The President, The Priest, And The Call Girl - The Fascinating Complexity Of Donald Trump

Jimmy Carter was a moral, principled president in whose fireside chats a la FDR, looking very much like Mr. Rogers in his cardigan and simple shoes, he urged Americans to turn their heat down, thereby missing the point of the competitive, free market which is at the hear of the American enterprise. We are not a moral people and while we might adhere to the rules of polity that make civil society workable, we are not about to trade comfort, desire, and wealth for principle. 

There were those who admired Carter for such principle.  It was about time that a president used his bully pulpit for more than saber rattling and patriotism; but most Americans would only adjust their thermostats if made to - i.e. if there were a price to pay. 

  
Today's liberal acts with the same diffuse, arbitrary morality.  He recycles assiduously, assuring that cans are rinsed and never mixed with plastic, sorts and triages, and adds a compost bin to those in the alley.  The economics of recycling are irrelevant.  It is received wisdom, an obvious good, a must for the planet.  The same goes for electric vehicles, another unchallenged, absolute good.  

The child labor in the Eastern Congo, the gaping mining  holes in the Arizona desert, the disposal cost of toxic battery materials, the sudden and precipitous demand for electrical power generated by AI beggaring the environmental impact of E-vehicles, and the new geopolitical competition for rare earths destabilizing the Third World countries are all overlooked. 

The modern liberal, a legatee of Jimmy Carter's naive morality, persists in his accumulation of received wisdom.  Hypocrisy abounds.  Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders who advocates for every progressive cause and insists on the redistribution of wealth, is a millionaire, owns three homes travels to environmental conferences in a private jet and travels to the airport in gas-inefficient SUVs. 'Do as I say, not as I do', says the Senator.  'It's the principle that matters', and given P.T. Barnum's famous adage, 'A sucker is born every minute', millions of credulous Americans light  candle to the senator from Vermont and believe his every word. 

When Donald Trump arrived on the scene, few in the political aerie of Washington took him seriously.  He was a man without principle, without an iota of the compassion and humility of Carter or the rectitude of Joe Biden.  He had nothing of LBJ's higher order principles - The Great Society and Civil Rights.  Trump was a charlatan, a con man, a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York without a scintilla of morality.  He was out to enlarge, enhance, and expand his own personal financial empire at the expense of the nation. 

 

Of course he was none of those things. Liberals had simply never seen a man like this who had rock-solid conservative principles no different from Ronald Reagan but who was a vaudevillian, a tummler, a Borscht Belt comedian, and outrageous circus act who looked very much like America.  

Former President Bill Clinton famously announced that his Cabinet was 'going to look like America' and by so claiming he began the downward spiral into divisive, contentious DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity); but Trump was the first real American President - a man who not only tapped into middle class, middle brow, bourgeois aspirations, but embodied them.  He was crass, vulgar, and with a kitschy, tacky taste - as American as apple pie - and liberals hated him for abandoning their sense of righteousness and moral purpose. 

Worse than that, they saw him as evil – a sorcerer and shaman in the court of the Devil, a fiendish interloper who had to be stopped at all costs. It was no longer a matter of politics or matters for the loyal opposition.  This was a visitation of evil, a man not only without moral principle, but one espousing moral absence – a vacuity of principle not just a political revision.

His was a rule of perverse legerdemain through which he cast a spell on millions who were now his ardently defiant supporters.  Only political exorcism would rid the country of such scourge. Lawsuits, claims of personal and official malfeasance, and attacks on character and family went on for years but to no avail.  His attempts to reconstitute America into a soulless, acquisitive, morally indifferent country went undaunted.

The American Left engineered a revision of sexual identity, insisting that sexuality was only a matter of choice and preference.  Heterosexuality was only one option on the so-called gender spectrum, one of a hundred or more possibilities.  No one needed to be artificially locked into an arbitrary sexuality.  Biology and genetics were overruled. The 'other gendered' were championed as the new wave of social reconfiguration.  Motherhood, fatherhood, siblinghood, the whole gamut of reproduction and social organizations to encompass it were rethought.  The idea of sexual attractiveness, female beauty, and virility was reset. 

Except for Donald Trump who had always been the squire of beautiful women.  Ever since his earliest New York days, Trump was a sought-after male - handsome, wealthy, confident, and appreciative and lover of women.  Female company was part of his persona, his life and his weltanschauung - not just any women but the most beautiful, the most desirable, the top of the line. 

He like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former French presidential candidate and well-known Lothario, did not stop there.  Their courtesan lovers were worthy of a Sultan's harem.  A beautiful, accommodating, attentive call girl was simply part of the sexual panoply.  When Strauss-Kahn was caught in a prostitution sting, he defiantly replied to his accusers, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'.

The allure of such men, both Trump and Strauss-Kahn, was limitless.  They were the quintessential, unreconstructed, unbowed, and unapologetic lover of women.  Women were not put off by their many lovers, but wanted men like this, men who reveled in sexual conquest, sexual favors, and the sexual satisfaction that only they could give. 

While Trump never dismissed homosexuals - his libertine philosophy was all-inclusive - he felt sorry for those who would never know the Lawrentian, ying-yang, Tantric pleasures of heterosexual sex. Homosexuality was not a perversion, but a sad missing out. 

And so it was that heterosexual sex defined the man, Trump, and whether princess or courtesan, he thanked God for the pleasure. 

This male, virile, strong-willed, dominant character was the real reason why Trump hatred emerged; and when added to his hopelessly bourgeois taste - the tacky White House ballroom, the outrageously Las Vegas Arch of Victory, or the Disney-esque Field of American heroes - on top of his radically conservative political initiatives, it was no wonder that the Left was apoplectic. It was one thing to hate a man for one of the three, but all three was the perfect storm. 

Never had progressives seen such a man, a profoundly American man, the embodiment of every lowbrow aspiration of the American lower classes, a sexual truant, a social deviant, and man so ruled by antagonism to good that he could only be a spawn of the Devil. 

This is why Donald Trump is the most complex, fascinating, and unique President in American history.  Other presidents have had lovers, popular appeal and challenging political policies; but none have had the complete package - a man to be envied. 

As psychologists know, envy leads to disastrous corners, and progressives who cannot bring themselves to admire such a sexually, politically, financially, and socially successful man, can only hate him. The perversion is theirs, not his. 

Complexity is hard for the single-minded, and the American Left has shown itself to be a Johnny One Note, capable of one thing and one thing only - hate for Donald Trump. 

The rest of the country has seen a once in a lifetime - no, once in history - American original, and the country will never forget him. 

Of course many of his policies are worth examination and opposition - such is the nature of radical politics - but that is beside the point.  To miss the Donald Trump show and to focus on the obvious, predictable, nit-picky aspects of governance, is to miss the spectacle of a lifetime. 

The President, Kitsch, And Bad Taste - How Class Not Policy Defines Trump Hatred

'He is vulgar, crass, lowbrow, and bourgeois', said Esta Gittleman about the President who kept defiling the image of Camelot with his arches, uber-tacky ballrooms, kitschy makeovers of the traditional, and turning the White House into a gross, plastic, tasteless monstrosity. 

Esta was well past her prime - never an attractive woman, but in the Sixties when good looks were signs of elitism, Esta's wiry hair, sallow complexion, and oddly-arranged features were entry tickets to the radical Left.  

Until you got used to it, Esta's face was hard to look at.  Everything was so off-kilter that your eyes could not take in the whole and saw only a nose that was somehow not aligned with her mouth, an eye that wandered right, and a jaw not quite prognathous but suggestive of it and which when still gave her an Easter Island look but when in motion, a strange, misshapen character of its own. 

As much as she and her colleagues in the East Village were loathe to admit it, there was something alluring and desirable about Camelot, the White House of John Kennedy, an appeal which lasted long after the young president's assassination and maintained a hold on Esta's generation.  

Camelot was far from the rancid basements and lumpenproletariat of Avenue A, far from Prince Jack and Princess Jackie surrounded by the glitterati of Washington, hosts to the best and the brightest, the epicenter of high culture, good taste, and marvelous manners. 

Of course Esta said she hated everything about Camelot, how it symbolized the worst American instincts of class, privilege, and entitlement; but as she looked around and saw only crummy looks and dopier, stoned grins, she admitted her desire for the top, not the bottom - and make no bones about it, this existence was nowhere, and despite its sloganeering and counterculture self-assuredness, it was going nowhere. 

 

But the die had been cast.  As she looked in the mirror - which she never did because it was a sign of bourgeois vanity - she was taken aback.  She was indeed ugly, a twenty-five year old fright.

She ran her fingers through her hair, but the wiry thatch was permanently frazzled, unkept, and a tangled mess.  She had always wanted straight, blonde, silken hair and hated her parents for having given her misshapen Mediterranean looks and not the American Dream; and now, looking in the mirror, she saw what the few years since that hopeful adolescence had done.  She turned her eyes away and started to cry. 

Esta grew up of course, learned to live with the bad hand she was dealt and learned how to trace her very ethnic, plebian looks to her advantage.  She became a star in the progressive firmament.  She had dismissed her girlish fantasies of Prince Charming, a boudoir, and life in a castle, forgotten Camelot, and turned her former envy into political fodder.  

She became a progressive's progressive - a woman devoutly obedient to the canon, a warrior in the cause of social justice, and the reform of everything privileged, endowed, and inherited. 

She was surprised at the level and intensity of her hatred for Donald Trump, a bourgeois bottom-dwelling bombastic fool.  Although an extension of the halcyon Biden years - a cabinet and White House filled with people of color, of alternate sexuality and full figures - might not be in the cards, and any overblown childish Camelot fantasy was long gone, this travesty...this absurd, ungainly, fat fool of the worst of American culture was unexpected. 

She would have welcomed a continuation of the Biden years and even tolerated a channeling or incarnation of Kennedy's best and brightest; but this?  This expression of the very worst that America had to offer - tacky, sequined, tinseled, big titted and absurdly over-made up, vainglorious in its embrace of the most god-awful American excesses - was too much. 

She - and the Left - hated Donald Trump not for his gestapo ICE troops, his relegation of gay and lesbian Americans, his downright racism and crony capitalism, and his military adventurism but for who he was.  They couldn't stand the fact that he was one of the masses that they hated and saw as ignorant obstacles to social progress.  He was a fake as they were.  

She abhorred his oversized yachts, mansions, and hotels.  She hated his beauty queens and arm candy.  She hated this classless, culturally clueless monstrosity.  

It was class and culture that mattered, nothing more. A President without such aggressively bourgeois taste with the same political agenda would have been objected to, fought, and countered but never hated or dismissed like Trump.  The Left hated him for his defiant embrace of class in what they hoped would be a classless society.  Not only that, his class was the worst imaginable. 

Esta felt outraged and insulted by each and every gross obtuseness of the man. It was bad enough that he built the White House ballroom, a Rococo monstrosity, but when came the kitschy makeover of the Kennedy Center, followed by the victory arch and the field of heroes, she could only ask, 'What next from this clown?'

 

Never before had such virulent ad hominem hatred for a sitting president been seen.  The inchoate rage, the apoplectic misery, the absolute incontinence of hatred is new even for the smarmy affair that American politics has always been.  Even Richard Nixon, the disgraced President who lied and cheated for political advantage and was forced to resign, never generated such visceral, blind hatred.  

LBJ withdrew from politics rather than face the excoriating rage of the American people. 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today', shouted thousands in front of the White House demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Yet, his Great Society social reform and signing of the Civil Rights bill were hailed as milestones of progressive politics. 

Trump gets no credit, no acknowledgment for any of his programs and policies. Opponents simply cannot get past the all-consuming virulence of their personal hatred. 

Yet, no President has been as American as Donald Trump.  No one has embodied the lowbrow culture of the bayou - the glitz and sequined glamour of Las Vegas and the treacly romantic vision of Hollywood, the marvelous creation of European Jews, Goldwyn and Mayer who wanted to reflect a country as far from the European shtetl and ghetto as they could imagine.  They helped consolidate this unrealistic, dreamy image of an America which never existed nor would ever exist.

 

Donald Trump has never hidden his Americanism - not his stars-and-stripes patriotism but his love of yachts, mansions, and arm candy.  He is as vulgar as a pipe fitter, as dippy as a soap opera addicted housewife, as obsessed with not just money but a show of wealth.  

He wants - and has - what we want. Not Pablo Casals and Robert Frost but Merle Travis and Taylor Swift.  Camelot was a lace-curtain Irish fantasy, that of the son of a bootlegger and bar fighter.  Trump is like Kennedy in his oversized imagination, just different in the dreams he creates. 

Americans loved Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, two Edwardian period pieces about the English upper classes and their downstairs maids.  A series about class and democracy but loved for its royalty - and such is the contradictory tale of American culture.  We gave up Camelot for Donald Trump and are more American for it. 

Esta never got over her bilious hatred for Trump and finally lost her hold - on her marriage, her community, on reality itself.  Hate, as social psychologist Brent Underwood has noted, is far more powerful and all-consuming than love; and once it takes hold it can only grow, metastasize and eventually destroy the host. 

Everything went by the wayside - Esta’s progressivism nurtured since a young women in the basements of the East Village and the cafes of Bleecker Street, he passion for social reform, her commitment to the black man...everything gone with the wind, and all that was left was a crochety old lady. 

Americans are proud of saying that they live in a society without class, unlike the British, but nothing could be farther from the truth.  Despite all the fol-de-rol about race, gender, and ethnicity, it is class which still defines us; and we are shamelessly bourgeois, graspy, and romantic about our absurdly impossible dreams. 

Esta was a victim of class.  Had the President been anything but a lowbrow buffoon she might have been less addled and more focused; but such is politics and such is the tenure of Donald Trump and his Second Coming.

The Folly Of Overeducated Old Men - Never Giving Up On Doing Good, The Tale Of A Fading Flower

Bob Muzelle was getting old - was old, actually, if you looked at the actuarial tables, but never felt better.  Yes, a new hip and a new knee, trouble sleeping, and the odd stumble, but he felt as fit as a fiddle.  He was proud of his straight, confident gait as he walked to his office past stooped old men shuffling along, sitting on window ledges to catch their breath. He was in fine fettle, had all his marbles, and there was no reason why he couldn't rule the roost at Scientists For Social Action - the non-profit he had founded. - forever. 

'What's on the agenda today?', he snapped at a minion already at his desk.  There were always a million things to do, so many pressing problems; and now that Donald Trump was in office, they became more urgent.  The many strides that Bob and his colleagues had made regarding the warming climate were being set back decades.  

The President was opening gas and oil fields, investing in new refineries and pipelines, promoting data centers, and rescinding all former subsidies on electric vehicles. He alone had advanced the Doomsday clock to dangerous, catastrophic territory. Their hard-fought victories for gender equality, racial identity, and a more equitable economic system were being denied, set back, and ridiculed. 

His first appointment was waiting for him - Bettina Evans, a transgender woman who wanted Bob's organization, known for its progressive stance on gender equality, to lobby for her and other sexually reassigned men and women and to ensure continuation of federal legislation to protect and promote their cause. 

Her perfume, floral and cheap, filled the small conference room.  The windows in the building, an old Victorian brownstone, were sealed shut as part of the retrofitting for central air, and her cloying, gagging perfume recirculated. 

She was dressed to the nines.  She was one of those men who when they became women felt it important to flaunt their new sexuality but having no practice always overdid it and turned themselves into tarts - all the eyeliner, lipstick, and costume jewelry their new persona could take, and they looked very much like the hookers of the Rue St. Denis in Paris. 

Bettina was waiting surgery on her larynx, and so her gruff, chain-smoking, piper fitter voice was still hers.  The contrast was unsettling. Seeing her sitting in the chair before him, legs demurely crossed and an expectant smile on her face, Bob was unprepared for the dockyard voice which, despite being as gay as she could make it, growled at him.  

'And what can I do for you, Miss Evans', Bob began, emphasizing the 'Miss', and ginning up all his reserves to act the attentive, interesting listener.

Bettina croaked on for ten minutes about the persistent discrimination that she felt, how she was met with dismissive, curt refusals at every job interview, was cackled and smirked at at singles bars, and was politely told that the resonant, classically bass notes of her register were not quite what the Westmoreland Church of Christ choir was looking for. 

She got the picture  - discrimination - and she wanted recourse, justice, and reparation.  After all, she had spent thousands of uncovered medical costs for her transition, and now, unemployed, was having trouble paying back her loans.  Action must be taken. 

A loophole, thank God, thought Bob.  She wants legal counsel not Congressional action, so he might quickly dispose of this petitioner; but no, Bettina insisted when Bob gave her the name of his friend, a prominent gay attorney who took such cases.  She wanted 'to go to the top'.  

She sniffled, took a dainty lace handkerchief from her sleeve, and dabbed her eyes.  'This has been such a nightmare', she growled.

Bob promised he would do his best, would put together a joint plan of action, and would get back to her soonest.  Bettina seemed calmed and restored, thanked Bob profusely, and left his office now chokingly filled with the awful scent of Eau de Lilac. 

'I never would have behaved like this as a younger man', Bob thought as closed the door behind the sashaying Bettina.  He would have marched with her, joined arms with her, burst his lungs for her; but instead he had looked at this pathetic, unreal creature and couldn't even manage an iota of sympathy.   

The old Bob kicked in tat the most inappropriate and untimely moments - the propriety, conservatism, and stability of his small New England community - and try as he might, he couldn't shake the thought.  She was a freak who belonged in a Barnum & Bailey side show along with two-headed babies and bearded women. 

 

He told his aide to follow up with the woman in a few weeks time, suggesting again that she consult a lawyer, and although he hesitated to send anything like this the way of his Yale classmate, anything to relieve him of the clown show he had just witnessed. 

The day turned out to be no easier. Why was it on some days the sun shone on him, and on others the day was nothing but stormy tempest?  He had long ago parted ways with his Calvinist upbringing and like most progressives saw religion as the obstacle to social progress, so prayer was impossible. 

So he put up with the troupe of angry black men who filled his office with their particular scent - some rancid, unfamiliar body odor mixed with expensive cologne and cigar smoke-filled Armani suits - and treated their appeals just as diffidently as he had those of Bettina. 

This diffidence was particularly troublesome for Bob who had cut his social justice teeth on civil rights - with the Reverend Barker Stone Cutter, Yale Chaplain on Freedom Rides to Selma and Meridian; alongside Martin and Ralph on the Pettus Bridge; first at the barricades, first to be handcuffed to spend a night in a Tuscaloosa jail; but now he was frankly and shamefully tired of all the cant, fulminations, and dilatoriness of the black community, still beyond dysfunctional, mired in crime, absent fatherhood, drugs, and violence. 

'Haven't I given enough?', Bob shouted out loud when the black men had left his office.  'Haven't I given them my best years?'

And then came the global warming concession - young men and women like he used to be clambering to be heard, appealing to join forces with an organization which had always been at the forefront of climate sanity.  The first name that came into the heads of climate activists was Scientists for Social Action. 

The looks on their faces as they crowded into Bob's small office, reduced to almost nothing compared to the old days when he commanded corner office space high up on a glass tower on Massachusetts Avenue, were telling.  The scepter had been passed from this sorry old man they saw creaking up from his chair to greet them. 

Bob listened patiently to their presentation, but to his mind, usually sympathetic and open, it was they whom time had passed by.  Polar ice was increasing, not decreasing.  The sea had not poured over the seawalls into Manhattan and Miami.  There was no unexpected, violently increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, or tsunamis.  More and more geological evidence collected from deep core samples of ice, trees, and earth showed conclusively that the world's climate had never been static, but went through periodic warming and cooling periods.  Man's contribution to these cycles was negligible.  Al Gore and other climate doomsday-sayers looked like fools. 

 

Old age has a way of smoothing things out, providing the calm perspective that earlier ages lack. Mortality provides insight and calms the nerves.  It wasn't the warming climate that kept Bob up at night, but the irrevocability of his death. 

He cared little about lesbians, the ghetto, and the polar ice pack.  As hard as he tried to recapture his old piss and vinegar, he failed.  He was an old man, a fading flower. He couldn't get it up either for Annie from Accounting or the climate. 

'You've done all you can, dear', his wife Corinne said to him as he shared his thoughts with her, 'and maybe it's time to retire'.  To be honest she had put up with more than any wife should have with her husband's increasingly feral activism - much of it was nonsense and at best a willing suspension of disbelief.  Who could continually champion the black man as the savior of a crass, indolent, money-obsessed American culture when the ghetto was more of a shithole than ever?  What blinders did it take to ignore the obvious? 

'And don't let me get started on...'.  Here she held back the nastiest slur in the lexicon for the otherly-sexed Americans her husband had fought for.  She was sick and tired of their 'nobility', their cherished place in the new, sexually indeterminate age. 

Bob hung on, received the few desultory petitioners that still came his way, gave up on his speaking engagements, and eventually shuttered the doors of Scientists for Social Action.  Nobody noticed, of course, certainly not since the conservative volte face of the President; and there was indeed 'a time to live and a time to die' - at least there was that homily from the Beatles? Joni Mitchell?  He was dated, alas.