left-liberal movements, one of America’s mightiest soft powers across the globe — has been dismantled. As have the many ‘woke’ policies of the previous regimes, at least ensuring that biological males cannot participate in sport with biological females or use their bathrooms.All this appears to have broken MAGA down the middle, with Trump loyalists holding on for dear life, hoping that they can ride out the storm for four years, after which they could be next in line to hold the nuclear football. A bit disturbing when you think about it, but as the French say: C’est la vie. Which is translation for: Can’t believe we lost to Chelsea.
