Donald Trump was the kind of outrageous American president that the country needed. No more of the quiet, religious, sanctimony of Jimmy Carter. No more of the ‘I am the first black President, Cabinet that looks like America’ crown of thorns Bill Clinton. No more of the macho, arrogant aircraft carrier landing strut ‘I won the war’ Bush II.
Donald Trump was finally America’s President, the real thing – lowbrow, arm candy, Las Vegas, Hollywood, NY real estate bully, and one of us. No fireside chats, warm, worn sweaters, cigarette boat, Vineyard sailing pretentions. Trump was crass, tinseled, over-the-top and grandiose. He wanted nothing to do with the Washington Establishment, the powers that be, and least of all with progressive sanctimony and comic book Utopianism.
Trump is a man of the reality TV generation, the generation of make up, Botox, stiletto heels, and Las Vegas faux glamour and sexual innuendo. He is a hero to the trailer trash, gun-toting, church-on-Sunday, flag-waving, patriotic crowd which had no chance for his yachts, resorts, and beautiful women but who never resented the fact that he had them. Wanting these glitzy, showy, fancy things is at the very heart of the American dream. Donald Trump unapologetically taps into this back country, hillbilly, cracker mentality, and his constituents love it.
More importantly Donald Trump totally dismisses the old, established cultural powers that be of Washington. He has no respect for the established media, political pundits, think tanks, or received wisdom. He is a man of social media, big data, and universal populism. He is a child of the new, plugged-in, cybernetic, subjective, viral New Age; and the old guard are flummoxed. They have no idea what’s happening and persistently try to draw the Republic back to truth, veracity, intellectual mediation, and reasonableness; but not only have politics changed but the very social dynamics of the country have.
America is no longer the republic of agrarianism and respect and reverence for Anglo-Saxon patrimony. Donald Trump’s revolution is cultural. Trump and his populist generation are new wave activists. They care little for vetted, authoritarian facts and place their bets on subjective optimism and good, old-fashioned patriotism.
He laughs at progressive sanctimony, gender politics, inclusivity, and multicultural absurdity, He has no problem with the originalist idea of a heterogeneous society, but has excoriated the absurdity of the Left’s exaggerations – a gay, transgender, black, feminist America. He lambastes progressives for their naïve, moralistic assumptions, their disregard and dismissal of righteous middle Americans, and their vain hopes of Utopianism. He is not a man of faith but never one to gutterize it like the Left. God or no God, religion will always have a prominence and essentiality far beyond political venality
He is a snake oil salesman, a carny barker, and vaudevillian; a master prestidigitator, a circus clown, and the ringleader of a three-ring circus. He is a borscht belt comedian, a late night talk show provocateur, and a TV jolly. He is one of us.
For all these reasons the Left hates Donald Trump. He is against everything they stand for – not simply the familiar progressive policies of government spending, international compromise, environmental protection, and social reform, but much more importantly the very idea of governance and the generous political philosophy behind it. The world is too troubled, too beset by predatory capitalism, systemic racism, misogyny, and climate change denial to be left to a buffoon.
It would be one thing of Trump reasoned with them, engaged them in reasonable debate about findings, consequences, and investments; another thing altogether to suffer his scurrilous, vicious, intemperate, and ignorant attacks. He is not content to challenge but to offend, to attack, to laugh at, and to dismiss all their passionate, missionary principles.
Biden and his progressive claques are not socialist in the Soviet-era sense of the word, but more profoundly communalist in social outlook than any Communist. America is a country of absurdity and wild exaggeration – Trump’s country. It is a place where social outliers can find a home, a nation of anti-vaxxers, isolationists, believers in an Armageddon just over the horizon; believers in alien invasion, brainwave altering Russian technology, the insidious, treacherous insult of fluorides, and the one-world conspiracy. Any belief, no matter how cockamamie, has a place here.
Donald Trump is the best spokesman for American eccentricity and real American exceptionalism that America has ever had. He is anathema to the Upper West Side liberals who insist on the existence of one, universal, undeniable truth, and a champion of those for whom one anything is nonsense.
The Left is afraid of Donald Trump; and for his first year of campaigning, his four years in the White House, and the two years since, they have never let go of their animus. They have nurtured their hate, turned it into principle. Ridding the nation of Donald Trump has been a sacred mission, a Crusade, a holy war. No Republican president has been so viciously attacked. For all George Bush’s military adventurism and brush-cutting Texas machismo, he was treated as an opponent, an espouser of contrary ideals, and a man without social perspective.
His father, George Bush I was respected for his patrician noblesse oblige, his long dedicated service to the country as ambassador, his high-level civil service, Vice President, and President. Even Richard Nixon was given his due for détente with the Soviet Union and China, attacked for his deformed Vietnam policies, and finally hung out to dry because of his unconstitutional acts. Nixon was an unattractive man, ingrown, suspicious, and deceptive; but he was a political anathema and little more. The Left was not afraid of him, knew how to rally political support, and were confident that he would not last.
The Left is afraid of Donald Trump because they know that his popular support is not just electoral but cultural. The tens of millions of Americans who voted for him are like him – untamed individualists who refuse to be force-fed notions of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’ and more importantly resent the assumption that because of their refusal they are ignorant, backwoods crackers.
Donald Trump, speaking for these very angry and vocal millions, throws back at the Left their pomposity, sanctimony, and arrogant assumptions of moral superiority. He ridicules them, casts them as fools in an Orwellian dystopia of their own making. Of course they hate and fear him. No one has treated them this way.
No president has come under such flagrantly political use of the judiciary. Trump has been accused of wrongdoing at every turn, impeached, brought before judge and jury in a failed attempt to discredit and finally, once and for all, banish the man from American political life. No less respected sources as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have noted the irregularity of the current suit against the former President.
The Wall Street Journal described Trump’s indictment as a “sad day for the country, with political ramifications that are unpredictable and probably destructive”; and Gary Abernathy of the Washington Post wrote, “ Bringing charges related to the possession of classified documents against a current or former president for anything short of colluding with our enemies or selling them on the black market is unnecessary, unwise and destructive to democracy.”
Spoiled, bratty children brought up in a purified environment of sanctimony and presumed right, offended at every perceived slight, incensed that their ideas could possibly be challenged, can only hate. The man is evil, an incarnation of all that is anti-social; a cultural pariah, a demon.
Wrong. He is one of us, pure and simple.
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