Donald Trump has distinguished himself by parading before the world as a public persona bursting with blatant and unrepentant narcissism, violence-infused musings, and hints or even frank calls for racism and brutish marginalization of minorities. He’s advanced proposals that range from the nutty (building a wall along the Mexico-US border and getting Mexico to pay for it) to the outright illegal (nuclear bombing of international opponents).
Yet Trump attracts voters, mostly disaffected white men and women who have been damaged — or feel they have been damaged — by economic forces beyond their control. By US trade practices, for example: the shipping of jobs overseas to countries where workers are paid low wages and work long hours, a practice that has been going on for decades (well before Obama) and is driven primarily by the addiction of those same disaffected Americans, and others, for cheap consumer goods.
Walmart, for instance, although showing signs of decline, has been leading the rush to export jobs for decades, now buying 70 per cent of its retail stock from China.
Trump attracts voters who feel beleaguered and shut out of the “Great American Dream” – but haven’t the slightest idea why. They want a leader who talks tough, won’t compromise, and is always mad as hell.
As one enthusiastic Trump acolyte in the small town of Oskaloosa, Iowa opined recently in an interview with GQ: “I like that Trump won’t back down...he ain’t going to say he’s sorry. Sometimes he likes to say things not politically correct, but they all better get used to that. The people who do speak politically correct have been losers.”
A friend sitting beside her chimed in: “What we have had is politicians and lawyers who have constipated America. Let’s get a businessman in there and get things moving! We need our new MiraLAX!”
Colourful and rather bizarre imagery aside, it is clear that Trump, with his unusual hair and his expressive and explosive gestures, is pulling in the newly awakened among our southern neighbours -- those individuals who realize that their lives aren’t as secure and meaningful as the Great American Dream suggests they should be, and desperately want quick and dirty answers as to why.
Trump messaging is jam-packed with quick and dirty answers: build the wall (to keep those "bad guys" out), bomb the enemy (to whack the "bad guys" abroad), torture and throw out the foreigners (to weed out the "bad guys" who somehow snuck in) and, once and for all, “Make America Great Again” – that inane, child-like Trump card. His policies allegedly horrified even his own superPAC strategist, who has since resigned once she saw that he actually believed his own rhetoric.
Donald Trump, hair and arm-waving and bombastic expostulations and all, embodies the spoilt and disgruntled child in all of us – the I-want-my-chocolate-ice-cream-cone-and-I want-it-now region in our brain that longs for instant gratification but can’t seem to find out how to fulfill that longing.
Trump appeals to who we were when we very young, when we were frustrated because we couldn’t have our way and the authorities in our lives, at the authoritarian end of the parenting spectrum, didn’t explain. He reminds us of the figures who said “do as I say because I’m your mother/father/older sibling/teacher”. Eventually, that would be replaced by “boss/manager/leader/owner”.
Trump especially reaches out to those Americans whose parents issued commands – no explanation, no leeway, no relationship, just “do as I say, because I say so!”
As that same Iowan commentator put it: “He is for the quiet people. …The people who don’t think they have a voice.”
Trump is channelling all of us before we were old enough to understand that there were other people in the world just like us – before we could understand that they had needs like ours, and realize that meeting our own needs and the needs of other people was best accomplished by sharing.
Donald Trump enthusiastically declares his love for the “poorly educated” because deep down in that reptilian brain stem of his, he knows that the last thing his campaign can handle is close scrutiny.
The wheels are starting to come off the Donald Trump campaign bus now, as the sycophant US media majors start to realize that they have actually allowed themselves to be run over by that same bus.
I believe Donald Trump will die a fairly rapid political death, probably fuelled by a courtroom drama or three – weighed down by the inevitable disclosures of ever seedier liaisons with ever less attractive business and political partners. He’ll head offstage as the world comes to realize that, vast stacks of moolah aside, he’s not a particularly interesting person.
The shock factor will wear off.
And it won’t be his hands, or his hair, or his hubris that will do him in.
It will be his inability to stop opening his mouth and speaking. It will be his cunningly inventive mind, dreaming up new ways to try and astonish his followers, and the world in general, with rude and witless revelations of what we already know only too well — that he’s markedly less interesting than he wants us to believe he is.
It’ll be nice, one day, to be able to leave the volume on the radio or TV alone during political campaign programming, instead of having to turn it down to compensate for all that extra noise, that “tale told by an idiot," as Will the Bard said in Macbeth, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Going for a walk in the fresh air. Now there’s an idea.
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