How Can A Buffoon Like Donald Trump Be President? - Because He Is One Of Us

Most people outside the United States cannot understand how a man like Donald Trump could possibly have been President and is likely to be so again. How could this buffoon, this tummler, this outrageously offensive vaudevillian, this clown even be considered for the highest office in the land? 

In 2020 in the election he lost to Joe Biden, he received 75 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the popular vote.  The turnout for Trump in his winning bid for the presidency was no different.  Half of the American electorate not only voted for Trump but were passionately for him. 

The American Left assumed in 2016 that their candidate, Hillary Clinton would win hands down.  She was  former Senator and Secretary of State and First Lady, and she was a woman in a woman's time.  There was no way that she could lose against rube, a barroom brawler, a man of glitz, arm candy, and bombast without an ounce of compassion, integrity, or respect; and yet she was defeated. 

Progressives who had hoped for a new era of social harmony, civil rights, and international respect were dumbfounded at the results.  How could a woman of principle, rectitude, and experience lose to this madman? 

 

No sooner than Trump had announced his intention to run for office in 2024, the Left began their decade-long campaign to discredit him.  Not only was he an outrageous, intemperate, bully of a man, he was also a racist, misogynist, and homophobe.  He cared little for the common man and less for the common woman - a bauble to be squired, escorted to his yachts, mansions, and exclusive clubs only. 

In fact according to progressives he was actually evil - a satanic character, a man who not only was without principle but against it.  His reign would be that of Beelzebub and the end of Christian compassion and goodness. 

The howls from the Left only increased when Trump was selected as the nominee of the Republican Party and would run against Kamala Harris, a woman even more credentialed and Oval Office-worthy than Hillary Clinton.  Harris was a proud black woman, a take-no-prisoners Genghis Khan California prosecutor, a harpy on the Senate Judiciary Committee who flayed, eviscerated, and tore the flesh from conservative Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanagh - an ur-woman with no apologies for her sex or her race.  She alone would transform America; and even Republicans would see the light of the changing day and turn to her to lead the nation into a new, more progressive, equal, and prosperous world. 

And yet, there was the buffoon on the stump, howling at his own moon, shouting about immigrant savagery and the godless, soulless poseur running against him.  He had survived lawfare - the multiple attempts to convict the former President on a series of imagined, politically-motivated, senseless charges - and survived not one but two assassination attempts, each of which gained him votes as the Odysseus of the modern age, waging battle, wounded, but victorious. 

How is it, then, that a country founded on the intellectual brilliance, political astuteness, and philosophical integrity - that of Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin - could have fallen so far?  How could this storied legacy have been so completely forgotten?

The answer is that despite the principles and absolute moral convictions of America's founding leaders, it has never been the country that they envisaged - an elite, profoundly traditional, Christian one founded on the principles of the European Enlightenment - but a brawling, gunfighting, mob-run, conman, Ponzi scheme, snake oil kind of place, a place where Las Vegas and Hollywood, lands of glitz, glamour, and image are the cultural centers which quickly replaced the Old World aristocracy of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. 

 

Americans not only are low-brow, but revel in it.  Their populism is not a simple nativist one - we are not 'The People' that Jefferson envisaged, the will of whom would always be right, but the mob that Hamilton saw, a rowdy bunch of kulaks and louts holed up in the piney woods or stumbling behind a plow.  We have evolved from backcountry crackers, shoot-'em-up cowboys and buffalo hunters; and yet our mentality, our pursuits, and our intentions have not changed.  

It matters not that malls, big box stores, off-the-rack clothes, and tours on the Danube have become the cultural memes of the day, or that a vast, barely educated, poorly employed, and politically adolescent middle class has become universal.  We haven't changed.  Robert Frost, Emerson, and Thoreau are at best the names of I-95 rest stops. Symphonies, ballet, and chamber music are irrelevancies. America has not gained in cultural sophistication as it matured as a country - it has lost it. 

So nothing should be surprising about Donald Trump.  Is he not the huckster, squire of beautiful women, magnate and owner of yachts, mansions, and things that we would like to be?  Is he not quintessentially American in his appetites, his braggadocio, and over-the-top personality?  Who can possibly judge Donald Trump who has ever been to Las Vegas or Hollywood; or who has ever set foot on Wall Street or the streets of New York?

He is one of us.  We want everything he has.  We want to say what we think, elaborate the facts a la Sunset Boulevard, dismissively judge amateur talent and ridicule amateur intelligence.  We want his yachts, his women, his palaces, and his power. 

Finally we have an American president, one of us.  Kennedy was an aristocrat from Downton Abbey, Clinton a horny dissimulator who refused to acknowledge his hillbilly roots, George Bush a down-home wannabee who confounded his cowboy and patrician heritage, LBJ who, as much as he hated Camelot and Hyannisport, would always define himself as the not-Kennedy.   Trump is not Kennedy, Churchill, Roosevelt, or Reagan.  He is American – at heart, fundamentally, and absolutely.



The tens of millions who voted for Donald Trump understand that he is a Man of the People more than any other president.  The Left, and especially the progressive Left cannot and will not accept that he was in the Oval Office and is likely to be again; but in this rejection of his legitimacy have ignored what is really America and not their imagined vision.  Trump is bourgeois, crass, and unschooled.  He is a streetfighter, a hooligan, and a showman.  He is a gambler, a risk-taker, and an unabashed, in-your-face, cultural thief.  How can he possibly be President, progressives ask?  How could this sexist, racist, etc. etc. man have fooled so many?

He did not fool anyone.  Those who voted for him and those who almost did understood him completely and voted for him exactly because of who he was.   They are not disappointed, but requited.  Nothing he has done – no turnabouts, questionable relationships, friendships, or deals have turned them against him. 

Donald Trump was the first real American President.  Who better to embody American petty bourgeois notions, materialism, unalloyed ambition, and success-at-all-costs?  Who better to appeal to Americans’ love of image, glamour, presence, showy wealth, and power?  Who better to showcase the American Wild West, rugged individualism, and the ultimate value of success.  It is all well and good to champion the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled, and the marginalized in public; but the reality behind closed doors is supremacy and victory.

Donald Trump is the quintessential American.  He, like the rest of us, likes beautiful, sexy women; fast cars, yachts, resorts, penthouses, and glamour.  The only difference is that he has them and we can only aspire to them.  We must be satisfied with People, E!, and Entertainment Today while he squires Miss Connecticut, spends weekends at Mar-el-Lago, and plans for his second post-Presidential retirement in Palm Springs, Palm Beach, St. Tropez, and Gstaad.

What is more threatening to progressive coastal elites than Trump’s radical populism is his unabashed classless, shameless, American crassness.  What disturbs his woke opponents more than his politics is his Las Vegas style.  No homage to the rectitude and Puritan tradition of the Founding Fathers; no Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, the Main Line, or Russian Hill; no Oxford eloquence, no thoughtful parsing; and worst of all, no respect for anyone.

What these opponents do not get nor ever will is that most Americans love Trump for his braggadocio, his one-liner insults, his fearlessness, and his absolute, unassailable confidence.  We would like to insult, to ridicule, to stereotype in public precisely because we have been told to shut up, be considerate, compassionate, and respectful despite the fact that the world needs more ridicule not less. We are Shecky Green, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie Murphy, Jackie Mason, and D.L. Hughley. 

Only the Left miss the point and still don’t get it.  Trump supporters knew precisely whom they were electing and for whom they will vote this November – a braggadocio, a carny barker, an outrageous, oversized, magnificent blowhard - one of us.