House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a wondrous politician, a “weaver” of Democrats as she puts it, a soother and an energizer, an inspiration. How splendid to see this elegant person seated directly behind U.S. President Donald John Trump’s long yellow hair as he turned the always slavering State of the Union address into a tacky TV episode performed live before a gormless studio audience. How wonderful to see her rip up that ludicrous speech behind his big orange volleyball head.

Pelosi is the perfect package of sane and sensible. Americans need that. There is something reassuring about her, partly because she was unfazed by Trump’s impeachment acquittal, and partly because she is quite certain that Trump will not be re-elected.

Trump and Pelosi are polar opposites. He wears a black hat, she wears white in honour of the suffragettes.

Trump is a man-child, a thug, a liar and a cheat, yet he can make hundreds of frighteningly rich men do a greasy Uriah Heep as he speaks in the Senate chamber or holds an hour-long venomous freestyle event the day after.

Pelosi, on the other hand, is an emblem of Democratic revulsion. With one raised eyebrow, eyes widened in faux surprise and a brisk unwillingness to put up with flim-flam, she expresses the world’s need to writhe.

Pelosi, 79, has a rich history of defending Democratic values. As economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2018, as House minority leader she helped block president George W. Bush from privatizing Social Security. She then helped president Barack Obama pass the Affordable Care Act, backed financial reform and the desperately needed stimulus after the 2008 crash and, since she entered politics in 1976, has never been once touched by scandal.

“Looking at modern House speakers, Pelosi stands out as a giant among dwarfs,” Krugman wrote. She is resented, as all powerful women are. It has been that way all her life.

But wherever Trump goes, he leaves fumes of bribery, libel, fraud, sexual incontinence, invented numbers, lies, spite, vengeance and dirty money. It has been this way all his life.

Devoid of the social skills demanded of a normal president — Nixon was like this, too — Trump is ritually forgiven because he is rich, powerful and eager to punish. Especially post-impeachment, he is a human gun whose bullets could spray anywhere before the election and finish off Republicans from the principled Sen. Mitt Romney to the unwell Rep. Jim Jordan. Status anxiety clogs the room. Republican senators sink lower in their chairs. “Don’t pick me,” they plead. They close their eyes so he can’t see them.

A new book, “American Oligarchs,” by journalist Andrea Bernstein tells the history of the Trumps and the Kushners, two families born into at least two generations of greed. It is filled with corruption, so thick and heavy with it that my hands feel corrupted by holding it. As with novel coronavirus, I must not touch my face.

It matters because the weight of American corruption will be 10 times heavier if Trump is re-elected and the U.S. continues the transition to failed state status.

According to Bernstein, dodgy real estate deals birthed both families. Trump’s German grandfather fudged land claims, she writes. His father was repeatedly caught self-dealing, and the Trump family’s business history has been under almost permanent criminal investigation. The family has one goal: pay no taxes. They lie like rugs. It’s what they do.

The Kushners are much the same. The eeriest thing about the Trumps and the Kushners is how embedded they are in New York politics, business and law, a pack of cronies who do deals together, attend the same schools, go to the same parties, blackmail together, and make deals together. Political donations are the price of entry to the Trump/Kushner trap. They are un-Pelosi, they are shameless.

Here’s a metaphor. The U.S. is heading toward a “moulin,” a hole formed by underground meltwater in a previously solidly frozen glacier. As described by nature writer Robert Macfarlane, these tubes created by climate change can drill down a full mile to bedrock.

A moulin “is surely the most beautiful and frightening space into which I have ever looked,” he writes. The mouth is oval and the sides are polished blue ice like the shaft of a well. It’s an Edgar Allan Poe kind of horror. Twenty feet down, all is dark. Terrified, Macfarlane enters one, slips and begins swinging back and forth into an icy waterfall. He is hauled up before he dies.

The U.S. has been drawn to its own moulin, tiptoeing closer and closer. It can’t help itself. It is near the edge and the long black ice hole looks strangely attractive.

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Pelosi and the Democratic Party have been holding Americans back on a rope. If Americans do the mad thing and re-elect Trump, the nation will enter a moulin from which there is no rescue, no return.

Americans, hold on tight to the rope. Don’t pull the rope down with you. Pelosi can’t help you then.

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