“Gotterdammerung” is a German word denoting the collapse of a regime, marked by catastrophic violence and disorder.   The word was popularized as the title of the fourth and last of the cycle of operas by Richard Wagner that together tell a story called Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs).

Full disclosure:  Richard Wagner was a profound anti-Semite, adored by Hitler, and as a Jew, I refuse to pay to see his works.  Yet as an opera aficionado, I have studied them.

And Gotterdammerung is a most apposite word to describe the collapse facing President Donald Trump and the Senate Republican Majority on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3.  As shown by virtually all the most recent polls, all hopes for the reelection of Trump and the retention by the Republicans of US Senate control are gone.  Only Trumpist fanatically delusionary lunatics can think otherwise.

This Gotterdammerung is almost solely due to the appalling mismanagement of the Coronavirus pandemic by the administration of Donald Trump, characterized by deplorable corruption, repulsive nepotism, and appalling incompetence.  It was a mismanagement to which the Republican members of the House and Senate gave their enthusiastic assent, symbolized by most of them following the Trump practices of 1) disdaining social distancing and 2) refraining from wearing the mask.

Trump’s failure to tell the truth about the virus early on before its full manifestation, as described in the Bob Woodward book, Rage, resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands.  He committed this act of criminal negligence all out of fear that his beloved stock market could not withstand the truth.  And if you listen to the following video of Trump explaining his reasoning to Bob Woodward, you will find it most chilling:

https://youtu.be/e1uQpTAXaNk

The Coronavirus Pandemic was also a major theater of Trump racism.  He realized that African-Americans had been disproportionately impacted by the virus, hindering their ability to travel to polling places.  He knew that eliminating their vote-by-mail options would constitute a major suppression of the African-American vote.  So that is exactly what he set out to do, in his flagrantly, undeniably racist attempt to have vote-by-mail statutes abrogated by reactionary federal and state judges.

If you want to see nepotism at its worst, Trump’s Coronavirus management provides a classic case study.  The anti-scientific Trump refused to trust in scientists to manage the crisis.  Instead, he vested the response to the pandemic in his son-in-law, the utterly corrupt and incompetent Jared Kushner, whom I described in a previous column as the political Rasputin of the Trump family.

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/how-this-child-from-new-jersey-has-morphed-into-the-trump-familys-rasputin.html?outputType=amp

While Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump live in the lap of luxury, oblivious to the needs and pain of the “little people,” tens of thousands have died., due to Donald Trump/ Jared Kushner corruption and incompetence.   Donald, Jared, and Ivanka will not be attending their funerals. There is no empathy on the moral compass of Jared Kushner, only excessive, immoral partisanship and ludicrous reliance on free markets.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate

Finally, there is the disgraceful, deplorable example that Donald Trump set before the American public in his personal comportment and behavior.  In defiance of medical science and out of a desire to mock the manliness and courage of Joe Biden, Trump disdained wearing the mask and did not require social distancing at his White House and campaign events.

He wanted to prove to his cultish followers that he is a mythic Nordic/Greek god-like hero.  His shunning the mask and not practicing social distancing was all done in pursuit of this objective.  Yet this ultimately resulted in his exposure to the Coronavirus.  And this made his current virus infection and illness inevitable.

The response of leading GOP players to the insanity of the Trump deprecate-the-mask doctrine was pathetic and intellectually absurd.  Trump made his no-mask, no-social-distancing practices a Republican political badge of defiance of science, which his GOP base loved and the Republican leadership emulated like sheep.

The denouement was the creation of a Coronavirus cluster at the White House, resulting from the appalling Rose Garden event at which Amy Coney Barrett was introduced as Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.  Virtually nobody at the event wore masks, and social distancing was non- existent.  One week later, the President and First Lady were infected with the Coronavirus, along with other attendees, including former White House Senior Advisor Kellyanne Conway, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Notre Dame President Reverend John Jenkins, and various Trump governmental and campaign aides, including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien.

It is indeed the White House Coronavirus cluster that exemplifies most vividly the ultimate failure of the Trump pandemic response.  And the person most personally and politically impacted by the cluster is Trump himself.

He was already headed towards a landslide election defeat in which the American public would be judging him unfit for the presidency in terms of his character, judgment, and intellect.  Now, he is physically unfit as well.

Yet Trump will still hold the powers of the presidency until January 20, 2021.  And if you understand the nature and character of Donald Trump, you will dread the damage he is capable of inflicting upon America during the Interregnum between the Election and Inauguration days.

Donald Trump most resembles both a fictional tragic character, the actress, Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, and the all-true real major villain of Italian history, Benito Mussolini.

Like Norma Desmond, Trump will live the remainder of his life in a state of self-delusion, trying to perpetuate real and imaginary past glories, needing the adulation of a past adoring public that no longer exists.

As for Benito Mussolini, watch the following videos of a Donald Trump rally and a Benito Mussolini rally.  The resemblance in the comportment of Trump and Mussolini at their respective rallies is uncanny.

https://youtu.be/CfS8AulsYRk

https://youtu.be/WIs2L2nUL-0

All this makes for a most unbalanced and frightening presidential personality.  We encountered a small, yet significant example of the type of irrational action Trump may take during the Interregnum last night.

Trump briefly left Walter Reed Hospital Sunday evening to wave to supporters from his car, despite the guidelines of the Center for Disease Control requiring his isolation when diagnosed with the coronavirus.

Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University and an attending physician at Walter Reed Medical Center, tweeted that Mr. Trump’s brief departure from the hospital was “theater” and called it “insanity.”  He further stated that every person in the car with the president has to be quarantined, and that their lives were put at risk for “political theater.”

There is, however, a mechanism that could protect America from Trumpian damage during the Interregnum, to wit, the 25th Amendment.  The provision relevant to the Trump situation reads as follows:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

So the Trump Cabinet does have the power under the 25th Amendment to mandate that an emotionally and mentally unbalanced President Trump be forced to step aside and that Vice President Mike Pence become the Acting President.   And it is highly likely that such an exercise of the 25th Amendment will become most warranted.

Yet I doubt very much that the Trump Cabinet will have the character and courage to do so.  That is why I will remain very apprehensive until the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on January 20, 2021.

Alan Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.