The Bully Hero
When did Americans start rooting for the bullies, the traitors?
I’m still thinking about the late Sen. John McCain.
You know, the man who was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967, badly injured, and then tortured on and off for more than 5 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, so badly at times that he considered suicide. The man who had the courage to become a naval aviator, suffer torment and torture as a prisoner of war, and then serve his country again as a representative, senator, and, ultimately, statesman.
Of this man, faux-patriot and pretend tough-guy Donald Trump, in one of his patented hissy-fits during the 2016 campaign, gibed:
He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.
There was context to those dismissive words; McCain had referred to Trump’s supporters as “crazies.” Trump decided the appropriate response was to belittle McCain’s service to his county.
Always striking back hard at perceived slights and any criticism was one of the Machiavellian maneuvers Trump had absorbed like a sponge from early mentor Roy Cohn. The dark lessons of Cohn resonated because Trump himself was a deeply insecure, prickly man — a walking bundle of grievances. Residents of New York City well knew about “The Donald,” but the rest of America would have much to learn about Trump’s enormous incapacity to deal with anything less than praise or, worse, being outshined by anyone.
Young John McCain had requested combat duty in Vietnam; young Donald Trump received four educational deferments and, lastly, a medical one, for bone spurs in his heel(s). (Was it one or both? Even he couldn’t say.) He spent the war years playing soccer, squash, football, and golf and, according to a suit by the Justice Department, denying Black renters housing in Trump properties. He would later quip in a radio interview that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while sleeping around was “my personal Vietnam.”
In any other campaign, what Trump said about someone who had more than ably served the country and had suffered almost unimaginable personal sacrifice would have been the end of the line. But the Republicans had gotten away with doing much the same hit job on John Kerry when he ran for president in 2004, calling his service to his country in Vietnam into question. Even though the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were entirely discredited in that case, they normalized the use of disinformation about people who served their country in the military and created a new low in campaign tactics.
I was thinking about the “swift-boating” of John Kerry and Trump’s disparagement of John McCain while watching the mini-Trumps in Congress excoriating Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley and CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, with the likes of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) having the malign chutzpah to castigate both Austin and Milley and call for their resignations.
As always, Gaetz’s “Rep.” stands for Rep-rehensible. As for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), that pious soul, who also obviously relished the opportunity to dress down the generals and call for them to resign, I amuse myself by seeing his “Sen.” as short for Sen-tentious.
It appears we have now all moved on from the Republican berating of the top military officers in the country — on to the next outrage, say, Republican operatives ignoring subpoenas to testify to members of Congress — but that’s what the Trumplicans count on with their ceaseless sowing of conflict and chaos.
But let’s look at this phenomenon, members of the former GOP disparaging the military brass, and how this behavior can possibly appeal to conservative voters.
I understand the appeal of anti-heroes. In literature, one can understand the motivations of anti-heroes, from Shakespeare’s dark prince, Hamlet, to Poe’s vengeful Montresor, to Dostoyevsky’s penniless ex-student Raskolnikov. Clint Eastwood built his career playing lonesome, often violent anti-heroes on film. A massive audience found themselves rooting for Walter White even when he broke extremely bad, and viewers of “Dexter” seemed to find the depiction of a serial killer somehow life-affirming.
But when did the bully-hero — which we must place as a loutish subset of the anti-hero — appear in our culture? Think back to the insults and name-calling Trump made use of while in office and during his two traveling circus campaigns. Think back to that jaw-dropping scene of Trump basking in the fulsome praise his new Cabinet members felt pressured to provide, after Donald had kicked off his first full cabinet meeting — 5 months into his presidency, by the way — by praising himself and then tossing it to Mike Pence to say a few words about the good work his administration was doing. Remember that?
Think about Trump, the ostensible leader of an actual country, calling people (including his own vice president) pussies.
It’s as if 30% of the country watches the “Back to the Future” movies rooting for Biff Tannen (even before that character, in Part II, was explicitly linked to Trump), or laughs with anticipatory glee while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” when that loser and sucker Uncle Billy drops that newspaper — and all those Bailey Brothers Building and Loan deposits — right in Mr. Potter’s Alpha-male lap. (That Billy. What a cuck!)
The bully as hero. In America.
What happened?
Merriam-Webster defines anti-hero as “a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities.” Of course, with Trump, it is objectively far worse than simply lacking heroic attributes. But his supporters see him as a heroic figure, almost a deity.
We are told that his supporters are mainly those who did not attend college and who have missed out on the economic gains of the past decades. Anyone in this country living paycheck to paycheck or contemplating how to save enough for retirement knows a special and terrifying fear of becoming homeless one day — because of medical bills or because saving enough was never even an option. In our particularly cruel form of capitalism, many people dream of hitting it big because they feel so small, and con men of all sorts have always loved to exploit that fear. As author and critic Fran Lebowitz famously noted, Trump is “a poor man’s idea of a rich man.” As he preens before them, endlessly talking about how he has been slighted and cheated, they convince themselves that he actually cares about them.
But Trump is also supported by people who reside in a higher economic realm who claim to “look the other way” at his, you know, destroying democracy and winkingly promoting white supremacy because they made out well with his tax cuts. I often wonder if some of these economic, if not intellectual, elites are also anxious because they too have not saved enough for their retirement years because they had to have the flashy pickup truck and the cabin in the woods and couldn’t stop spending to keep up with the flush, happy couples they saw constantly on television.
Many follow the former president because he says the game is rigged and only he can fix it. Voting wasn’t rigged, but the economy has been, for decades. Since the time of Reagan, the American workers’ pay was decoupled from their productivity and inequality has grown precipitously. In this country, a young person’s chance at economic mobility has lessened, while the upper levels shore up their own positions at the metaphorical country club. (Did anyone not see good-ole-boy Joe Machin [D-WV], who says he cannot support the $3.5 trillion people infrastructure bill because it will give people an “entitlement mentality,” literally talking down to constituents from the back of his “Almost Heaven” yacht?) But the irony in Trump’s faux populism is that, while the Democrats may not have accomplished near enough, the Trumpist party is the one working tirelessly — from the federal level down to your local school board — to keep you in your place, as a worker, as a woman, as an LGBTQ person, and as a person of color.
But especially as a worker.
Remember Trump’s “infrastructure week”? It was just another of his just-wait-until-you-see-what-we-come-up-with-it’s-going-to-be-unbelievable teases about…nothing. Now that the Democrats have put forward an actual plan to fix America’s outmoded and crumbling infrastructure — in physical and human terms — and begin to address climate change, the Republicans are willing to tank the economy and the fiscal reputation of the United States to stop that in its tracks.
Maybe it is just that demographic, those with little social standing who fear the bully and appease him, making him into much, much more than he is.
Until he is.
As the gang at The Bulwark say, the Republicans kept feeding a baby alligator in the bathtub and now they don’t know what to do with the monster snapping at them. You really can’t use that bathroom now, can you? Ask Sen. Lindsey Graham (senseless), who recently got booed when he mildly suggested people get the vaccine.
Maybe life is just an extended version of high school, and the bullies have managed to rebrand themselves as alt-heroes. Think of the late Rush Limbaugh puffing himself up 3 hours a day on the radio (with talent that was, he often said, “on loan from God”) while pocketing his legion of devoted ditto-heads. Limbaugh was certainly a mentor to many Republicans — in 1994, Newt Gingrich brought him to address incoming members of the House — and as important a mentor for Trump as Cohn had been. Trump learned from Limbaugh that there was an upside in appealing to people’s worst angels. Trump also aped Limbaugh’s sly art of covering socially unacceptable behavior and statements with a veneer of humor.
Anyone who attended middle or high school knows how bullies operate and recognizes the boys, and the girls, who — out of fear or some warped admiration — suck up, like remoras, to the bully, as he sharks his way through the hallways. Those sycophants to the bully grew up to be the middle managers who looked the other way while you were sexually harassed at work; they grew up to be the rah-rah guys who would parrot the company line, even if they knew better, in a financial scandal or environmental disaster; they grew up to be Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, et al., who may have become U.S. senators but will never be considered statesmen, like John McCain or John Kerry. In school, if a bully was given an inch, he’d take a mile. In a country, put a bully in charge and he’ll destroy the norms of conduct, take a hammer to the concept of separation of powers, and try to take away your democracy.
And for a frightening number of Americans who feel left behind or whose white grievance has been sufficiently stoked by politicians and Fox News “personalities,” that seems to be just the thing they want. Those politicians and “journalists” say Trump “tells it like it is,” though he has proved, time and again — indeed, from the very beginning of his public career, when Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett began writing about him — that nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.
“Like his father, Donald Trump has pushed each deal to the limit, taking from it whatever he can get, turning political connections into private profits and public expense.”
Barrett had Donald’s number when he wrote that way back in 1979. Trump’s “deals” remain totally transactional and all about what benefits Trump himself, financially or politically. And the public pays an increasingly deep price — astonishing divisiveness in Congress; tribalism and death threats among citizens; more than 700,000 dead of coronavirus, with hospitals still overrun with Trump supporters who refuse to get vaccinated; and the ongoing promulgation of the Big Lie about the 2020 election, which threatens to tear the country apart.
The bully’s fundamental lie is that he’s a tough guy. But none are tough as they pretend to be. Think of them: Limbaugh on the radio name-calling, like some grade-school bully, women “FemiNazis” and trading on old misogynist and racist tropes, then laughing it off as “entertainment”; Trump braying that he would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with the protestors he whipped into a frenzy, then rushing back to the White House to watch on TV what he had unleashed; Hawley raising a fist of solidarity to the gathering mob outside the Capitol, and then slipping inside to vote against certifying the result of a free and fair election; and Graham, who is given to tough talk but whose photo resides in the Dictionary in My Head as a precise illustration of the word sycophancy.
Heroes? Only the smallest, most insecure among us become the bullies, the misogynists, the callers of the mob.
I was raised, by my family, by my culture, to call out the bully, the traitor — not praise him.
Weren’t you?
