For the past two weeks, social media feeds have been invaded by an extraordinary number of anti-Trump posts. They arrive relentlessly, one after another, as if the internet itself has developed an appetite for denunciation.
And yet, perhaps there can never be too many when the cause is noble.
Is it the midterm elections? Perhaps. Is there some carefully calculated political strategy behind this sudden explosion of outrage? We do not know. We shall probably never know. But I have the distinct feeling that we have not yet reached the end of it. Two more weeks, perhaps three. Maybe longer. The machinery of outrage, once switched on, rarely knows when to stop.
However, beneath all the noise there is a question I find strangely absent:
What will the world look like after Trump?
Not after the next speech. Not after the next scandal. Not after the next election or the next furious exchange on social media. After Trump. What will be left when the man, the movement and the permanent embarrassing display have finally passed into history?
The Unseen Wounds
Something has happened during these years that cannot simply be switched off when a presidency ends. Something has been damaged. Something has been torn. These fractures will not heal quickly; I do not believe they can. There are deep marks in politics, in institutions and in the collective imagination. They divide neighbours, friends and even families. There are strain lines in America’s relationship with its allies and in the world’s understanding of America itself. And such wounds have long memories. There is no reset button for history. There will be no morning after Trump when the sun rises and everything is miraculously restored. The birds will still fly, the institutions will still stand and the buildings will still be there, but the confidence that once lived inside them may take considerably longer to return.
The Weight of Legacy
When this period finally ends, we will have to decide what to do with its ‘legacy’. Do we simply bury it beneath the next news cycle? Do we pretend that none of it happened? Do we reduce the entire era to a collection of memes, scandals and increasingly distant memories?
Or do we face it directly?
History is cruel in this respect. It does not care what we would like to forget. It keeps the names we wish it would erase. It preserves the photographs, the speeches, the decisions and the consequences. It turns yesterday’s political obsession into tomorrow’s historical evidence.
I confess that part of me would like to see the name Trump disappear altogether: erased from the headlines, erased from the vocabulary of political conversation and erased from the daily consciousness of people who have spent years either defending it or fighting against it. I would like to open a newspaper one morning and discover that the name no longer matters. But I know that is impossible. Perhaps the best we can hope for is something more difficult: to remember without obsessing, and to remember without allowing the past to dictate the future.
The Literary Aftermath
Then, inevitably, there will be the books. There are always books after a political storm.
At first, they will arrive almost breathlessly, pushed into the world by journalists, former officials, advisers and observers who were close enough to hear the doors closing behind them. There will be revelations, accusations, memoirs, confessions and counter-confessions. Everyone will have a story. Everyone will have an explanation. Everyone will remember something differently; some will write to condemn, some will write to defend and others will write to settle old scores.
Many will insist that they are writing only for history, though who ever writes only for history? This will make the literary aftermath almost as contentious as the political one.
Perhaps the most revealing accounts will not be the ones published immediately. They will come ten, twenty or thirty years later, when Trump is no longer a living political force capable of dominating the daily news agenda.
The true historians will arrive when the shouting has grown quiet and the participants have become footnotes. They will have access to documents we have never seen, conversations we never heard and evidence that has not yet surfaced. Unburdened by the daily fever of our present moment, they will ask different questions:
How did this happen?
What did we learn?
That is the only question that ultimately matters. Not whether we posted enough, not whether we shouted loudly enough, and not whether we defeated the person we hated or celebrated the person we supported. Because if we learn nothing, all the outrage was merely noise. But if we learn something, perhaps the wounds will eventually begin to close, not quickly and not completely, but enough for the world to breathe again.
