Trump barely exists outside of our imaginations. Our minds have constructed him from the detritus of America's decay. If we are dead inside and feel nothing, we can still feel Trump. Trump's putrid face is America's feeble pulse.
What have we done to deserve having the world's ugliest infection decomposing inside of us? You can't kill it with antibiotics, can't severe its grip with the rusty blade of politics, or scrape it off with a chunk of coarse sand paper. Even if you could, it would grow right back like fungus on a dead log. How many of us have had the dream—either awake or asleep—of stabbing it with a sword, tossing it overboard into a whirlpool of famished sharks, or clubbing it with a Louisville Slugger until it has been reduced to a puddle of raw sewage. Have a hundred million people savored this same fantasy? No! It has to be more, way more, and that is the point—no amount of collective outrage has any use. The terrible malignancy gets bigger as if the gathering ire nourishes it with fresh methane-infused wastewater.
Trump gives us pure vitriol unmediated by complexity. There is hatred, and there is hatred without a second thought.
There may be a real Donald Trump, just as it is plausible that Jesus Christ once lived in the mundane rhythms of ancient Roman culture. Once a breathing, possibly sentient being has been conscripted as an icon to represent our fears and fantasies, it no longer matters whether or not some real version of our shared delusions exists as a literal fact. If not Trump, something else would take its place. Trump is a blank slate, an empty vessel in which to pour the toxic runoff from the collective American psyche.
It is precisely Trump's vacancy, his emptiness, his vapidity that makes him into such a splendid projection screen. This malignancy —don't forget that cancer cells are undifferentiated, generic—has nothing to distract me from hating him. He doesn't paint pictures of enormous buildings looming over tiny people like Hitler did, nor does he portray deft versions of cute dogs and soldiers like George Bush. One imagines that Trump, if handed a pencil and paper, would refuse to satisfy us with a stick-figure piece of evidence that he has no talent. He doesn't produce art on principle!
Trump is a blank slate, an empty vessel in which to pour the toxic runoff from the collective American psyche.
And he has no animal companions—no dog like Hitler, to test cyanide on, or a cat like Bill Clinton's "Socks." Animals humanize people and so Trump became the first president in history without so much as a goldfish to help us pretend that he has the capacity to experience tenderness. To add the exclamation point, Trump's children shoot endangered animals. In the Trump universe, the animal kingdom has been distilled into us, wall trophies and food.
The driver of our national fate exhibits no curiosity, no intelligence of any sort. He must have been the rare child who never received a plastic dinosaur to help kickstart his sense of awe. We are told that he never read a book and hired people with his father's money to do his schoolwork. His hobbies are lying about the size inside his pants and cheating at golf. Even an amoeba has a richer inner life. This walking mass of absence has become the tool to razor our country in half, and I have a theory about the intrapsychic value of vacuity. Trump is the greatest American entertainment commodity, bigger than Play Station, X-Box, and the NFL.
More than anything else, Americans want a laser-point for their rage. The crumbling empire disintegrates before our eyes—the broken, bleeding wreckage pounds in our brain. For some of us, the most important thing is that our inchoate, soul devouring disgust has a simple voice, untainted by ambiguity, doubt or restraint. Trump gives us pure vitriol unmediated by complexity. There is hatred, and there is hatred without a second thought.
Animals humanize people and so Trump became the first president in history without so much as a goldfish to help us pretend that he has the capacity to experience tenderness.
But that is only one side. If insipid cruelty has a mass market appeal, so too does a fatuous vision of justice. Trump is both a perfect voice for hatred and a flawless target for contempt. How many of us hovered about in eager anticipation of Mueller time? How many more dove neck deep into impeachment rituals? Now we have trials and charges, and Trump, who doesn't draw or read or fawn over cats and dogs, but, rather, commits acts of cruelty like a trained seal balances a beach ball on its nose, inspires our blissful dreams that he will be locked up in an orange jump suit.
The man who lauds razor wire in the Rio Grande, who longs to be a greater president than Lincoln by being a greater genocidaire than Hitler—that is the man we all want to represent karma. The worst living being in the world will surely get his, and we watch anything on MSNBC or YouTube that promises to deliver his downfall.
It was music to many ears to hear witnesses to Trump's tantrums on the nightly news talk about how he is "losing it" and becoming "more and more unhinged." It was nearly orgasmic to hear Trump, in his own stupid voice, mistakenly accuse Nicky Haley of refusing his offer to send in national guard troops to provide security on January 6th - a lie he had originally used to blame Nancy Pelosi. If the American system of criminal justice can't do a thing about this morally deformed chauffeur of our destiny, just maybe the gods of Alzheimer's can come to the rescue. Where is that subtle margin where a leader can represent both an electoral mandate and advanced dementia? How brazenly confused can a candidate for the world's highest office be?
Trump is the greatest American entertainment commodity, bigger than Play Station, X-Box, and the NFL.
Ask yourself this: what is more entertaining than a man slobbering in confusion, a man coughing up the pureed remnants of his brain while diddling absent-mindedly with the nuclear button? Are you on the edge of your seat yet? Ready for more popcorn?
We, at least most of us, find Trump to be a lot of fun. We could be in the streets over climate, or worrying about war, hunger, the unhoused, piss-poor medical insurance, dwindling life spans, and the proliferation of neurotoxins—but Trump is relentlessly amusing. In the video game that is America, you get to choose whether to shoot him in the head and—if he doesn't explode and vaporize, you can shoot him again. Or, if you would rather, you can opt to make Trump jump over Mario and Luigi until he reaches the Fuhrer's throne. That is the beauty of America—free choice.
