Donald Trump is a master of hyperbole, exaggeration, and downright tall tales. His invective is unparalleled, his stereotypes are as accurate as those of Shecky Green or Jackie Mason and as hilarious. He is full of bombast, braggadocio, hot air, and wild ravings. He is a whirling dervish, a St. Vitus' dancer, a voodoo priest, a Mad Hatter.
Amidst all this vaudeville, this Wild West show of bull riding and lassoing, clowns and high-wire acts, how can anyone take him seriously? How can anyone vote for a man so mentally discombobulated, and so entirely vain? What are his policies? Where does he stand?
The Left howls at his lies, his fabrications, and his downright distortion of fact while his supporters cheer and go wild. There is a disconnect somewhere, something someone is not getting. Either he is a clown, a carny barker, circus freak, and overrated showman, or he is a man of principle and sound policy, gussying up every speech with marvelously ingenious slights, lambasting his critics as bumpkins, rubes, and downright fools and letting his minions parse his words. After the weed-whacking, the ground - his ground - is as clear as day.
Of course Trump, as a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas, a performer, vaudevillian, and big tent revivalist in the old American tradition, doesn’t mean what he says. He says what he means. His is a political circus act with a semiotic foundation. Crazy as a fox and as smart as a whip, he speaks a firestorm but is more rational than his opponents who speak in platitudes, shopworn nostrums, and self-righteous appeals to righteousness.
None but unreconstructed liberal elites take him at face value. Everyone knows that his call for expatriating all illegal immigrants is purposeful hyperbole, circus act exaggeration, and vaudeville at its very best. Everyone but old Eastern progressives and young idealists understand that there can never be an impenetrable wall on our southern border.
No one but academics who insulate themselves from the world in their Cambridge, Upper West Side, San Francisco, and Chicago redoubts think there will ever be mass deportations, electrified wire fences at Dulles Airport, and storm troopers on the Canadian border to keep immigrants out. It is the heart of the matter that counts.
Hyperbole is window dressing, frills and pinafores, a scent of perfume and a bit of lace. Illegal immigration is a serious problem which has to be addressed, no longer with the tentative, hesitant gestures of the past but directly.
Trump's Borscht Belt comedic insult of those ‘alternately sexed’ does not mean, as his opponents claim he would intern, punish, and neuter them Nazi style. His words, loud and outrageous as they are, mean only to alert the electorate to the flaming idiocy of sexual diversity.
His offhanded dismissal of the dysfunctionality of the ghetto and the unregenerate hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter championing racial rights instead of racial responsibility is not racist but indicative, time to call a spade a spade, to look objectively at corrosive social ills.
The Left listens to his words and takes them at face value, but Trump is smarter, more savvy, and a genius at rhetoric, a Mark Antony, a Hamlet, a Demosthenes; and ironically the embodiment of Derrida and Lacan, deconstructionists who insist that the words of a text don't matter, only the hidden content, the pernicious and persistent catalogue of social injustice behind them.
Deconstructionism has had its day, although because of tenure there are many academics who will preach this secular animism until the day they die. All texts are equivalent, they say. There is no such thing as artistic genius, and the works of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Dostoevsky should be read only within the narrow context of race, gender, and ethnicity. Hamlet and Macbeth are nothing more than plays about political power, the corrupt nature of elites, and the alienation of the many to serve the powerful.
If one reads text carefully, deconstructionists say, one will discover the true meaning behind the words which are mere and artificial constructs of individuals who can but express political zeitgeist and the particular configurations of social, economic, and cultural conflict.
So where are these deconstructionists when it comes to parsing the stump performances of Donald Trump? Why are they so literal in their interpretation of his words? How could they assume that his hot button rhetoric is anything more than getting sinners to walk up the aisle and accept Jesus as their personal savior?
Americans are all lay deconstructionists. We understand that what Trump says stands for something else and is not ex cathedra. We get it. We get him. He gets us. We can read between the lines, and like the narrative we find there.
Most people hear what they want to hear, make up their minds early and quickly, and use information to confirm or consolidate their opinions. Once they have concluded that a public figure is worth attention because of his commitment to their causes, principles, or ideals, they stop parsing his speeches, analyzing his white papers, and listening to his debates.
Donald Trump - and Ronald Reagan before him - understands this social phenomenon and knows that what a catty journalist called 'profound simplicity' actually captures the essence of political brilliance.
Meanwhile Kamala Harris caterwauls on, mixing and matching, jumbling, a trifle, a gooey, custardy mess of fruit 'n' things, a cloyingly sweet dessert with no character, no class and no uniqueness, a sugar tit.
When she gets on one of her rolls, the words come tumbling out of nowhere, linked to nothing or at best to some notional idea she had when she was a child. And when she stops to think, to explicate and parse with care, she makes even less sense. Notional ideas are gone and only longwinded metaphors remain. 'Word salad' is far too kind for her incoherent, indecipherable allusions and mix-and-match randomness.
The intelligent listener cannot decide which is worse, which is more telling of the vacuity and inanity of the woman - making no sense whatsoever or spilling nostrums, platitudes, and pablum. The objective critic listens, pays attention, loses her after the first winding, circuitous, virtual circle. The most charitable claim is that somewhere in this babbling brook is meaning, She is only being Kamala, searching for le mot juste, putting her own brand on familiar themes, saying what she feels for God's sake, unlike that madman who rapes and pillages the English language. Sound and fury meaning absolutely nothing.
So, a week before the election, the show goes on - bombast, braggadocio, big top lion-taming, and high-wire acts; and immeasurably incoherent homilies, metaphors, and allusions. The Left is worried, very worried that the man they have branded as evil, spawn of the Devil, a dangerous, destructive man may again sit in the Oval Office. How could this happen, they repeat again and again as the polls narrow and Trump edges closer to victory?
While at the same time Trump supporters throw their hats in the air at each wonderfully wild and wooly attack on 'that woman' and her succubus claques and wait for their day to come.
Who knows? Either a clown or a vaporous fool will occupy 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, but only one knows exactly what he is up to.
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