The Trump Thing

The Trump Thing

          This whole Trump thing amuses me deeply but amazes me not at all. I confess that my amusement tends to be wry, sometimes bitter, and probably not at all a good reflection on my character, but there it is. I can afford it because I live a long way from the United States, and not by chance.

          One thing that amuses me about the Trump phenomenon is that everything I’ve read and viewed about it has come at it from what to me is obviously the wrong direction. Bassackward. I’m sure many other people have noticed the same error, because it’s so obvious, but their analysis has failed to reach my admittedly limited exposure.

          This observation is that Donald Trump did not create the phenomenon that is the Trump movement; the Trump movement created the phenomenon that is bully-boy Trump! the frontrunner.

          Trump has not constructed this violent fury towards all things and people who are vulnerable or intelligent or both. Trump is not the author of this vast display of dominance-oriented violence, bigotry, misogyny, violence, xenophobia, jingoism, violence, know-nothingism, anti-intellectualism, and violence. Oops, I put ‘violence’ down more than once; I wonder why?

           As H. Rap Brown noted in the 1960s, ‘Violence is as American as cherry pie.’

          Trump’s just stumbled upon it and, hardly believing his luck, made the most of it. It’s been there all along, historically at least since the 1840s and the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. Catholics, Muslims ― who gives a shit? Its intimidating presence and its underlying power within the United States’ dominant culture, subtly and cynically manipulated by those with actual power, was the primary reason I fled with my family from the country in the mid-1980s. It wasn’t a shock-horror surprise to me then, either. I’d referred to the Trump-movement-in-waiting in something I wrote in 1969 as the ‘cossack rube hordes’.

          What Trump has done has been to dispense with the smooth, subtle, cynical part and just talk as he’s always done with his millionaire mates at happy hour on the mega-yacht or in the changing room at the exclusive golf club. Just between us boys, har-har. Trump’s psychology prevented him from appreciating the nuance of just-between-us and blurting it out for all to hear.

Nice people have been horrified. The cossack rube hordes are not nice. They’ve swept Trump up in a wave of berserker frenzy by making the not-niceness they so dearly love seem more than socially acceptable. Figuring out, this time at least, upon which side of his bread to spread the butter, Trump’s just gone along for the ride.

          Trump himself, with all his toxic narcissism, is in hog heaven. He can say anything he wants. His supporters don’t give a shit about what he says as long as it’s dick-headed, and his natural, off the top of his head, just-between-us-rich-guys har-de-har, huff-and-puff, and mine’s-bigger-than-yours blurtings are nothing if not dick-headed.

          Not only does what he says not matter, but he himself doesn’t matter, either. He belongs to the cossack rube hordes; they don’t belong to him. They have their voice and their excuse and they’re off. Even if he were to keel over dead getting a piece of ass from his young wife, anybody else with a gigantic enough ego and access to the media could take his place.

          As it is with Bernie, it’s not him; it’s the movement. Only a different one.