The Trump Show: How long can it go on like this?

I left America in the summer of 2015 after 14 years in Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York. Apart from London and Belfast (the city where I was born and grew up), it’s the place I have known for the longest time, and, having an America wife, I still feel a strong sense of connection, if not belonging.

So when I say that I have had enough of the ongoing saga of Donald Trump, it is not because I have no interest in the politics of Washington, it is because the politics of Washington, and the White House in particular, have degenerated into something so sleazy and disreputable that the business of keeping up with events feels like watching porn. It’s not supposed to be like this. This is a travesty of what was endorsed not just by the Founders – those overblown secular saints whose cunningly-crafted Constitution is viewed as holy writ, second only to the King James Bible – but by pretty well every Administration for the last 230 years.

Every morning, my wife and I catch up with the news by way of the Late-Night Hosts – Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah and Jimmy Fallon – who, with impressive comedic verve, deliver their collective verdict on the latest madness. Each of them, plus the masterly weekly satirists Bill Maher and John Oliver (a Brummie who never quite cut the mustard on Radio 4 but has made it big-time in America), has carefully honed his Donald Trump impression into an aural version of a Gerald Scarfe cartoon. Using carefully selected clips from the news, talk shows and Twitter, they heap daily humiliation on the Oval Office, as well as everybody who has ever worked there, most of them, it seems, as incompetent and ill-suited to their jobs as the man at whose eventual displeasure they serve.

But it isn’t just besuited comics who pile it on, earning their millions by insulting the World’s Most Powerful Man. The serious news channels and the papers are at it as well. CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post: they are morbidly obsessed with the character and personality of the President, whom they judge – however correctly in my view – to be an unnatural amalgam of Hugh Hefner, Richard Nixon and one-time Alabama Governor, George Wallace.

The result is that the Trump White House has become a sitcom and a soap, each episode of which ends with a cliffhanger that turns out to be no more than an invitation to more of the same. We are well into season two now, and most of the talk centres on how long it can continue and how its increasingly bizarre story lines can possibly be resolved. “Trump” has become like the hit show Dallas in the 1980s after Bobby Ewing was killed off only to reappear the following season when it was revealed that his murder, followed by his funeral and the family’s subsequent civil war, was nothing more than a bad dream.

You couldn’t make it up. That’s what the critics say. But they don’t have to. It’s real – unless we are all of us locked into a nightmare from which only Glinda, the Good Witch of the South out of The Wizard of Oz, can awaken us.

The extraordinary thing is that America hasn’t fallen apart. Not yet, at any rate. The economy has grown; Wall Street is booming; unemployment has fallen; Hollywood continues to churn out blockbusters; Amazon has become the world’s high street. But problems on all fronts are building, and not just for Facebook. Beyond the White House, Me-Too, Times Up And Black Lives Matter aren’t simply slogans, they are symptoms of a society struggling to achieve far-reaching, but painful, reforms. Gun violence shows no signs of abating. If anything, it’s getting worse. Healthcare, post-Obama, needs urgently to be tackled if a new generation of Americans is not to be left by the wayside. Protectionism has become America’s default response to global competition, leading to fears of crippling trade wars on just about every front. Issues of immigration are being being allowed to fester behind a wall of rhetoric no more real than the promised 2,000-mile-long wall along the Mexican border. Equally contentious is the ever-widening, Third-World-style gap between the Super Rich and ordinary Americans. If this continues to fester, bolstered by tax breaks for the wealthy that are permanent while those for the poor are strictly time-limited, unrest is certain to grow.

At the same time, far from home, America’s place in the world is slipping. The intermittent involvement of the U.S. in Syria has achieved nothing, allowing Vladimir Putin to posture as the leader of the only effective Super Power. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, due to be completed any day now, is a pointless snub to the Arab World. It is, I suppose, just possible that the “Dotard” and “Little Rocket Man” will somehow defuse the threat to world peace posed by North Korea, but the President’s near-certain decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal brokered by Obama can only add fuel to the fire that is burning up the Middle East. Meanwhile, on climate change, which the President sees as fake news, the message from the White House echoes that of a doctor who advises a heart-attack victim that a varied diet means shuffling between Burger King and MacDonald’s.

Having to approach all of the above, and a whole lot more, by way of the uniquely dysfunctional Trump White House is, of course, the reason why America’s conversation with itself currently borders on hysteria. The man behind the curtain has been exposed, but he still has his hands on the levers of power. Not only that, but millions of voters think that, for all his faults – which they will cheerfully, almost gleefully, enumerate – Donald Trump is still their guy, the man they trust to drain the swamp and Make America Great Again.

It defies analysis. But that doesn’t stop the Hosts and the media commentariat from trying, to the exclusion of just about everything else. Which is why I’m hacked off and exhausted. Anyone for Brexit?