On Sunday morning, many of us woke up, fired up the internet, and confronted the spectacle of Donald Trump body slamming and pummeling a man in a suit whose head was the CNN logo. Wait. What? This has to be a hack, right? A parody account?
Alas, no, this was the Twitter feed of the “real” Donald Trump, and even though it was taken down less than an hour later, the storm of indignation it provoked confirmed its authenticity. After the hue and cry that emerged after the Mika Brzezinski disaster, even from some Republicans, many assumed that Trump would cool it for a bit. Why do we keep assuming there is some threshold after which this man is going to stop? Do we really expect him to come on TV, surrounded by flags, and apologize to the nation for his abhorrent behavior?
What we on the left fail to see is how tweets and speeches play in Trumpland. Breitbart, Fox, Info Wars, and most certainly Facebook groups that are the mirror image of RISE and Indivisible see Trump’s behavior as the clearest evidence that he is still the same man they supported in the campaign. The singular genius of Trump is that while he hands the keys to the city to a pack of billionaire businessmen (and I do mean men), he is able to sell his image as a rebel, an outsider to Washington and especially the liberal academic and media elites who is not afraid to stick it to “the man.” Set aside your incredulity, your insistence that Trump IS “the man.” To his followers, all the sobriety and high-minded civic piety of a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are empty words they have heard before, while the image of the America they love is seemingly under attack.
Americans love a good conspiracy theory, and we love a come-uppance. This is why the high-browed New York Times is such a great target. Every time they criticize Trump, rather than giving his followers pause, it reinforces the notion that they are fake and are just the mouthpiece of the liberal left. Each time he is “attacked” assures his supporters that he is doing the right thing. They are finally getting what they deserve, those city-dwelling, gay-loving, atheistic communists. Finally a leader has the nerve--and the independence, due to his wealth--to tell it like it really is. Make no mistake: we live in a post-fact universe. Appealing to truth, the public record, and precedent are laughably naive. What matters is attitude, speed, bluster, repetition, and above all, an absolute aversion to ambivalence or apology. A real leader is decisive and he never questions his decisions or backs down from them. And those facts are all concocted by the media elites who are just agents of the globalist cabal, the deep state.
We on the left are fond of indignantly pointing out just how different our views are from Trumpers. We respect the rule of law, tradition, decency, morality. Those sound like conservative values to me, don’t they? We are all about high-minded decency now, but have we always been like this? In many ways, progressives today are descendents of the counter-cultural movements of the 60s, when everything was up for questioning, and no wonder: we were fighting a senseless war overseas, and our society at home was reeling from backlashes to attempts by African-Americans and women to achieve some measure of equality. The spirit behind much of this has been transferred to a sort of general irreverence for authority that seems to transcend social class or political party. Rock and roll probably best epitomizes this attitude, and as George Saunders points out in an essay on Trump supporters for the New Yorker, “if there’s anything common across the left-right divide, it’s the desire not to come off as tight-assed or anti-rock and roll.” This is why Trump is so popular: despite the suits, red ties, combover, and Manhattan heritage, he is the most anti-authority leader we have ever had. In our raw simplicity, we equate the New York playboy/tough guy reality host with an actual human being. This is not new: Reagan was the Gipper, a football hero, Jesse Ventura was a pro wrestler, and The Terminator ran the largest state in the union for years.
Populism is a tricky and dangerous thing, but to be against it is to de facto be an elite. As obviously despicable as Trump is, we should take stock of our own beliefs: not the ones we say we have, but the ones that actually drive us. No single person’s elevation to the highest office in the land is a mistake, or can be blamed on some group of “other” people. Sure, sure, I can hear you howling: I didn’t vote for him, not my president, and all the rest. What I am arguing is that we should be ruthless in purging the appeal of demagogues from our brains. For far too long, we on the left have picked candidates based on qualities that have less to do with competence or experience and more to do with looks, charisma, and TV appeal. We would do well to remember that as the 2020 cycle rolls around, although there is not too much we can do to fight the tide.
Returning to Trump and his supporters, give up on any idea that he is going to stop tweeting vile insults, threats, and braggy claims of victory, and give up on the idea that his followers are going to one day wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “what have we done?” If they weren’t done at pussy grabbing and mocking the disabled, they aren’t going to leave now. They are all in, and our indignation fuels the fire. So what course of action does that leave us? Remember that Trump’s approval ratings are now under 40%. That equals his hardcore base plus a few other random folks. The center has utterly abandoned him. To many undecideds who were sick of the status quo, a President Trump seemed like a funny schtick, a big middle finger to the system that has seemed ineffectual for so long. However, many of these voters incorrectly assumed that when he took office, Trump would take on at least a few of the trappings of the office. They also assumed that he had a shred of competence. Both of those assumptions have been utterly shattered, and all but Trump’s most fervent admirers can see that now. So while the man himself, like a child, basks in the adulation of his admiring fans, the rest of the nation scorns him. Take hope: there is some redeemable strain of American belief yet. Just don’t expect to hear that coming from a Trump supporter. And forget about him deleting his Twitter account.
Comments
Post a Comment