The Trump No One Knows

Who is Donald J. Trump? I know he is the 45th President of the United States. I know he is a real estate mogul and owns casinos in Atlantic City where his name blinks into the darkness like an over-eager slot machine. He’s been married a few times. He was on TV. On his show he would squint his eyes and say “You’re fired.” His kids look like him regardless of whose XX chromosome they have and are usually at hand, like a gaggle of puppies. He was a Democrat and now he’s a nativist Republican. No one thought he would win the last election, but he did.

These are mundane facts and they tell us nothing about Donald J. Trump the person. The Trump branding, the bad taste in furniture, the TV personality, the bravado, the hair — the caricature of Donald J. Trump is a brilliant invention that allows him to hide in plain sight. Most people who meet him say he is different in person. That he is polite. He gives his time freely. Mostly, he seems sort of like a boring businessman. His friends come on TV and tell us, as Tom Barrack did on Charlie Rose, that it was all an act, part of Donald’s plan to get elected. It worked.

The smart cookies in the audience, however, didn’t buy it. They took note of the sleight of hand and wondered who, or what, was behind the mask. Most Americans know instinctively that there’s a sucker being born every minute and they were having none of it. And so as a result most people don’t take the Trump persona at face value.

There was a meme after the election, taken from Salena Zito’s article on Trump in The Atlantic that:

“the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

The villain after the election was the press because they reported that Trump was losing when he was in fact winning. I don’t blame them. No one expected Trump would win, including team Trump. In short, Zito’s quote misses the forest for the trees. The problem wasn’t the press not understanding Trump — it’s that no one does.

Trump is the mystery that everyone thinks they have finally solved. All those other suckers are buying into an appearance of what is true, but this here is the real McCoy. It’s interesting to note in this context that no one knows who the real McCoy is. Here are a few possibilities, from Snopes:

• Elijah McCoy, inventor of a device that lubricated the moving parts of a railway locomotive, or his invention itself.
• Someone from the Hatfield-McCoy family feud of the 1880s.
• Products of the Nelson McCoy Pottery company in Ohio.
• Booze supplied by Prohibition-era rum-runner named Bill McCoy, whose product was said to always be of the highest quality.

And so it is with Trump. He is:

• Savior of Western Civilization from the Muslim hordes
• Sexist pig who hates women
• Puppet of Steve Bannon
• Puppet of Vladimir Putin
• Strategic genius who is always three steps ahead of his enemies
• A person suffering from a psychiatric disorder
• Patriotic American who gave up trappings of wealth to save the Republic
• Con-man who is using White House to benefit the Trump brand

After the election the thing that struck me about the Trump phenomenon was how each faction in America saw something different in him. He was like the perfect holographic being who could change appearance based on the needs and desires of the person with whom there was interaction. I made the connection to Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. Like most things, the internet teaches you that any idea you might have has already been had by someone else, and so I discovered that lots of other people were making the same allusion. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times was using this meme to great comic effect in her writing on Trump in the early days of the transition:

His meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.

In Kozinski-speak this was the equivalent of, “I like to watch.”

This was another version of the real Trump: Trump as Chance, the gardener. The buffoon who stumbles into the presidency. I chuckled but this seemed to miss the point of the Kosinski novel, which isn’t so much about Chauncey as it is the people around him - the real subject of Kozinski’s biting satire. In the novel, our world is shown to be a fiction made out of cardboard cutouts. Things you took to be real and which seemed to require expertise and insight were just phantoms created by people making up shit on the spot. To me this is the insight to be taken away: it’s not just Trump, everything is bullshit.

Miraculously, Trump is President of The United States. How did he accomplish this? Why did he get all of that free publicity from the media (without whom he would never have been elected)? How is it that Trump became a virus we could not resist, replicating itself exponentially in our consciousness, resulting in non-stop talk of Trump good, bad, but never indifferent?

It will probably require historical distance to be fully understood, but, for now, I posit that the Trump persona is a figurative device that undermines the logic of our pre-conceived idea of things, our meta-narratives. You toss a bit of Trump into any discussion and it becomes a loop of self-regression that undermines itself and reality. Some examples:

• Trump was elected with the help of Russian meddling in the electoral process. This influence took many forms. Unwitting agents of Russia like Bernie Bros were employed by the Russian state. In short, opposition to Trump is what got him elected.
• Trumped bombed Syria to distract us from his ties to Russia. Trump bombed an airbase where Russians were stationed so that he could maintain his ties to Russia.
• Trump has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He exhibits grandiose self-importance and preoccupations with being brilliant and successful. This makes him dangerous. It’s not Trump or his policies that are dangerous, only the condition by which he suffers.
• Trump is a proto-Fascist. Punching Nazis is the only way to stop true Fascism from happening. By acting like Nazis we can prevent them from taking over.

Any argument about Trump ends in an epistemological nightmare where our very ability to understand Truth is undermined. This is why Trump is so fascinating. His inscrutability escapes categorization. And that is the pleasure. Our projections are given free reign to mingle with reality — the best possible virtual reality ever invented, so lifelike it scares us.

There is something of the evil genius in Trump who, unlike Chauncey Gardener in Being There, is very aware of what he is doing and knows how to push people’s buttons. He almost goes out of his way to troll and upset just about everyone. I’m sure right now, in a doctor’s office somewhere in America a patient is telling their psychiatrist about how damaging Trump’s election has been to their well-being. It’s a negative capability that is almost funny but isn’t.

What does it say about us and this moment in time that someone so genuinely unlikeable — even many of supporters don’t really “like” like him — has become so famous and so powerful? During his inauguration Trump greeted Washington DC by telling them they were a bunch of losers who were doing such an abysmal job that he, someone with no experience in government, was forced to come in and clean up after them. Yeah, hi to you too Donald. Are we all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Oedipus Complex? What exactly?

As I write this our Commander-In-Chief has just launched a missile attack on a Syrian air installation after a recent chemical attack in Idlib on the civilian population, attributed to Assad, which has his right-wing supporters such as Ann Coulter near apoplectic.

He told us he would be the president of America, not “the world.” Could somebody show him pictures of Americans raped & killed by illegals?

Trump has the uncanny ability to piss off even his most ardent fans, groupies, and hangers-on. Bannon will no doubt be seething about Trump’s double-cross on the pages of Breitbart before too long.

The many versions of Trump seem to be accompanied by as many outrages and disappointments, as the varying Rashoman-like tales of him are left in tatters and dust in the hands of his would be interpreters. Will it eventually be his undoing? Can someone make this many enemies and still succeed? Or will the Trump persona continue to beguile us and prevail where a mere mortal wouldn’t stand a chance?