Donald Trump And The Wild West, The Defining American Icon That Europe Will Never Understand

Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere as the American Left seems to assume - an alien being of vast intelligence and inimitable power with the conquest of earth in mind, an interloper, an unexpected, unexplained viral threat, a demon cast out of someone else's hell. 

He came from America, from everywhere in America - from the prairie, the bayou, the backcountry, the Mississippi, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the mean streets of New York; but most of all from the Wild West.  For all of these origins, he is more American than any president before him. 

Europe can understand part of this legacy.  They can fathom the wide open spaces. 'Purple mountains' majesty' may not have the resonance it does for Americans, at least older, native ones who remember Flag Day and Fourth of July parades, and the Pledge of Allegiance, but any European who has travelled beyond the Mississippi and has some inkling of American history can combine the grandeur of the West with Monroe's Manifest Destiny and come up with a vague conception of our origins. 

They cannot understand the Wild West - that vast territory settled by early Americans, a contentious place where Indians resisted colonization with militancy, savagery, and persistence but Union soldiers cleared the way for white settlement. Where settlers staked their claims and defended them with the same determination and violence as those who wanted to take their land. 

Europe has been settled, civilized, and sedentary for a millennium. The tribal Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Celts have been long forgotten in Britain, too distant in memory and cultural destiny to become icons.  Only after the Romans and William the Conqueror did history become real; but only thanks to remnants - French and Latin influences in language, amphitheaters and aqueducts. 

The French have a more living past.  It has always considered itself the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church since Charlemagne and Charles Martel defeated the invading Muslim Saracens at Roncesvalles and kept Europe Western and Christian. Other European nations have their own history with its victories and defeats, defining culture, religion, castles, and cathedrals.

Yet this recognition of the past, this pride of legacy and cultural patriotism is a far cry from the nativism of America - a country which does not simply remember its history, but lives its legacy every day.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  It was the kings, queens, and popes of Europe who initiated expansionist wars. 

In a seminal scene from Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry goes incognito into the trenches to hear what the common soldier thinks of his heroic adventure.  Cannon fodder for royal vengeance they are is the consensus, dampening but not destroying Henry's dream to retake English territories from the French. 

American westward expansion was done by the people, not kings and courtiers.  It may have been conceived and initiated by Presidents, but the real work of plodding, planting, fighting, and settling was done by ordinary Americans. 

The frontier was indeed a lawless place where justice was administered from the barrel of a gun, where summary, extrajudicial hanging of cattle thieves was common, where The Gunfight at OK Corral was a fictional representation of the harsh reality of the times. 

The market was as free as it gets, and the only rule was 'Let the buyer beware'.  It was a marketplace of raw supply and demand, horse trading, snake oil salesmen, canny entrepreneurs, suckers, and gold diggers. Fortunes were made through diligence, violence, insight, and defiance. Laissez-faire was the mildest way of putting commercial transactions. 

 

Eventually civilization came to the West.  Those first settlers understood that the six-shooter was only a temporary, inefficient way of protecting one's investment; and out of that understanding came the rule of law, land titling, court access, and the gradual ordering of new lands.  The early years were indeed lawless and violent, but reflected the insuppressible frontier spirit of the new Americans willing to risk their lives for prosperity, land, significance.

The typically American valuation of individuality and independence grew out of those days.  Government was non-existent, towns grew up willy-nilly and only as supply depots.  The new Americans had no use for government until it could do what they could not.  The platting of urban land facilitated property rights, provided order to development.  In the old Southwest (the Florida panhandle) where English, French, Spanish, and Americans fought for dominance, transport, infrastructure, social services were all private until settlers and entrepreneurs realized the benefits of a benign overseer. 

The early days of industrialization - the era of the Robber Barons Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan - was an urban extension of the Wild West.  These first capitalists built and grew businesses on their own in bloody, unmediated competition with others.  The Al Capone era in Chicago where gangsters fought for turf and influence was no different, simply the other side of the American coin. 

So it is no surprise that after a scant 250 years, America is still redolent of the Wild West, robber baron capitalism, expansionism, territorialism, and fierce individuality.  The inner city black ghettoes are not anomalies, but legatees of this persistent, timeless ethos.  Guns, territorial ambition, individualism, violence, and lawlessness there are no different than the Wild West of two hundred years before. 

Donald Trump is the most complete expression of this ethos that America has ever seen.  The Left thinks he runs against the grain - baldly and defiantly individualistic, capitalist, and opportunist while they are compassionate, commiserating, and inclusive - but he goes with the grain.  Even the most casual student of American history with one or two trips to the wide open spaces understands his profound Americanism.  Only those with fanciful visions of a world that never existed and never will think he is out of step. 

Trump is a gunfighter, a robber baron, a carny barker, a roughhewn salesman, an adventurer.  He brooks no opposition and confronts any resistance with violence of his own.  He is uncultured without social graces.  He does not suffer fools, makes way through the ranks with intimidation and force of character; and he is exactly the president to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Putin and Xi.  He has, like his OK Corral gunslinger ancestors, no hesitation to use all the weapons in his armory to defeat his enemies, gain hegemony, wealth, and control. 

Why should anyone be surprised at the personality, character, and ambitions of Donald Trump?  He is a product of America, speaks for America, embodies every bit of its aggressive, uncultured, bourgeois appeal. 

Europeans shake their heads as they always have at American low-class excess, and the American Left goes apoplectic at his use of power and authority; but both have ignored or at best overlooked his origins, his social and cultural inheritance. 

Romance In A Time Of Misery - A Story Of Sex, Love And The Taming Of A Liberal Woman

Amanda Phillips was a simple woman of simple tastes and modest expectations.  She had grown up in a small New England town, daughter of a homemaker and a pharmacist, good Catholic, choir girl, good student, and aspiring citizen. 

That is what New Brighton did.  It was the model of propriety, rectitude, and good manners. Men still tipped their hats to women and opened doors for them, mothers happily and willingly took care of their husbands and their homes, and neighbors were helpful and considerate. 

Some thought that Thornton Wilder had New Brighton in mind when he wrote Our Town; and while the play had a dark message about life, the characters were much like those in Amanda's home town. 

 

Mrs. Eddy next door, for example, watched out for the Phillips children, brought angel food cake to Emma Phillips on Saturdays, and her husband helped Jack Phillips shovel snow from the driveway after bad storms. 

The town had its rumors - Irma Swanson's suicide, John Baxter's fugue to Paraguay to meet his Guarani lover, the 'incident at Chestnut Hill Park', an affair best left alone, and the arrest of a city alderman who 'had one hand in the till and the other hand up the skirt of the receptionist' - but all in all New Brighton was a good place to live, worship, and work. 

 

Amanda spent two years at Central Connecticut State College before it became a university and when it was still a teachers' college.  Her family intended her to become an elementary school teacher and she followed their advice and counsel.  Until one day she woke up dissatisfied, disappointed with and discouraged by her ordinary, common, and uninspiring life. 

It could have been the times.  Despite the insularity of New Brighton, the social revolution taking place everywhere else in the country could not but help but influence the town. Or perhaps it was sexual maturity and a growing sense of her femaleness and erotic desire; or the surprising fragility of her parents' marriage, itself a product of the age.  She heard late night arguments in their bedroom over her mother's frustration, immobility, and desperate desire for independence. 

In any case, Amanda became increasingly restive, told her parents that she was going to quit CCSC and go to New York to find herself and her fortune. 

Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were just as happy to have their now adult daughter out from underfoot - the decks needed to be clear for running in these difficult times - and wished her well.

New York was a far cry from New Brighton, but the young Phillips girl had her wits about her and enough savvy to negotiate the pitfalls of a young ingenue in the big city.  In fact she found the city exciting, demanding, and perfectly matched to her mood and expectations.

It was a heady time, a time of coffee shops, intellectual debate, revolutionary thinking, and liberal vision.  Life was now an open field, vistas in all directions, and room to roam. 

 

She enrolled in NYU, took courses on Hegel and Marx, found places of intellectual opening and collegiality, and her life trajectory now seemed clear.  Her life as a committed progressive began. 

Her personal life was just as fulfilled.  She had many sexual partners, travelled with them cross-country and stayed in Haight-Ashbury and a cabin in the Humboldt County woods and with each adventure became more and more convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her journey. 

However, the doors to her inner rooms, as she put it, remained closed.  None of her lovers had the patience to go beyond political philosophy, but she enjoyed her immersion in the heady social freedom of the times to explore who she really was. Love was absent in an otherwise full and complete life. 

She, like most of her New York friends grew out of rebellion and channeled her progressive energies into more substantial and productive work.  Too limited in education to follow a career in law and pursue a radical agenda in the courtroom, and too rooted in progressive ideology to pursue one in business, she turned to non-profit advocacy and joined the mainstream of liberal activism. 

Over the years there was no progressive cause that she didn't embrace - women's rights, the fate of the black man, the environment, world peace. So committed, involved, and passionate was she about the causes she fought for, that she lost the perspective that she once had.  If there was one thing about the Grover's Corners and New Brighton it was foundation - the importance of social and personal compassion and the inclusion of others in one's life and liberty.  

Now she had become embittered, angry, and annoyed at the ignorance of conservatives who refused to acknowledge the problems faced by the country and the world at large.  They were hidebound in the false security of wealth and privilege or so trapped in a working class prejudice that their obduracy and unwillingness to open their eyes was maddening. 

It is hard to love anything, let alone anyone within this zeitgeist of hate, resentment, and suspicion; and so that one important piece of the puzzle remained missing.  There was no room for wine and roses when the problems facing humanity were existential. 

Epiphanies happen unexpectedly - that is what they are, sudden aha! experiences that come without warning, and so it was that she met the man of her dreams in a K Street bar.  All of the subliminal, long immured, but powerfully romantic feelings that had remained behind closed doors for so many years came to the fore. 

 

At first she hated her feminized, independent, willful self for even entertaining such feelings, but simply could not help herself.  She fell head over heels in love with Trevor Cabot, Republican, conservative, lawyer and developer. 

Patrick McGrath in his book Asylum writes of the spontaneous, uncontrollable sexual desire of a young married woman for a patient at the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane where her husband is Deputy Superintendent. There was no question of propriety or caution involved.  Like Amanda, too much unrequited emotional need had built up and there was no question of for once and for all releasing it. 

McGrath's Stella simply could not help herself, and even awareness of her lover's violent, psychopathic past could deter her. She abandoned all reason, all caution, all responsibility to her husband and young son and pursed a disastrous relationship with Edgar Stark. 

Women, said McGrath, are creatures of vast, inexhaustible resources of sexual desire, passion, and need; and under the right circumstances and with the right partner, they are expressed and cannot be reversed. Men, he went on to say, are much more limited and circumspect in their desires.  Perhaps because they have always been the pursuer, the privileged, and the dominant sex, they have fewer such emotional reserves; but in any case it is women who fall the hardest, who succumb despite every measure of social discipline. 

Stella was so impossibly in love with Stark that she risked her life and despite the reemergence of his deadly psychopathic side never lost her desire for him. 

McGrath could have written just as easily about Amanda Phillips who from the very first came under the thrall, the spell, the control of Trevor Cabot.  All reserve was abandoned, and despite everything - his radical conservatism and his socially dismissive and arrogant political posture against which she had fought for decades - she couldn't resist.  He was inimitably attractive, confident, sexually mature, and irresistibly charming. 

In her calmer moments, she thought of her mother who had warned her against such men.  They had only only one thing on their mind and all women should beware.  In fact Trevor was a caricature of the cad, the Casanova,  and the Lothario her mother had described, and she had to smile at both the image and the reality.  Neither mattered.  She knew that she could not do without him. 

It is not surprising that her political advocacy waned as her sexual desire increased.  There was clearly no room for both in such an intense physical and emotional relationship; but it was more than her liberalism being shunted aside to make room for the more immediate passion she was feeling. The sexual desire somehow dismantled the architecture of her political belief. 

If this individual, highly personalized, intense, independent relationship was so completely satisfying, then wasn't individualism itself more valuable than communitarianism?  And if such irrevocable intimacy erased everything outside it, of what value was that pedestrian, predictable world she had spent so many years trying to change?

The relationship between Stella and Stark ended and ended badly - he off into his own febrile, insane world and she desperately depressed, still hopelessly in love with him and unable to live without him.  The affair between Amanda and Trevor ended less dramatically and existentially; but the transformation in her had been ineradicable.  The world looked different after the affair, as clear as before but the obverse of what she had seen. 

Love - usually the obfuscator of reality - was a cleansing agent, and gone were her former dreams of utopia and a new, compassionate, verdant, and peaceful world.  She had been tamed as completely as Kate had been by Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.  In both cases the taming had not been enslavement but freedom to choose once the fetters of the inhibiting past had been removed. 

Amanda was finally a happy woman. 

Donald Trump's Arch, Ballroom, Garden Of American Heroes - The Left Falls For The Most Brilliant Con Since Snake Oil

Speaking with NPR's Steve Inskeep, comedian and political commentator Bill Maher noted how news organizations such as NPR were falling for Trump's ploy to create "distractions" for the media to report on and discuss rather than the bigger issues.

Maher labeled the President's proposed 250-foot-tall Victory Arch as 'meaningless'.  He told Inskeep, 'These are things I don't care about.  This is his genius in getting you to care about..'

When Inskeep, incredulous, asked, 'So, I shouldn't care about that arch or whatever?', Maher replied, 'Fuck no.  Absolutely not.  Not the arch, not the reflecting pool, not the ballroom [not the Garden of American Heroes].  This is all meaningless stuff.  Steve Bannon famously said, 'The way we win is we flood the zone with shit, and you're eating the shit.  You don't have to'. 

'Genius'; but without the credulous Left with its now ingrained assumption that everything Donald Trump does is maliciously wrong, the con would never work.  P.T. Barnum famously said that 'A sucker is born every minute' and the carny barker, the con, the snake oil salesman will always have easy pickin's, and Trump has been a master for playing the Left like fools. 

The apoplexy of the Left is entirely of Trump's doing. He plays them like a violin.  He knows every note, every phrasing, every adagio and pianissimo, every clash of the cymbals that will drive them mad, send them into a St. Vitus' dance of epileptic fever.  He knows that for all the things he is hated for, it is this - his bad taste, his bourgeois love of oversized yachts, arm candy, glitz and glamour, image, mansions, sequins, and tinsel.  And knowingt hat, he rubs it in.  

Not just an arch, but gigantic, overwhelming, monumental one; not just a ballroom but a faux Baroque, Rococo, impossibly overdone one, as far from 18th century, old Anglo-Saxon, Founding Fathers simplicity and English reserve as can be.  Not just a field celebrating American heroes but a Disneyland, a theme park, a riotous display of Hollywood-style patriotism. 

While the Left flounders and sputters with hate, unable to articulate a single coherent policy or program, obsessed with these deliberate shibboleths, swallowing every last bait thrown to them hook, line, and sinker, Trump goes about his business.  Destroying Iran's nuclear capacity and degrading their military, government, and infrastructure; assuring that Hamas will never again threaten Israel; closing the southern border and deporting illegal aliens; reducing the size of government and eliminating the bureaucracy; freeing the private sector from punitive taxes and legal restrictions; dismantling the fallacious and divisive concepts of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) and the gender spectrum. 

This President is the most radically transformative in recent American history, and all that the Democrats have in their armory is Trump Hate - an inarticulate, choking, garbled response that has no resonance, no appeal, no appeal except to those who already have bought the fantasy. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president.  The Founding Fathers were not representative of the American people, the peasantry.  They were patrician English, aristocrats, intellectuals, philosophers, and thinkers and the country was lucky to have them framing the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. 

Trump is a man of the people, as lowbrow, bourgeois, and tasteless as the rest of America.  He is the president of Walmart, Arby's, professional wrestling, NASCAR, bass boats and gun racks, not Camelot, Pablo Casals, Chippendale, Townsend, and Robert Frost. 

Whereas John Kennedy, a shanty, lace-curtain Irish, son of a bootlegger and Nazi sympathizer, and faux aristocrat entertained la creme de la creme, the literati, the sophisticated, and the high-toned and sold the country on his Downton Abbey manorial cast; Donald Trump goes to the bottom - the real America, the raw, unschooled, ragged lovers of glitz, image, and fortune - and promises them a real American dream. 

Trump, a man who has amassed a fortune in the most competitive, lawless, aggressive, intimidating environment in America - New York real estate - is undaunted by Democrat attempts to remove him from office.  The many frivolous, politically engineered, absurd law suits against him have all been dismissed.  For Trump these legal assaults were no more than flies to be shooed away.  The Left's claims of racism, homophobia, and misogyny were swatted away, given no attention.  He was not a survivor, but a victor; and in this, his second term, he is letting his tormenters have it. 

There has never been a more savvy, astute, calculatingly brilliant politician than Donald Trump, and he came lately to politics.  When he ran for President it was a lark, an expression of that same braggadocio and outlandish self-confidence which made him millions; so when he took office he was not about to 'act presidential' as his critics insisted.  He had no idea what that was, and in fact no one in America did - except that it was some myth confected by the Left to conform to their faux progressivism. 

Acting presidential was simply being president, and Trump was that in spades. He learned the ropes during his first term and then came out blazing in his second.  The Left never knew what hit them.  From the first week of his second term he sent his bulldozers down Independence Avenue to raze the bureaucracy, sent federal agents out to round up illegal aliens, and began to dismantle each and every one of the preposterous programs and policies put in place by the progressive tool, Joe Biden. 

Perhaps most importantly - and a knockout blow to the Left - was his aggressive stance on illegal immigration.  Biden had deliberately let tens of millions of illegal aliens into the country to distort the electoral districting, i.e. turning red districts blue after censuses which counted illegal residents; and Democrats have refused voter ID to assure that those let in could vote for their party.  In the most callously transparent, hypocritical justification, they said it was to assure that black people who haven't the means, ability, or intelligence to get an ID, they are fighting for unrestricted access to the polling booth. 

So while Trump aggravates the Left and throws them into paroxysms of hate with his arches and ballrooms, he goes about the serious business of governance and restoration of political polity. Never a president like him.