My Trump

I grew up in New Jersey and working in NYC, then I move to NY-Long Island with my wife to raise our kids. This was in the eighties and early nineties. Depending on whether I used a bus or the train, I had to go through terminals. I also walked through subway stations, in NYC, where there are kiosks at every station as well. To my dismay I realized that Trump has been in the horizon of my consciousness since I was very young. Every time I walked through Penn Station, Grand Central or the Port Authority, his face was on rag, a tabloid. Most prominent was the National Enquirer [sic], which was everywhere in NYC. I never bought any of these salacious and bombastic tabloids. I understood the difference between sensationalism and journalism. So, I would stop over at my favorite vendor at Penn Station and pick up Harper’s or even the New Yorker. Occasionally, I would buy the New York Times, although I had a budget. In any event, I have known Trump, or about him, since I was young. His picture and name were ubiquitous. I guess we aged together. From what I gather at the time is that he was a Mr. Gigolo and allegedly a very, very, wealthy real state grifter. I never read the tabloids, and thus, I did not know what the exposure and urgency was about. None of the credible sources I read at the time mentioned him. Yet, I had to see his face every day, practically. Now that we know about Trump’s deal with the editor of the National Enquirer, I come to understand why he was in my face all the time as I was going to school or work. Trump’s face and his antics and so on sold the tabloids. This is now evidenced in his NYC trial.

Artist: Drew Martin

This weighs heavy on my mind. Why has this awful person been in my life for now close to forty years? I was fortunate to move to Europe for a year and then to California, where we didn’t have the tabloid culture, or none that I paid attention too. I was too busy raising a family and trying to be a good citizen. In what follows I want to address three issues that haunt me because of this phantasm that has haunted my life: First, I want discuss Trump, the person; second, I want to discuss the more important question why him, or rather the whereof of Trumpism, in this section I will address the issue of MAGANISM, and then, finally I want to briefly discuss how the new media enabled Trump and Trumpism.

Trump the Person

Trump to the chagrin of some is a person, and a citizen in and of the US. He is vile, but I will not demonize him. Nor should we. Still, from all the evidence, confessions from former employees, most of them, in fact, he is an awful person. But awful persons are still persons. In a publish interview with philosopher George Yancy of Emory University, I made the remark that Trump has, or his name, has exhausted the adjective for awfulness. Michael Cohen captured him well, because he was his “handler” and went to prison for crimes he committed on behalf of Trump. Trump is narcissistic, malicious, vindictive, uncurious, homophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Latinos, etc., and everything one can be anti, he has been anti. Let me be clear. Anti-rhetoric (anti-LGTB, anti-Immigrants, anti-Women’s reproductive freedom, and so on. It is too sad to list everything that is on the chopping block) sells lucratively well in the US, and evidently got him elected. Trump is mendacious. He is a fabricator. He will say anything, the more outrageous the better, to get attention, and widen the press bandwidth. Trump is a relentless self-promoter. He is intoxicated with his image, and press image.  One has to speculate whether he has a self or a subjective sense of self, that is not simply a calculation on how he can remain on the covers of magazines, tabloids, or on the web, and be on yahoo.com everyday (Yuk).

At some point Trump used to be handsome, in that kind of white blandness. I must confess I don’t have any animus towards his background, or anyone’s. After all, I am an immigrant. In one of my many conference trips, after I moved to California, late at night I could not sleep, so I began to flip through channels. Then I came upon the Apprentice haphazardly. I watched it briefly because I recognized Trump. My takeaway from the few minutes I watched was that he reveled in yelling “You are fired.” I gathered that entrepreneurs set out to build a business, which failed. And that the panel was to give them “constructive” feedback. I was baffled by the “You are Fired” Dismissal. This was humiliation and not educational or constructive. I wondered what this form of intellectual and emotional torture was about. I think Trump learned from the Apprentice the power of derision, derogation and insultation. Saying for a long time: You are fired! Must go to your head. So, he was on the New York City tabloids every day, or week. Then he was on TV, and then he was on the radio all over the stations. This is before Fox. I hazard to speculate that he was intoxicated, by now, in the nineties, with this Potemkin Media projection of himself, which he assiduously cultivated. Let me be clear, as he manipulated the media.

Before I turn to the question and challenges of Trumpism, I want to discuss Trump’s rhetorical and bodily, or embodied, presence. My nascent political consciousness grew under: Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. Clinton, Bush Jr. Barack Obama, and then there was the speed bump of Trump. WTF! I remember Carter’s gentle and folksy accent and his generous demeanor. Although I dislike Reagan’s policies, and I did not have an aversion to him as either a president or a person, he achieved a lot, and not all for the good (Central America, if anyone remembers, and the Contras). But he was not on our media all the time. Besides, he was handsome and knew how to deliver a great speech. Bush Sr. is a mist. But he had an amicable voice and he always looked calmed, as CIA agents or directors must project. He was reassuring in those times of turmoil. Now, Clinton was the master rhetorician. He had a pleasant face, always smiled, and got things done. His affair with one of his aids did not diminish my appreciation for what he had accomplished, although, for sure, I can’t make sense of it, namely why have sex with one of his, i.e. US, employees.  Now, Bush Jr. was interesting to me. He had no qualifications. Every president I lived under up to that point had been a governor, or senator, or some sort of public servant. Yet, he was pleasant. He had a funny voice. When he gave press conferences it seemed as though he did not know what he was supposed to say. Then, we get to Obama. Here we faced a gorgeous, athletic, and tall young black man who was articulate and had spent his life working for Chicagoans. He is extremely articulate. His voice is both soothing and urging. His speeches, which now I have in my library and many which I heard and read are historic speeches in American English. They are at the level of the speeches of J.F. Kennedy and Abe Lincoln. I have this book in my library titled Great Presidential Speeches, and the last speech in the book is from Obama. I speculate or wager than in future editions of this book there will be speeches by Biden, but none from Trump. Let me just flag a contrast between Obama’s speech on the killing of Bin Laden, and Trump’s speech on the killing of  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Obama’s speech was about how our intelligence and covert forces had infiltrate and located Bin Laden’s hideout. Here was an avowed enemy of the US taken care off, an euphemism, by our military forces and intelligence community. Trumps speech on  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was one of the worst and most crass things I have heard from any president. I will not meme his awful speech, which is a disgrace to the rule of law doctrine that our military lives and operates under. There is no speech by Trump that will be remembered or included in future editions of such a book. Why? I will return to that question at the end.

The ancients had a science called physiognomy; Aristotle wrote a treatise on it, titled Physiognomics. This “science” was eventually challenged when it morphed into craniology (see Stephen Jay Gould’s amazing book on this transformation). Craniology was one of the pseudo sciences of Western biological racism. Still, without endorsing the racial biologistic aims of the pseudo-science, I think there is some truth to what it was trying to point at, namely that a face is a window into the soul. Recently I wrote a long poem titled “Face” and it opens this way:

It has been said that eyes are windows into the soul

The face is a portrait of a personality

Dorian Gray’s Portrait haunts me

Someone who sells his soul to remain

As his portrait, forever young.

Faces are the geology of a life

A road map through a history

A voyage into a unique life path

The drift of this digression is that I want us to think about Trump’s face, body, and gestures. Since I am writing about “My Trump,” I want to underscore his transformation from an affable gigolo and bon vivant, into a mean, vengeful, petulant, angry child. His face is the least attractive of any of our presidents. It would be interesting to put together a collage of pictures of our presidents. There is something visceral and violent about the way Trump grimaces and talks. He does not talk. He yells. He is incessantly gesticulating with his “small hands.” He points at people as though he is shooting them or saying: “you are in trouble,” or some other act of unchecked plenopotency. His face is always a grimace. He opens his mouth wide. He bares his teeth, bleached white, clearly, always. He contorts his face, always into a scowl. It projects anger, disdain, derision, and contempt. This is not a comforting face, but a war face. His face reminds me of an angry bear or an angry lion. When I lived in Europe people would say: “You Americans are always smiling. You all seem to have amazing dental care.” We do, in fact. But Trump’s face is not the face of America that the world learned to appreciate and trust.

As someone who aspires to be a good citizen, I educated myself to detect charlatans, grifters, or what the Europeans call “apariticks.” (???), which in my translation means “conduit of power and control.” Part of my autodidactic education into grifter and potential dictators was to read: Victor Klemperer, William Shirer, Albert Speer, Primo Levi, and many more. Klemperer was lighting from the skies of truth. He wrote his diaries judiciously about what Hitler and Hitlerianism was doing to Germany from within. He also wrote an amazing book titled “LTI: Lingua Terti Emperi,” which I hazard to translate as “The Language (Lingo) of the Third Empire.” Why read Speer? His Spandau Diaries are some of the most moving things I have read. He is brutally honest about how he fell for Hitler. He confesses to his, Speer’s, narcissism. He wanted to be known as the next great architect. I admire his lucidity and self-assessment. The grand architectural visions he had were authoritarian and oppressive. Reading his diaries is deeply moving and morally pedagogical, coming from the so-called “Hitler’s architect.”  However, Klemperer has been my Socrates. He was a historian turned linguist of totalitarian language. One major take away of Klemperer’s LTI is that autocrats and would be authoritarians denuded language, boil it down to slogans, one slogan: MAGA. I am not being hyperbolic. Trump and Trumpism is the most monosyllabical political language to emerge since McCarthy.

The first sentence of the next stanza in the poem I quoted above, reads:” A face is a tectonic plate.” The US has no face, or rather it has many faces, all very different. It is beautiful to gaze upon those faces. Now, I would say a “language is a tectonic plate.” More important than the face. A language, the tone of the language, the semantics and phonetics of a language are seismographs of a nation, a people. This is why we have accents. An accent is the sound of a people, the prosody of a rhythm of collective life. When you are yelling you don’t have an accent. When you are yelling you are turning our language into a projectile. Yelling is indeed a form of language. But it does not communicate meaning, only anger or pure affect. Trumps’ accent is viciousness and revenge. He does not communicate. He is a Molotov cocktail of affect. It demeans and infantilizes.

Trumpism

The narcissism, crudeness, and vileness of one may be partially explained as a personality disorder of that individual. However, when we begin to ask about Trumpism as a national phenomenon, we must think harder and deeper. In this section I want to address what I take to be key elements, currents and aspects of US politics that synergized with Trump, or rather, that Trump tapped into those wells of anger, resentment, and vulgarity. I want to lay out six elements and currents of US politics; but I am sure there are more.

First. There is what I would call anti-Government politics. This goes back to Reagan, but probably Nixon. This is the politics that says: “the problem with government is government” (Thatcher), echoed by Reagan. The refrain of this form of politics is to get the government “off my back.” Here, the assumption is that the government is the enemy of the people. Another refrain of this type of politics loves the other slogan: “drain the swamp.” This is a reference to Washington DC, which in fact used to be a swamp, before it was drained by Lincoln (check), so that the majestic Mall would be built over the years. The swamp is a metonym for our government. One can note two important aspects of this anti-Government politics. First, that it is an anti-Government Government politics. While it despises government, it nonetheless wants to have the reins of government. In the last few years, we have seen plenty of this. For instance, in the theatrics about not approving the Federal Budget, while these anti-Government politicians angle to get some of that money for their districts. The other is that our well-financed and stocked government can respond to the many disasters that befall our citizens: floods, mud-slides, tornadoes, draughts. It is government that has made this a great nation. Have you ever driven across the US from New York to California? We have an incredible highway system, which was built by government. What about vaccines? What about student loans, and so on. I filed my taxes in March, but by early April I had a tax return check. That is the power of government working. Government has always worked on behalf of all Americans.

Second. Related to the prior point, there is what I call the “idolatry” of guns. Anti-government politics goes with the fetishism of guns. You better be ready to defend yourself against the government. It says: “Don’t tread on me,” I think is the expression. We have a nation armed to the teeth, compared with other democratic and civilized nations. We are also the nation with the most mass shootings because we have such lax gun laws. There are gun shows around where I live, because I suspect, it is mostly rural. I can go to one of those shows and buy a gun. I have not tried to do that. I have been around guns, big machines guns and rifles, and machetes. I sometimes think that I would want to own a small gun; maybe a revolver, and then I feel a revulsion. Would I ever use it? No, of course not. The thought of having a gun in my house revolts me. Guns are an ideology that makes money and promotes the idea that we need to be ready to defend ourselves from the government.

Third. The anti-government politics of Trumpism is permeated by resentment and grudge. This type of politics cultivates the art of resentment; namely someone has done you or the nation wrong. Trump, and Trumpists, manipulate this unique type of emotion, which is based on the idea that someone has done some alleged harm, very adroitly. The idea is to resent big government, the democrats, the Blacks, the Latinos the Muslims, the gays and LGTB people, and so on. Someone else has allegedly done you some bad. From there, holding a grudge is just a step away. But mind the gap. A grudge is when you resent someone so deeply that you will harbor a deep animus towards and against them. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grudge is both a noun and a transitive verb. As a verb, it means not to “give, grant, or allow.” That is, not to give forgiveness, to grant grace, to allow repair. Even Achilles, seeing his friends and troops suffer and be decimated by the Trojans, lets go of his grudge against Agamemnon. He fought valiantly against Hector and the Trojans. And died with his heart light and full of glory.

Fourth. A related aspect of Trumpism is what I call the ideology of “someone unworthy is getting my pie, or my piece of the pie.” Now, this is a racist, sexist, and ethnocentric ideology because it presupposes that there are the worthy and the unworthy, those who earned it and those that are free riders. People have used those words with me in conversations in bars. The unworthy are people on welfare, Medicare, disabled peoples, Native Americans, refugees, and above all Latinos and Latin American immigrants, mostly Mexicans. I grew up on welfare, which I did not realize at the time. My mother would take us once a month to do a shopping and she used bills that looked very different. I think they were called food coupons. We also used to get a cube of cheese, a two-pound piece of cheddar cheese once a month. Recently I found that this was due to Carter (check), who wanted to help American dairy farmers by encouraging them to produce more milk. He provided huge subsidies. The consequence was that there so much milk that some of it had to be turned into cheese and store in caves, large enough to hold all those cubes of cheese. A politics that agitates about the worthy and the unworthy is prolegomena to a politics of detention camps, expulsions, and extraditions.

Fifth. Trumpism trades is the most phantasmagoric politics, the politics of nostalgia. This is not politics, but antipolitics for politics is about what we can create, and thus it is prospective, not regressive, or retroactive. The slogan of MAGA is so outrageous as to be non-sensical: when was the US great? And most importantly for whom? This type of politics invites us to inhabit a memory that most of us can’t share. Does it mean: when the US was mired in apartheid, Vietnam, Central America, when Black American were lynched, and there were signs that said: “Whites only,” and “No dogs and Mexican allowed,” when gay men were beaten and dragged by pick-up trucks? I, for one, I am glad that America is gone and gone for good. I have read that nostalgia can turn into a psychic malady. This is a major trope of European fiction: the nostalgic, who is unable to inhabit the present. Nonetheless, nostalgia is important for our moral and mental well-being. It reminds us of those times when we had the sun was shining on our faces and someone loved us or did something gratuitous and generous. Nostalgia reminds us of a past. But for a nation, to inhabit a past, (which past and whose?), is probably not conducive to a healthy and effective politics.  Only in Norman Rockwell paintings does MAGA exist.

Sixth. And perhaps for the moment, Trumpism promotes what I will call “pugilist politics.” This is a politics as confrontation. It is a politics of the Roman colosseum, i.e. who can inflict the most damage and shame. The colosseum was a theater of cruelty, ferocity, and death. This type of politics thinks of politics as a spectacle of anger, might and violence. This means it is also a politics of entertainment. It is not a politics of governance, which involves compromise, mutual respect and planning together. Above all, I wager, it is a politics that infantilizes and renders citizens passive, just as a “Three Stooges” episode makes one wonder how and why? It deprives us, citizens, of a language of deliberation, compromise, and mutual respect. This type of politics has been potentiated by the transformation of media, the emergence of talk show hosts, targeted channels, websites, and then we don’t have a public sphere of public deliberation, but a myriad of media microspheres all trying to be as outrageous as they can, to get the “viewers” and “likes.” I am not trying to suggest that “pugilist politics” is a phenomenon of the new social media. This would be a form of technological determinism. All technology is multi-stable, i.e. we do not know what it may become.  Many years ago, more than three decades ago, when I lived in San Francisco, where my children were born, I went to an Arts Cinema to watch a movie. The title was “The Gods must be Crazy” (1980). It involved an African and his tribe having to deal with things falling from the sky: TVS, radios, bottles, etc. When I first saw it, I reacted negatively, because it implied Africans do not know what those gadgets are. They are so primitive they don’t know what a bottle is, was the message. Then, I began to think about the deeper meaning of the movie: careful what falls from the skies in your backyard, or your desk, or your purse, or back pocket.