Trump

POLITICSJULY 13 2016 Anatomy of Donald J. Trump RICHARD FORD I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump – or trying to. You might have noticed that unless Mr Trump is shouting at us from behind a forest of microphones, dressed in one of his ill-fitting suits, preening and grimacing and mugging Mussolini-like, wagging his under-sized finger, or sometimes making his finger into a pistol and pointing it at his own orange noggin, or cursing at some heckler out in one of his diminishing audiences – that unless we have Mr Trump’s iridescence squarely in front of us, it’s actually hard to keep him in mind. Which is odd, for such an out-sized individual who seems to want to win the US presidency on the argument that what you see is what you get – the cliché he hopes will translate into a case for his authenticity. Indeed, Mr Trump – who, I believe, is an actual human – seems strangely insubstantial. Here, it should be said, I’m leaving aside all his smoke ’n’ mirrors, hoo-doo “positions” and “policies” and blustery implausible “intentions” for what he’d “do” if he were elected to what Andrew Jackson once called “the first office in the world” (it may not quite be that anymore). I’m really just remarking on his personal affect. Watching Donald Trump, with all the gaudy hair and mortician’s tan and noisy, bludgeoning comportment reminds me of staring into a cheap kaleidoscope, wherein we can see one not-quite-bizarre, not-quite-interesting, not-quite-memorable, not-quite-distinct mandala after another. Thinking about Mr Trump, trying to fix on the there that’s supposedly there, is like wanting to figure out what basic design a kaleidoscope really contains down there inside its hollow paper tube. There isn’t one. It might seem unfair (it might be unfair, since I’ve never met Mr Trump) to appraise him in this way. Of course, most of the indices we use to estimate and choose our presidents in the United States are hopelessly impressionistic and insecure. We wouldn’t choose a person to mow the grass behind our house on such a pitiful amount of hard, supporting evidence. First of all, we’d insist on references. After that, we’d require to know that the applicant could fully identify a lawnmower, then show some aptitude for using it. Presidents we let off more easily. To get candidate Trump into better focus and measure his “actuality”, I’ve tried to think of some regular everyday activities I might seek to share with him – in essence match him against myself, since I’m still fairly actual. For starters, I’m sure that I could not have dinner alone with Mr Trump in my favourite restaurant in Paris. He’d ruin it. I’m also sure I couldn’t go fishing with him on a backwoods lake in Maine. Same reason. I’m sure I couldn’t explain to him and have him be interested in the anxiety-producing aspects of my saliva gland surgery (or my divorce – if I’d ever had one). I’m sure I couldn’t discuss with him a great novel I’d just read. He would’ve read something better – probably something he “wrote”. I’m sure I couldn’t go to most movies with him: he’d talk non-stop. In all these activities – things I could engage in with pretty much any stranger – Mr Trump and I would have nothing to say to each other. Nothing mutual. And the result could be spiritually wounding for me. I’m not sure why this seems important, but it does. To be fair, I could possibly go to a boxing match with Mr Trump, or better yet to a vicious mixed martial arts event held in a steel cage (he’d already have good seats). I could also go to a Bruce Springsteen concert with him at some arena he owned (we’d see Governor Christie there, which he’d like), though he’d probably prefer to see Ted Nugent. I could have a drink with him at the old Oak Bar at the Plaza (if I happened to look around and there he was. He may own that, too). I could go with him to buy an extremely expensive car. I could go with him to buy some extremely expensive shoes. I could also go with him (on his boat) to fish for marlin or Great Whites or some other monstrous fish. Not that I would want to do any of these activities with Donald Trump. But I could try, whereas with the other, more regular things I couldn’t. It’s not that I think that to support someone for president you have to imagine the person you’re supporting could be your friend. I have no urge to meet or to know or to befriend Barack Obama – although I judge him to be an excellent president and wish I could vote for him again. I just think that if I decided to tell President Obama something – about my surgery, or about ordering the cod at Sur le Fil next time he’s in Paris, or about what sort of colourful Mylar yarn to fish with on Lake Wappanooky – that he’d listen and at least try to remember. Which brings into consideration what it is about people that makes them seem actual or authentic, makes them seem to be there instead of seeming vacant and vanishing, like Mr Trump. I’m not going for genuine, Emersonian density and depth here, but again just how people seem, what they do that makes us think somebody’s present. Listening, would be one thing. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to listen to people, especially people who don’t corroborate what he already espouses (though he does seem to hear insults and likes to mock and threaten and even injure those he deems to be insulters). Being able to distinguish our needs from his needs, would be another trait of actualness – instead of believing (as Trump seems to) that our needs should match his, or maybe just match his wishes. That’s two. Another evidence of actuality might be that if a person spends a great deal of time and effort persuading us he badly wants something, that we eventually can find some evidence that the wanting person knows a modicum of what that something is. Three. Four would be that a person not flat-out mislead us when the truth is otherwise easily available. Five would be that a person not malign everybody who disagrees with him about virtually anything – calling into question their morality, ethics, religion, marriage, ethnicity, their dog’s name. Six would be (I’ll quit after this) that a person be able to affiliate himself with people who themselves seem actual or authentic, allowing us observers to conclude that he’s like them. Absence of these qualities is what makes us run away from people. It’s not what makes us elect them to be president. I have a theory. Possibly it’s not a new theory. But since it’s about Donald Trump and the American presidency, it’s arguably newsworthy. The lady who sells jellies, jams and crocheted cat cosies under my office window in Maine said to me the other morning, as I headed upstairs, that she’d heard that Donald Trump would soon be dropping out of the race. She doesn’t like him, so this was good news to her. She failed to learn why he’d be leaving. She’d heard it on television just as she was stepping into the shower and didn’t quite catch the rest. Hearing this, however, made me think about why Mr Trump might in fact drop out of the race. Which led me to consider that he might not really want to be President of the United States. Just because he says he does and acts that way . . . why would that matter? He says anything that comes into his head – no matter how stupid and implausible – and is forever claiming not to have said things we know he did say. It’s as if he thinks it’s we who are insubstantial. And worse – that we’re stupid, and he’s invented us just for the fun of it. I can say that Mr Trump advertises some traditional, quasi-presidential qualities that might fortify his resolve to stay in the race. For instance, he pretends to hate the press but actually lives and dies by it. He pretends an aversion to Washington but can’t wait to live there. He pretends to admire bipartisanship and the separation of powers but really hates both. He pretends to be a political outsider but is actually a consummate oligarchic insider who disrespects any authority but his own. His moral convictions always line up with his private interests, and he identifies all his opponents as enemies of America. Plus he’s a man. On the more philosophical side, Mr Trump, like many of our presidents, believes that peace should be indemnified by guns. He believes America is forever misunderstood and abused abroad, and also by his opponents at home. He believes American history is a constant struggle to re-establish our American character and that what we all need is to be more American. He believes the power of “the people” (his supporters) is constantly being vitiated by an elite, who distrust those very “people” and want to steal their votes. And, of course, he’s all in for Israel. Plus, Mr Trump, by having no governmental experience and by giving no evidence he’s ever thought about what the president actually does, taps into Americans’ long-held, anti-intellectual assumption that holding public office is – as Andrew Jackson wrote in 1829 – a fairly “plain and simple” matter. Or in Trump’s case, “it’s a beautiful thing”. Americans, even the old New England Federalists, have always been wary of government – except when we might personally benefit from it. Concomitantly, most Americans have little patience or appreciation for the intricacies of governance, and are easily lulled by stupid simplisms. We prefer cleaving to the fiction of the gifted amateur, and are often vaguely offended by someone who is or promises to be really adept at being president. Barack Obama, for instance. It’s similar to the squeamish way we erstwhile Puritans feel about someone who’s said to be really gifted at sex. But looking at the presidency solely from Mr Trump’s perspective, and forgetting for a moment ours as voters, it is hard to think being president would make Mr Trump very happy. Sure, he’d like the hoopla for a while. But Mr Trump is merely a natural, not a gifted, liar. Remember all those “thousands and thousands” of Muslims he supposedly saw celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City? And under the heat of constant public and congressional scrutiny, he’d quickly get caught lying, be made miserable and rendered ineffective (like Bill Clinton was). He could get impeached by the very governmental machinery he doesn’t know anything about. He also hates being called to account by others for things that don’t work out, and continually reverses course so that the Harry Truman buck never seems to stop with him – something his critics will feast on. Relatedly, he’s notoriously thin-skinned, so that the constant laceration from opponents he can’t fire, as well as a disdainful free press, would almost certainly drive him crazy and provoke even more stupid outbursts than those we’ve already heard, which will make him look and be pathetic. On top of all this, virtually all other heads of state will be smarter and younger than he is, and he’ll have to hear about that day in and day out. And at his age (I know, I know . . . the “a” word; but he would be the oldest president ever to commence his duties), the up-curve towards minimal competence could be hopelessly steep for President Trump. We could end up with Ivanka as our first female, caretaker president. I realize there’s no accounting for narcissism, and that Mr Trump’s appetite for winning could distract him through an extra-long honeymoon from any awareness that he’s no damn good at being president and actually loathes the job. But unlike Ronald Reagan – whom Trump loves invoking – people tend not to like Mr Trump the longer they know him, and the honeymoon wouldn’t last long. He’s not a man of the people, not a genuine populist. He’s a rich, apparently thoughtless bag of wind who likes insulting people less powerful than he is. His status as a messiah to white, disenchanted working-class men is, in my view, a sham, an invention of Mr Trump’s ambition and of those men’s disdain for government and their fear about a loss of economic and spiritual potency in a fast- changing, rapidly-becoming-non-white world. As heroes go, Mr Trump is not much of a hero. Like other presidents we’ve had, he could end up being the presidency’s hapless prisoner, and we voters its culpable victims. He might just decide to quit. He’s done it all his life. Oh, sure, if Donald Trump suddenly either gets out or makes it easy for his party to dump him next week, during the Republican Convention, you could say he’s proved his point. He’s shown the American political system to be the charade we all know it to be – a mock field of battle where a mockery such as he himself can succeed. A meta-candidate. That would provide him with the sort of victory he’s been savouring all his life as a tycoon. A bluffer’s victory. If we could only believe he’s that clever. And no, that’s not the way the American political system is supposed to work. When a person aspires to our presidency, he or she is meant to mean it. But this trumped-up meta-candidacy – if that’s what it is – does make the interested observer want to ask one more thing: what in the world are we doing in America? This is not really about the under-served demographic of pissed-off white males. It’s not really about the Republicans’ impotence to field a better candidate. It’s not really about our spiritual fatigue with a government that doesn’t work. It’s not really all that much about government at all. It’s not even about Donald Trump being president. That’s just a joke. We tune into Mr Trump for the same reasons we sit through the commercials, when we’re half asleep late at night, watching a movie we kinda like but kinda don’t, and should just go to bed and wake up clear-headed. If when we see him we think we’re experiencing a sensation of unreality, it’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing. It’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds. It’s our national malaise with life that’s become the problem. Donald Trump? Real or not, he’s just a gaudy, tarnished symptom of our American disease – one more thing we don’t want to think about very much.