The Republican Presidential candidate is of German extraction, and his family surname was originally Drumpf. It’s a perfectly normal moniker auf Deutsch, but in English it sounds a bit like someone hawking up a loogie. So like many immigrants before them, when they arrived in America they changed it to Trump, in order to fit more comfortably into a predominately Anglophone society. Hence, when the Evil Twin of The Great Pumpkin (apologies to the late, beloved Charles Schulz) expresses his violent aversion to immigrants, it strikes me as one of the weirdest of his many foibles, since with the exception of the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere, all Americans arrived here from somewhere else. Well, OK, so did the Indians, but that was ten thousand years ago. We may not be a melting pot any more (if we ever were – more about that below), but we’re certainly a thoroughly mixed salad.
Of course the salad makings he despises are non-white Hispanics and Muslims (by whom I assue he means Arabs, since some Muslims – Circassians, for example, the original inhabitants of the Caucasus mountain region, who gave their name to the term came the term “Caucasian” – are blue-eyed blonds). However, Herr Drumpf’s own skin isn’t really white, except around his piggy eyes, where his tanning salon placed the protective cucumber slices. It’s more a sallow pink, like that of all Anglo-Saxons, until he starts foaming at the mouth and waving his pudgy little hands, whereupon it turns as red-orange as a suppurating gonorrhea rash. But even in his most orgasmic transports of xenophobia, the blond comb-forward on his head never stirs. I suspect he’s actually bald, and has replaced his vanished hair with a particularly ugly wig (well, good taste isn’t his strong suit: witness his tacky life-style and his crass manner of speaking). The ludicrous rug reminds me of a giant taxidermied canary, perhaps a relative of the fabulous foo-bird, who when angry or scared, starts shrieking and gobbling and flapping around in ever-dimishing circles until it disappears up its own asshole .
And as I write (mid-August, 2016), it looks as if the Drumpfster might be doing just that, as far as his political career is concerned. Hillary Clinton is polling well ahead of him, even in some of the hard-core redneck states, and the nabobs of the Republican Congress and Senate are scrambling to distance themselves from him.
He has already implicitly conceded defeat, in his own psychotic way, by claiming that the election will be rigged against him, and calling on all red-blooded gun-toting NRA members to rise up and start a rebellion to “take out” Mrs. Clinton’s and her Administration. The Secret Service warned him about that kind of talk, so now he claims he was misquoted by the liberal media, though his call to arms was first reported on Fox News, and in any case, he made the chilling suggestion during a rally that was broadcast live by all the major television networks.
He’s also started using speeches written for him by his long-suffering staff and reading them from the teleprompter, instead of speaking off the cuff (or out of his head). But I doubt whether that will last very long. Self control isn’t one of his virtues, after all, and he began his run at – not for – the Oval Office as a pure ego-trip. It’s been suggested that he really doesn’t want to be President, because he’d have to endure intense scrutiny, and a good deal of hostile questioning, from reporters who want facts instead of fiction. He’d also have to negotiate with foreign leaders a lot tougher and smarter than he is (Putin’s already made a fool out of him, not that it took much doing). That suggestion was given more weight recently when he skipped the Republican primary debates. And now, it seems, he’s planning to duck out of facing Mrs. Clinton during the run-up to the national election.
Of course debates between candidates for high office have never been manditory parts of the political process. We remember the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858, and the Nixon-Kennedy match-ups during the 1960 presidential election contest. But all other state and federal elections have done without direct public exchanges of views between the candidates. So if the Big Orange refuses to meet Slick Hilly in a series of verbal jousts he knows he can’t win, since he’s abysmally ignorant about about foreign policy or anything else connected with the world that exists outside his masturbatory fantasies, he’s acting in accordance with American political tradition.
Not that he knows jack shit about that tradition: he brags that he never reads history books, or books of any kind. He maintains that he’s too busy making deals to waste his time on idle pursuits, and has people to do his reading for him and give him verbal recaps.
Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Drumpf’s The Art of the Deal, revealed recently that during interviews, he had the attention span of a three-year old. And he never read the book that was published under his name. I suspect there’s a real possibility that he’s only semi-literate, or at least severely dyslexic. It remains to be seen if he’ll wind up trying to count that disability as a virtue before the election fiasco is over, since his racist, homophobic, misogynist supporters also have trouble reading anything more complicated than the headlines in check-out line rags.
But I nourish a hope that the Drumpfster’s finally bound for history’s dumpster, and good riddance to him. His campaign was a scary ride while it lasted, kind of being locked in the back seat of a car going down a twisty mountain road with a raving maniac at the wheel. Now that it finally seems to be ending, I find myself thinking about the rise and fall of his hateful political career, and its place in American history.
Angry rabble-rousers like the Donneybrook are not without precedent. In the 1840s there was Lewis Charles Lavin’s Know-Nothing Party, composed of soi-disant “Native Americans” (read established WASP farmers, manufacturers, and local politicians) who railed against the Papist Irish fleeing their country to escape the Great Famine, and thereby threatening the established order – although the Irish provided cheap labor for paving streets and roads, laying track, and digging tunnels. About a century later the America First Committee arose, dedicated to keeping the United States out of World War Two. It was led by none other than the Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh, a savage anti-Semite and a great admirer of Hitler and the Third Reich. “Lucky Lindy” wasn’t interested in running for President, but as the most popular man in the world after his famous flight, the America Firster faction of the Republican Party tried hard to change his mind.
In the 1960s, Alabama’s Governor George Wallace, an outspoken racist, made a brief bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination on a platform whose main plank was a vow to crush the Civil Rights Movement: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” was his rallying cry, and he attracted rabid white factions throughout the Deep South, even finding numerous supporters in northern cities like Chicago and Detroit. In a bid for national fame, a disturbed young loner named Arthur Bremer crippled him for life with a gunshot wound. Wallace, confined to a wheelchair and presumably somewhat chastened, renounced his racist views some time before he died in 1998. But the racist monsters he summoned up are still very much with us more than a generation later.
All three of my examples described themselves as populists in their speeches, men who stood up for the ordinary (white) working stiff struggling to make a living– though, like Drumpf, Lavin, Lindbergh, and Wallace were rich, and none of them did a lick of manual labor after they achieved national prominence.
Populism is a slippery term. On the surface, it simply means direct government by the people: demokratia, in ancient Greek. But which people? As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his mordant satire on Stalinism, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” In the 20th century, the populist parties that gained control of their nations’ governments promptly turned into brutal dictatorships, from Stalin’s Bolsheviks through Mussolini’s Fascists to Hitler’s National Socialists and Mao’s Chinese Communism. All of those party leaders committed unspeakable atrocities against members of their own populations whom they considered enemies of the state: the animals who were less equal than those running the farm.
The Orange Balloon has been venting hot air through his pursy little mouth (has anyone else noticed how much it looks like an anal sphincter when he closes it?) in support of a populist base that is exclusively made up of angry middle-aged white (OK, pink) men who were devastated by the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath. It doesn’t matter to them that Drumpf is, if not the multibillionaire he claims to be, at least a multimillionaire. Nor does it matter that part of his money came from deals that were anything but artful, some being shady enough to warrant ongoing criminal investigations. They don’t seem to care that he’s got has deep financial ties to Russia, and has asked Putin to use his t FSB hackers to track down Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails. To them, Clinton, as a tough, outspoken woman, is the Devil Incarnate, whereas Drumpf sits on the right hand of God, because he says things they’ve always wanted to say but never could because of “political correctness,” whatever the hell that means.
Mind you, asking the leader of a hostile nation to interfere in the legal and political affairs of our country is an act of treason, but neither the Gasbag nor those who are uplifted by him seem to have actually read the United States Constitution, except for its Second Amendment, which they completely misconstrue.
The Trumpeting Asshole may have farted out his last stinking note on the national stage, but the members of his flatulant orchestra remain, waiting for their next bandleader. He or she will not be long in coming, now that Donald John Trump, Senior has opened the way for future demagogues. He’s the Freudian Id of the American psyche; he’s Edgar Allan Poe’s Imp of the Perverse; he’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde. He’s the Noonday Demon, the Lord of Misrule, the Father of Lies. And he’s as American as apple pie, as long as you don’t mind worms in your apples.