How Trump Could Win
Condemning Suffering Never Heals the Wounded
You’re Joe. You live in just another town somewhere in the vast American motherland. Once, it was a crucible of the dream. Its factories glistened and its forges roared. There was a job, a pretty little home, and a life of plenty for everyone who was willing and able to sweat for it.
Now, it’s something else. A cage, maybe. Or an abyss. Who can say?
You’ve gotten up every morning at six on the dot, and applied for job after job. Your father and his father worked at the mill, the plant, the beating economic heart of the village. But they were shuttered just when you were becoming a man. When you started dreaming.
So you applied and applied. But there seemed to be no work. Not for a man, a person, a human being, anyways. So you swallowed your pride, and took that part time gig at a warehouse the size of a few football fields. The robots give you orders, and nothing is ever fast enough. In just a few weeks, you felt used up, spent, shattered. Part time for the company means full time and then some for you. Yet somehow, your paycheck is barely enough to put food on the table.
What could you do? One day, you came across these new apps. They seemed to offer work. Maybe a chink of light glimmered. Now, on nights, when you get the call, you drive through your abandoned, rusting town, to the shining city across the bridge.
There, people richer and more confident than you smile and laugh and drink designer coffees in their suits and ties, underneath gleaming towers full of shining things. What do they do? You can’t even say. They can’t even say. They’re “directors of leveraged portfolio management” and “executive vice presidents of monetization”.
They invite you in, glance at you, at your mended clothes and the crows feet around your eyes, and smile with pity. You fix their doors, windows, toilets. You repair the stuff of their lives, with gentle dignity and careful attention. All the things they never learned how to do. What is it they do again?
Slowly, the hurt in you begins to crack open. Like a great tree falling. The raw stump feels bitter and bruised. There’s something wrong with all this. You’re working harder than ever for people who don’t give a damn whether your family eats or starves only to get poorer. It’s not right. It’s not just fair, noble, true. You’ve never done a dishonest thing in your life. And yet here you are, on the edge, teetering. And there they are. Laughing and smiling. That stump in you aches like a great wound.
One day, you turn on the news. There’s an election coming. You’ve never been interested in politics. The politicians mostly seem to be taking a hammer to your dreams.
Those dreams. You remember them quietly. A pretty little house, a wife and kids to call your own, smiling faces at the end of the long day, food on the table, everyone asleep in their beds. What is there now?
You look around your town. It’s just as broken as you. There, on the corner where your dad taught you to ride a bike are dealers. There, on the street where your sister giggled with her best friend, is a boarded up den for the desperate. What happened? Beauty decayed into ugliness, somehow. And now the place you proudly call home is just as hurt and damaged on the outside as you are on the inside.
You look at the TV. One candidate says: “This is the greatest country that ever was!”. The other says, darkly, “This country used to be great. But now it’s a mess, a wreck, a disaster. But we’re going to fix it. We’re going to make it great again!”.
You furrow your brow.
The pundits appear on the screen. They say: “this country’s great! You mustn’t vote for the candidate who says it isn’t. He’s a failure, an ignoramus, a dangerous man. You just can’t trust him. We condemn him! Shame on him!”.
They say you’re a “swing voter”, and your vote is the one that counts most. They’re talking to you, you realize, for the first time in your life. But what are they really saying? Something stirs in you.
You think of your broken town. You think of your life. You think of the people in the shining city across the river. What is it they do again? Just how did they prosper, while you broke, failed, suffered?
Those talking heads on the TV screen. They’re still not really seeing you. This. What your life is. They’re just talking down to you. Like somehow you deserved all this. With that same false pitying smile on their smooth faces. You’ve seen it before. It’s the one the people in the shining city across river give you.
In that moment, a grimace crosses your face. A tightening in rage. They say: you can’t trust the candidate who says things are broken? They’re wrong, you realize. You can’t trust them. Not just the candidate who says things are great. But the whole system. It’s rotten, the whole damned thing. Every last bit of it. All of them. They’re why you’re here.
The candidate who says things are broken is the only one you can trust. And the more they insult him, they more they call him a rube, a sucker, a con man, the more you laugh bitterly. And redouble the firmness of your faith in him. He’ll fix things. He’s the only one that really sees the truth of things as they are in the first place.
Things are broken. Cities, towns, places, dreams.
But the thing that’s the most broken, hurt, and wounded? It’s you.
Umair
London
July 2016
