David Roth wrote a post-mortem on Trump's autogolpe last year. There was a subtle thread there that struck me about why various people embraced Trump.
We've spent six years pondering the question as to why a significant number of Americans have backed this obvious con artist. For the "reality based community," Trump's obvious signal failures have left us agog at those who simply can't accept that Trump is exactly who we say he is.
I've written at length about the Evangelicals and how their outsized presence in our country is warping democracy. Their dogmatic insistence on a Magical Sky Daddy who controls everything makes them unable to grok the idea of personal agency expressed through electoral institutions. So they are the main cogs in the grievance engine of Trumpism. We can add the virulent racists, sexists and anti-Semites to that group. These are the ones that Adam Serwer was writing about when he said "the cruelty is the point."
Roth's piece though moves beyond the screaming viciousness of Trumpism and glances briefly on Trump as "Rich Guy." A lot has been written - both editorially and straight up factually - about how Trump was not actually THAT rich. He lived rich by living off debt, bankrupting companies and skating away to the next grift or con. The recent departure of Jeff Zucker from CNN has highlighted how Zucker and Mark Burnett created an entirely fictitious Trump for reality TV's The Apprentice. Trump's career is a cascade of failures as a businessman and a series of garish successes as a salesman of his "brand."
Trump's faux opulence was probably an underrated aspect of his appeal. It's natural for those to the center and left to be drawn to Trump's racism and sexism, especially after his 2016 campaign, where he committed any number of political "sins" and yet managed to "win" anyway. We see what disgusts us most. But as someone said (Coates?) it wasn't necessarily Trump's racism and sexism that made him appealing but that it "wasn't a deal breaker."
I think maybe what we should understand is that we - quite rightly - see America as a society cleaved in two, but how that cleavage exists is a matter of great debate. Rural v Urban; Red State v Blue State; College v High School; POC v White. Roth points out obliquely that it is really Normal v Rich. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that the rich are different than you and me. We've boggled at the accumulated wealth of someone like Jeff Bezos. There are millions of Americans - very much the majority - that enjoy lives of comfort beyond the imaginings of someone 200, 100 or even 50 years ago. No large society in human history has been richer.
Simply being "well off" with most of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs easily checked off has made us dream of lives of the super-rich. For Bezos or Gates or Musk, the rules are simply different. For the very wealthy, the small constraints of 21st century life melt away. Trump's Grab'em By The P***** tape was important because he said it and got away with it. Not just the tape, but the sexual assault of which he bragged. He skated from failed company to failed marriage to failed casino without every slowing down, becoming a reality TV star.
When you're famous, they let you do it.
Trump's one actual talent is selling Trump: both as a brand and as an "experience." "Come stay in one of my garish, gilded casinos, and live like me!" "Take Trump University courses so you can be successful like me!" "Eat Trump steaks so you can be fat and happy like me!"
The people who flew to Washington on private jets 11 months ago were people who were on the edge of that Trumpian level of opulence. They weren't there, but they wanted to be there. If only "those people" weren't being given so many advantages over good White people (and a handful of Black and Brown people) like us. Trump is a direct descendant of Russel Conwell's Acres of Diamonds sermon preaching the Gospel of Wealth. He's the Risen Messiah of the churches that Joel Osteen's ministers.
Trump is what happens when a country worships wealth, because wealth allows you to break the rules. In their eyes, America is a paradoxical country of great wealth, but also some constraints on what you can and cannot do because some "cultural betters" say that we can't say the N-word anymore or hit on a co-worker. Trump is the avatar of crashing through those constraints.
His transgressions are as much the point as the cruelty, because his ability to skate through consequences demonstrates for all his cultists that once they get rich enough, they can skate through consequences, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment