Almost everything you could possibly say about Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has been said by now. The big problem with Trump as a symbol of America’s tragicomic decline is that he seems fictionally, improbably perfect for that role; the symbolism is painfully obvious, although that doesn’t deprive it of all resonance or meaning.
I covered Trump’s first presidential campaign back in 2016, which both feels like a lifetime ago and like the day before yesterday. (Time! It doesn’t seem to work the way it used to.) One of the songs in constant rotation at his endlessly delayed rallies that year was "You Can’t Always Get What You Want," until the lawyers for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (or for whoever owned the rights to their songwriting catalog) made him stop. It struck me then, and strikes me now, as carrying a ham-fisted double meaning: Nearly nobody got what they wanted from Trump’s first presidency, but one could argue, at least for a while, that “we” — meaning both Americans and the people of the world — got a lesson we both needed and deserved.
