On Medium: Overwhelm with Malignancy: The Trump Technique
Read on to learn what's at the heart of the Trump technique and of our revulsion towards him. We confront here a supervillain with the powers to overwhelm us with superhuman malignancy and to threaten us with the revelation of evil, that goodness may all along have been for suckers.
We all have our ways of coping with Trump's victory. Mine is that this is just a nightmare from which I'm bound to awaken any time now. Trump was the undeniable dreamsign, the bluntest of all hints that my unconscious mind has sent to reassure me it's all just a dream. Hopefully I won't even remember any of it once it's over.
ReplyDeleteI think Jimmy Carter is a good counterpoint to Trump. Both have been president and both were (are) anomolies as presidents go. If some red-letter southern baptist who eschewed consumerism & mounted solar panels on the white house could become leader of the most vulgar, materialistic civilization in history, then Trump's presidency actually comes off as fairly plausible by comparison. Trump is really America writ large. This place has got to be the fattest, dumbest, most decadent nation in history. If you could somehow extract the quintessence of the American soul & 'give it body', as the old alchemists were purported to have done with their elixir, you'd have Donald Trump. Imagine a stone that turns everything it touches into pyrite - fool's gold.
It's interesting and paradoxical how Trump's "presidency" is both an anomaly and America writ large, as you say. What's anomalous, then, is that the president should actually represent the country instead of mainly the nascent plutocrats, which is to say the US isn't so democratic.
DeleteThe US didn't begin as a democracy, but it's been steadily progressing in that direction for quite some time.
DeleteObserve that most politicians on the right & the left didn't take Trump's bid for the presidency seriously. The only reason the GOP finally endorsed him was because he won the primaries. In other words: if American elections were run like they are in every other country where the party chooses its candidate, Trump could never have become president. In fact, primaries didn't even exist in America until the early 20th century and even then they were pretty rare.
Democracy enables the rise of demagogues like Trump and demagogues end up destroying democracy and replacing it with autocracy. This is why Plato wrote the Republic. It's why the framers of the US constitution also wrote the Bill of Rights. What a waste of ink, huh?