The Ongoing Quest to Figure out Donald John Trump (Part II)
First off, sorry to write yet another article about Trump. Lord knows, the world doesn’t need more ink spilled about him, but damn, he just takes up so much American head space that it’s hard not to think about him. Like your high school girlfriend, or maybe God, not that I’m analogizing him to either. God has better hair.
As I mentioned in my previous rant about whether or not this MAGA thing is actual populism or pretend populism, I’m an independent who neither loves/worships nor hates/is terrified of our president. This puts me in such a bizarre place in these days of lead-with-your-emotion politics. We’ve always been emotional about politics (canings on the Senate floor, the Civil War, In this house we believe…), but now logic has taken a spaceship to nowhere, to hang out with Katy Perry, Oprah’s tall lanky friend and the other pretendanauts.
Being an independent, I’m trying to look at this phenomenon clearly, without emotion…and it ain’t easy. Emotional release now seems to be the raison d’etre of our politics. Still, I’ll soldier on until I can answer this question. Because populism is good, and since we haven’t seen actual populism in a long time, if we attended a 30 year high school reunion and populism was our Prom King/starting quarterback, he’d have a noticeable beer gut and look like he’d spent the last two decades as a train-hopping hobo. If we squinted we could eventually tell who he is, but it’d take a few minutes and a knowing head tilt.
I’m going to approach this second attempt through the lenses of two close friends. I’ll call my MAGA friend Francis and my old-school liberal friend Iris. I love and respect them both.
Francis is a high school friend who is now an OB-GYN with a happy nuclear family and a newfound evangelical zeal. He was raised Episcopalian, like I was, a sect which I’ve always called Catholicism without the religion, and now he’s full-on fundamentalist. Francis says MAGA is pure populism, and sees Trump as the embodiment of a new kind of politics, replacing the stale old with the gold-plated new.
Iris is newer friend, an old-school liberal, and a psychologist. She is admittedly someone who leads with her emotions. Hell, she has a phD in emotions, literally. So it’s not surprising that she sees this phenomenon as the beginning of total control, pure authoritarianism, and focuses on the scary precedents that reverberate throughout totalitarianism, things like rounding up people and indiscriminately shipping them to South American gulags. It’s hard not to notice that when that’s happened before in history, bad things usually follow.
But Francis would counter that Trump’s only rounding up people who are here illegally, which is true, at least for now.
Iris would counter that the authoritarian regimes start out pushing populist ideas and then morph into something else.
Francis would counter that with the idea that Trump’s just doing what people have said they want for years. That he’s a doer, not an old-school political sayer who never does. He’s just being responsive to the people, which is the definition of populism.
Iris would counter with the Nazis. [Liberals really need to stop the Nazi comparison, it’s so overused that people tune out when it gets used again.] And she’d have a point.
Francis would counter with the idea that our federal government was already authoritarian (eminent domain, spying on Americans, overriding the will of the people and either faking catastrophes or at least using them to push totalitarianism). It may have been totalitarian, but it was softer, almost unspoken, and now it’s loud, because Trump does everything big, screetchingly loudly and in fake gold lettering.
Iris would counter with the severe lack of empathy on the part of the administration. She’s a shrink, she knows these things. Sending people to gulags does display a lack of something, no doubt, even if they are gangsters. But if it’s what people want, then isn’t it, by definition, populism?
Man, this is hard to figure out. If Trump does big populist things, like ending the drug war, restoring Americans’ privacy rights and sticking it to Big Pharma and Wall Street, then yeah, I’ll conclude that Francis is right and it’s populism, albeit a dirty brand of populism, but if Iris is right and this is the beginning of total control, then shit, I should’ve moved to Tahiti in 2015.