I come today to praise Donald Trump, not bury him. With less than a month to go before Election Day, and with an oversized mug of tea at my side, I would like to take the moment to celebrate the former president and all he has brought to the nation.
Nine years ago, most of the nation laughed at the brassy businessman when he descended his golden escalator to announce his candidacy for President of the United States in front of a crowd of paid extras. We laughed because Donald Trump has always been a laughable figure. Those of us who grew up in the New York area had long been accustomed to the braggadocious real estate developer elbowing his way in front of cameras, pontificating on the love lives of the famous, celebrating his own sexual conquests, bankrupting various businesses, and generally making a buffoon of himself.
Nobody’s laughing now.
For better or worse (worse), Donald Trump receives full credit for reshaping the American political landscape. Trump’s greatest accomplishment isn’t achieving the presidency. Rather, it’s red-pilling an entire nation. Gone forever is the illusion of political comity and decorum. Although Mike Judge predicted it, and Sarah Palin rang the bell, it was Donald Trump who ushered in the WWE era of American political life.
I don’t just mean that political flamboyance, always a minor component of American life, has now become de rigeur on both sides of the aisle—for every Lauren Boebert, there is a Jasmine Crockett—I mean that Trump has shone a light on the hypocrisy, absurdity, and scripted nature of the entire American political landscape.
The conventional wisdom used to be that politicians required a certain decorum. Gravitas was the word most often deployed to refer to that certain strain of statesmen who might one day occupy the Oval. Trump obliterated all of that, recognizing that the panoply of new media outlets and avenues demanded a showman. Somebody who could create soundbites at will could command the airwaves and chat rooms of an entire nation.
Trump was the first politician to fully recognize that, in the Attention Economy, the coin of the realm is, naturally, attention. The more of it, the better. Consider how Kim Kardashian turned a sex tape into a billion-dollar Hollywood empire. Trump did the same for Washington DC. Alone among politicians, Trump turned scandal into asset. All the way back in 2016, when he correctly prognosticated that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, the chattering class didn’t understand what he meant. Shoot somebody? Get away with it? Hell yes. As long as you never apologize and you never stop feeding the base.
Donald Trump speaks at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 15, 2023.
Marco Bello/File Photo/Reuters
Democrats pat ourselves on the back and say, “Not us.” Well, I’m not so sure. For proof, we need look no further back than Bill Clinton, whose own bad behavior never sank to the level of Trump’s, but whose own lies and peccadillos presaged the Don. I’m old enough to remember a line of shame-faced Democrats standing in front of the press to defend a man who had violated both the nation’s trust and an intern. So let’s not get too high and mighty with our own sanctimony.
Trump also exposed and upended the symbiotic and parasitic relationship between the political class and the traditional media class. While Fox News was the first to create an “opposition” to so-called mainstream media, it was Trump who blew up American journalism.
By refusing to play the game as it has been played for decades, Trump confounded, and continues to confound, the practice of journalism. “Alternative facts” are now not only commonplace, they are the basis for a false reality that millions upon millions of Americans live within. Gaslight has become the only light by which these people see.
Trump understood that the media could be turned against itself. When he poked his finger in the eyes of the journalists that cover him, he understood that they could not poke back without jeopardizing their “objectivity.” The nation saw an impotent media spluttering in their responses, and felt themselves vindicated.
How did the medialike it when somebody talked down to them, the way so many felt they had been talked down to? The more outrageous Trump’s statements, the more his people gobbled them up. Not because they necessarily agreed with everything he said, and says, but because the act of saying it is its proof of its own virtue.
Are they really eating cats and dogs in Springfield? What difference does it make so long as it triggers the libs?
Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 15, 2024.
Cheney Orr/Reuters
The outrage engendered by his casual racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and threats of violence is like food for these people. “F–k your feelings,” is their battle cry. Does that mean his supporters actually lack empathy? I don’t think so. Talk to them one-on-one and they’re, generally, fine folks. What they share is a sense of victimization and aggrievement ginned up by the same media they turn to for solutions. Enter Donald Trump promising that he alone can fix it while, at the same time, doing everything in his power to fuel those feelings of victimization and aggrievement.
It’s brilliant.
The result is obvious. Mistrust. Paranoia. Americans scratching at the open wounds of our own history. Americans seeking the Red Bull rush that comes from scapegoating those most likely to be actual victims of a system that traditionally has historically insulated the rich and white and powerful and which, despite their fears, continues to do so. Donald Trump certainly didn’t invent scapegoating, but he’s been its most successful propagator since Joseph McCarthy. Has anybody in our history been better at turning Americans against ourselves for the purpose of personal enrichment? None come to mind.
There’s a month left. A month until we can be rid of Donald Trump as the most potent political force in the nation. A month until we at least have the opportunity to turn the page on this profoundly ugly chapter of our history. I don’t think the MAGA movement goes away when Trump finally, mercifully, rides that golden escalator to his penthouse in the sky, but I think we at least have a chance of stitching together something like an uneasy truce.
In time that truce can be built upon. But the old rules are gone. Trump obliterated them. He resurrected American nativism at its ugliest, spawning an army of cretins, blowhards, grifters, and—most ominously—students. Regardless of how this election ends, we will be dealing with the Trump effect for decades to come. He deserves his place in history.
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Publish date : 2024-10-08 23:42:00
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