Donald Trump And Manifest Destiny - Clearing The Land For A New, White, Christian Republic

'Good guys wear white hats', said the President, exchanging his red Make America Great Again baseball cap for a Stetson and, smiling broadly for the camera, was the very image of a range roving, cattle herding, brush clearing vaquero; or a Texas Ranger pacifying the territory and ridding it of banditos, rustlers, and renegades; or at the head of a division of Union Cavalry chasing Sioux and Comanche across the Mississippi. 

 

It was that one gesture that invoked the great American past, the Wild West, the settling of Indian territory, the scourging, indomitable juggernaut to make the entire country from East to West a white, European descended, historic nation. 

Watching the President wave his new hat to the crowd, strut across the stage like Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S Grant, they saw a man in his virile, political prime, ready to replay the 1850s and reclaim American land for Americans. 

It was an exuberant, exultant time then, and it would be now, for no one doubted the President's intentions.  Already in only two months, illegal aliens were being rounded up, herded in cattle cars, and shipped across the border.  Elon Musk's wild bunch was cutting a swath through the canyons, gulches, and arroyos of the Capital, clearing it of human sagebrush and tumbleweeds, sending layabout bureaucrats running for the hills.

'I am back', shouted the President, a mighty Genghis Khan astride his stallion, spurs jangling and ceremonial sword, sheathed in silver-embossed Mongolian leather, the gold handle glinting in the sun - a Genghis Khan, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman combined.

Again he waved his hat, gestured to the thousands gathered on the Mall to hear him speak, stood tall and proud as a conquering hero, a victor.  

The Left of course was having none of it, and for them Trump was only evoking the genocide of the Native American, the white juggernaut that killed and maimed and sent the remnants of a once proud people to reservations.  He would indeed be the incarnation of the new Manifest Destiny, an ethnic cleansing and cultural sweep to recreate a white, Christian nation. 

 

Bob Muzelle, an old cultural warrior, one of the legions of progressive faithful in the middle of the throng of flag-waving Trumpists who watched in horror as bigotry and shameless bullying was out in full force.  Around him and the thousands on the Mall, sounds of bulldozers, wrecking balls, and demolition charges could be heard echoing down Independence and Constitution Avenues as the Musk juggernaut made its way from Washington Monument to Capitol. 

It was for Bob and his colleagues, a frightful sight, a horrendous display of autocratic power.  They did not see the President astride a white horse leading the cavalry to victory in a sweeping panorama of white establishment, but a Hitlerian putsch, Kristallnacht and the Warsaw Ghetto, an unholy Crusade like that of Urban II to ride the world of Muslims, apostates, and heathens. 

To give Bob credit, he did brave the wild MAGA crowd, and stand up for what he believed, but the waves of glowing, cheering, happy, exuberant adulators drowned him out, suffocated him with their mindless 'USA' chants, hugs and kisses, a jamboree of nonsense. 

'Into the mouth of hell', shouted Trump recalling The Charge of the Light Brigade, a righteous battle, a Christian battle, a necessary battle between good and evil.  The crowd was exhilarated, energized, charged, ready to follow him from field to fallow. 

'What a bunch of idiots', said Bob to Esther Pilchman, the rancid, sour lesbian who found his unsettled anger particularly meaningful.  Bob after all had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, had felt the bullwhips of Southern sheriffs and the bites of their dogs, so his undiffused, hate for the interloper, the latter day Hitler resonated.  Trump was not just a twisted caricature full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but a part of a dangerous American phenomenon of racial injustice and insurrection.  

It was the Thirties all over again, torchlight parades, giant banners, goose-stepping SS Storm troopers, and roaring crowds in the tens of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate.  When Trump saluted the crowd, Bob could only hear, 'Sieg Heil!' but of course he had heard these words ringing in his head ever since the President first came on the scene.  He was a fearful, fear-mongering, dangerous man and had to be stopped. 

 

After ten years of trying to dislodge, defeat, and exile this faux patriotic demon, he and his colleagues on the Left were left bloodied, bruised, and left on the curb. The country wanted no more Biden-esque black this, black that, gender freak shows, and revisionism, censorship, and moral hectoring.  They wanted the averred virile machismo of Trump, his unbowed, uncowed, defiance of liberal cant; his arm candy, yachts, mansions, and resorts - the whole low bourgeois, delightful return to middle American roots. 

The images in Bob's head were nothing but confabulations, contrived fantasy worthy of Browning, Ibsen, and comic book fabulists. It was a miracle of human self-deception and irrepressible psychological fugue.  When Bob looked over the cheering crowd and watched the President invoke American history and commit himself to righting the diversions and back alleys of the past, he could only see the Fuhrer, legions of storm troopers, giant swastikas, and hear only Wagner.  He and his progressive allies had willingly suspended belief, took the fanciful meme to heart, saw only brown shirts, the gestapo, and Anschluss. 

The Austrian psychologist Friedrich Manheim, an expert in mass hysteria, wrote in a feature article in Welt:

Freud observed that psychological 'variation', i.e. disturbance, is as infectious as the plague; and once it becomes viral, it is virtually unstoppable.  A fabulist miasma occurs, a willing suspension of disbelief that is melodramatic, even operatic in its expression. This phenomenon is particularly acute within the context of politics.  For men and women who are convinced of the righteousness of their claims and the absolute evil of the opposition and have already descended into the nightmare of convoluted hatred, the advance to mass hysteria is but an easy elision.  'The camaraderie of hatred', as Jung called it - the happy association of vengeful, spiteful people, is the final disassociating measure to untether the true believer from reality. 

So, in keeping with Freud, Jung, and Manheim, Bob Muzelle and his colleagues saw a weird conflation of historical misreading, hopeless idealism, and innocent expectations.  Trump in this febrile vision was at the head of a Union Army division wantonly killing Native Americans and leaving their bodies to be picked over by carrion birds.  Refugees and asylum seekers, not indigenous people this time, were in his sights.  At the same time he was Der Fuhrer, storming across Europe in a wave of genocidal killing and territorial aggression. 

 

Meanwhile Trump supporters saw only a man committed to restoring simple, evident social values, economic freedom, and international strength - a patriotic American sincere in his desire to return America to its originalist, Enlightenment roots. 

For the first time in his life, Bob was flummoxed, at sixes and sevens, discombobulated and adrift.  His moral compass was spinning and there was no port in the storm.  The more angry and frustrated he became, the more the image of Trump storm troopers rounding up the black, the poor, and the sexually othered became real, the only reality.  It was a constant battle not to lose his bearings entirely. 

No one seems to know what happened to Bob after that seminal rally on the Mall.  Some suspected the chaise lounge, others St. Elizabeth's, a few imagined a courageous and principled drink of hemlock. In any case, it would not be a good place but a not unexpected one, and a lesson in there somewhere.