Dignity is all but dead in Trump's presidency

Should you so choose, with a single search online, you can view a photograph of Abraham Lincoln looking like death chewing a wasp. He's elegantly gaunt, somewhat haunted, every inch of him screaming the agony of holding a country together with a mixture of intelligence and prayer. It's a typical early daguerreotype where the stilted sitter looks vaguely tubercular and humourless. But with Lincoln, you can actually see the toll - the man wore the ravages of a Civil War on his face like a borrowed suit that didn't fit. You look at it and know what authentic leadership actually costs.

We fast forward 160-odd years and are treated to the spectacle of President Donald Trump, robed as a grandiose medieval monarch, piloting a fighter jet with his name plastered across the wings like a budget airline, dropping what appears to be digital excrement onto hoards of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

Welcome to the future. It's dumber than you imagined.

The American presidency has always trafficked in theatre - every administration understands the power of the image, the carefully staged photo opportunity, the symbolic gesture. But there's a chasm of difference between FDR's fireside chats and Trump's AI-generated descent into authoritarian kitsch. We are witnessing not just a departure from presidential decorum; Trump's taking a wrecking ball to the basic notion that the presidency exists as something bigger than whoever's sitting in it for four years. There used to be this understanding, unspoken but solid, that you could loathe the man in charge while still holding the office itself in some regard.

When seven million people take to the streets in peaceful protest - the largest single-day mobilisation since the first Earth Day half a century ago - it represents something rather significant in a democracy. It's the people exercising their voice, that quaint old notion embedded in the United States First Amendment about freedom of assembly. The traditional presidential response might involve acknowledging legitimate concerns, crafting a unifying message, or, at the very least, maintaining the dignified silence of someone who understands they govern for all citizens, not merely those who voted for them.

Trump's response? A video game sequence - all CGI and bombast - where His Majesty Trump flies over Times Square with 'Danger Zone' thundering away in the background, hosing down protesters with what appears to be liquid excrement. It's a visual metaphor that doesn't require a doctorate to decode. The message is meant to be brutally clear: even widespread dissent will be met not with engagement but with contempt, quite literally rendered in the form of digital faeces dropped from an imperious height.

The truly jaw-dropping thing about this moment isn't merely the crudity but the casual obliteration of any remaining boundary between the person and the esteemed office. American presidents are fallible, with personal flaws, sometimes appallingly so, but there existed at least the pretense that the presidency itself transcended the incumbent's worst impulses. Nixon may have been paranoid and sly, Clinton may have been reckless, but neither would have dared respond to mass civic action with a cartoon fantasy of themselves as an absolute monarch literally defecating on their citizens from above.

Trump has understood what every mediocre comedian learns when their routine tanks to zero applause. If you can't win an audience with carefully crafted words, be at least shocking. If you can't command respect, then demand attention. The crass AI-generated videos aren't nuanced political messaging but the work of an inflated ego that views the presidency not as a grave responsibility but as the world's most powerful social media account, where engagement matters more than respecting and reinforcing any democratic norms.

What makes this particularly shocking is the timing, as these aren't campaign trail antics from a private citizen seeking office. This absurdity is the official response of the White House to the largest peaceful demonstration in two generations. The same establishment that once delivered the Marshall Plan, delivered the world from the horrors of World War II, and put men on the moon, has been repurposed by an orange buffoon to create memes mocking millions of its own citizens.

Americans have endured crude presidents before. Lyndon Johnson was legendarily vulgar, conducting meetings from the toilet and referring to his penis as 'Jumbo' with indulgent frequency. But their vulgarity was largely private, kept behind closed doors in an instinctive understanding that the public face of the presidency required something more elevated.

Trump instinctively knows that shame on social media is a choice, and its absence can be both remarkably liberating and useful. Why get distracted with the art of diplomacy or the exhausting work of political persuasion when you can simply create a viral meme mocking your opponents who are literally covered in excrement? It's efficient, in a crude way, with no need for policy papers or nuanced argumentation when you can just crown yourself king and call it a day.

But beyond the immediate grotesquery lies a more troubling question: what happens when the office itself becomes indistinguishable from the person occupying it?

American democracy depends on a kind of collective suspension of disbelief - the understanding that while presidents come and go, the institution endures. The American presidency was designed to be larger than any office holder, carrying with it the accumulated weight of history and noble precedent. When that dignity dissolves entirely, when the office becomes just another platform for personal grievance and juvenile score-settling, something essential breaks.

Summarily labelling legitimate protesters as "whacked out" and dismissing them as "not representative of this country" after they have peacefully assembled by the millions isn't just wantonly tone-deaf. It represents a fundamental dismissal of how democracy functions. In the great American democratic experiment, citizens who take to the streets aren't the enemy but rightful participants in the ongoing conversation about what kind of nation they want America to be. Drowning them in animated excrement, even digitally, suggests a president who views dissent not as a feature of democracy but as a personal insult requiring a bout of bullying.

The sombrero image reveals a casual racism, reducing Democratic leaders to racial stereotypes while boasting about being "built differently". It's the aesthetic of a bully who's somehow gained access to professional graphic design software, the visual equivalent of a schoolyard taunt and stamped with the presidential seal.

And yet - and this is where it gets truly depressing - it works. The videos go viral. The memes multiply. People get furious, which is rather the point, and fury makes them share it, and sharing means Trump wins again because he's never particularly cared whether you're applauding or throwing tomatoes so long as you're looking at him. Trump realised this years ago: that being talked about beats being ignored, every single time, even when you're supposed to be running a country rather than auditioning for a particularly odious pantomime villain. The old adage that publicity doesn't distinguish between good and evil is especially true when you're the US President and your grotesque fantasy life involves medieval regalia and defecating on your own citizens from a safe remove.

A now disillusioned electorate is left with the unprecedented spectacle of American democracy reduced to a tasteless game show, where the highest office in the land responds to legitimate protest with artificially generated contempt, full of spite and shamelessly demeaning.

Lincoln's glassy-eyed photograph stares out from a more cultured era, gaunt and haunted by the weight of office. One wonders what he'd make of his successor, self-crowned in pixels, riding a fighter jet named after himself, dumping digital ordure on citizens below while 'Danger Zone' plays in the background.

Probably nothing suitable for a daguerreotype.