Donald J. Trump represents the worst of his country—the archetype of the ugly American. I have been pondering what selection of adjectives might best describe this sorry specimen.

Wikipedia describes the “ugly American” as “a stereotype … exhibiting loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behaviour.” An apt choice of descriptors for the man, although Trump is no stereotype, he’s the real thing. Add “avaricious,” mention his utter lack of ethics and simple decency, and I think we’ve captured him.

So how did such a person get to be head of his nation? How did a narcissistic felon, a mentally ill criminal, get to be the most powerful man in the world?

Primarily because 77,284,118 Americans voted for him, 1.5 percent more than voted for his opponent. Many in the Democratic Party wallow in guilt over this. How did they fail the people, they lament.

Well, they didn’t fail the people. Joe Biden was the best president for the working class since Lyndon Johnson if not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He reconstructed the American economy to bring manufacturing home, to rebuild the country’s decaying infrastructure, and to prepare the nation for a renewable future. He strengthened organized labour and consumer protection while constraining corporate power. And his reward from the working class? They elected Donald Trump. They betrayed the Democrats, or at least President Biden.

The Democrats can’t say that, of course. In a democracy we tell ourselves that the people are always right. In fact, they are often wrong.

And in this case they made a stupid mistake for which they will pay dearly. They have allowed themselves to be conned by a pathological narcissist whose sole talent is self-promotion. The result is a president who is undermining every facet of their society: the economy, the military, foreign relations, the arts, the sciences, education and research, health care … the works. And he and his lackeys are doing it out of spite, out of imagined grievances. “The people,” perhaps intending to punish the two major parties, have punished themselves.

But then human progress does not arise from the masses. It arises from small groups of enlightened individuals (elites?) who develop the ideas and then struggle to convince the masses of their value, usually against conservative forces that cling to the old, often imagined, ways. Such is the case in all our endeavours from the arts and sciences to economics and politics.

In the U.S., since WWII the enlightened have had a good run of success. American society is much improved from the segregated, gay-bashing, misogynistic ways that prevailed in the 1950s. And the country has become the Rome of the arts and sciences, the place that all roads lead to.

But suddenly immense changes have stirred dark forces that offer simplistic and emotionally satisfying answers to the complex problems that these changes have imposed. Climate change, globalization, automation and AI seem to have disoriented America’s benighted masses and, overwhelmed, many have been seduced by those answers and the demagogue who brings them.

They have made a terrible mistake, a mistake that has put their country on the edge of the abyss. If America’s noble experiment is not to end, the American people will have to make amends. They will have a chance to partly correct their blunder next year and fully correct it in three years. Unless of course President Trump manages to reprise January 6th at scale.