Donald Trump is Already President!
It started out as a joke between friends. Sitting around the back porch, the nights sky overhead, sharing wine, stories, tobacco, music…
“I heard Donald Trump’s actually leading in the polls,” strains a lone voice.
Somebody always has to find a way to bring Trump into the conversation. Such is the story of America in 2016; he’s unavoidable.
“Trump is already fucking president,” someone retorts, half under their breath, with an unamused glare.
“Trump’s already president and he’s always been president,” echoes another unenthused voice.
A dark, ominous wave seems to creep over the gathering, like a shadow spreading over our hearts. Laughter. Silence. The idea is incomprehensible, yet at the same time, almost perfectly explains how most of my friends and I feel about the 2016 election and politics in general.
Realization and a moment of astonishment become visible on our faces. It’s a pretty sickening joke, but then again, so is American democracy. American democracy is like pop music; it sounds good in the right context, but somehow always leaves me feeling empty.
“Donald Trump is already president” simply means that the institutional racism, sexism and absolute bigotry that are the foundation of his presidential campaign have been dominant in the American political system for my entire life. It means that Trump supporters aren’t just materializing out of thin air, but have been a powerful force in my entire twenty-six year experience on Earth. If we understand Trump not as a singular agent, but for the general hate that he represents, we can see that Trump has been around for a long time.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that nothing would change if Trump were to be elected president. Donald Trump is a new breed of political monster with terrible implications. But Trump doesn’t need to be president in order to be influential.
However, by giving voice to the secret thoughts of millions of Americans, Trump’s campaign shines the spotlight into the dark cracks of American society. The dark underbelly of American hate loves to hide behind KKK masks, police badges, corporate desks, high gates, and barbed-wire fences. It might just be the spotlight reflecting off Donald Trump’s inflated ego that brings these creatures out of hiding.
I inhaled a deep breath of fresh air, rocked gently in my chair, and gazed around at my friends, all gathered together on the back porch on that warm spring night. How could all of us have such a deep dislike of Donald Trump, and yet so many people around the country and even in our own hometown love him?
It seems the majority of the people in our wealthy, conservative Southern California town are content to follow the normative path laid out for them: seeking economic success, material wealth and subsequent power. These values are entrenched in the American capitalist system. Donald Trump is the perfect representative of white male capitalism. He’s an older white man whose economic success affords him beautiful women and cultural prestige. He’s built up his brand with inherited wealth and used reality television to catapult his career.
This leap from reality TV sensation to presidential candidate is proof of how influential popular culture can be in contemporary American society.
It was clear from scanning the back porch that my friends and I are different from the average American in at least one significant way. None of us watch television. The average American watches more than five hours of T.V. every day, not to mention how much time they spend with their eyes glued to the screen of their iPhones. How are we supposed to create cultural change when so many people have to work all day, then go home at night, lock their doors, and veg out in front of one screen or another?
Donald Trump would not be as successful as he has been in this presidential campaign without the help of specific large American media corporations. The handful of corporations controlling some of Americas largest media outlets, such as News Corp, Disney, Warner Brothers, Viacom, CBS, Comcast, Google and Apple have incredible influence in the presidential election: by choosing which candidates are most publicized, they are in effect putting those candidates at the center of American politics.
Donald Trump is an easy choice for these media corporations who value profit above all else. His extreme rhetoric is guaranteed to keep interest and ratings high all the way until the end of the race. The disgusting part is that these powerful, wealthy American media corporations don’t care enough about humanity to pass up on easy profits. In the American capitalist system, which is strongly supported by our largest media outlets, profit is king and humanity is the jester. Donald Trump didn’t invent the court, he is simply the heir to the throne. And if Donald Trump is already our president, I think we need to question the influence of a large part of our popular culture that glorifies white male capitalism.
I sat quietly on the porch, passing the wine jug to my left, daydreaming of the eminent screen-addicted zombie apocalypse. I thought about Donald Trump’s openly racist hatred towards Mexican communities. It occurred to me that from where I sat I could be in Mexico in about twenty minutes. Mexican immigrants are an absolutely essential and crucial demographic in my hometown. I have friends and co-workers who are Mexican-American, yet throughout my life, countless politicians and public policies have worked to increase the power of the white wealthy elite while marginalizing Mexican communities.
I hadn’t even learned to tie my own shoes when American political leadership signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA has undermined small scale economic systems so that large corporations can increase their profits and spread their influence. It has “created 14 billionaires in Mexico and displaced 6 million Mexican agricultural workers.”
And people wonder why Mexican immigrants come to the U.S. looking for a better life.
Today, Trump gives anti-immigration anger an unapologetic and openly racist voice on a national platform. In the mid 1990’s, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who supported NAFTA, anti-immigrant policies and a military-based border crack down. Today it is President Obama, who has quietly deported more people than any president since Eisenhower.
Anti-immigration policy and racism towards Mexican communities is nothing new. It’s not simply Trump or Republicans, but Obama, the Clintons and countless other Democratic politicians who have implemented discriminatory policies. Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant ideas are not new to the political scene. They are in embedded in the structure of politics itself.
However, by highlighting the plight of minority communities, Trump’s campaign has effectively exposed the deep-seated hatred that runs in American politics.
The fact that Donald Trump is a popular political figure means that, at least in part, his hateful ideas are popular, which means that America is full of people who support these ideas. Donald Trump’s popularity forces us to reflect on the larger systemic culture of our political system.
The jug of wine came whirling around again, back into my welcoming arms, with a grunt of “here ya go” from my friend. He passed me the jug and picked up the guitar. I looked optimistically at the jug of wine, now about two-thirds gone. You can usually correlate how much wine has disappeared from the jug with the content of the conversation. We were now moving away from the political and into the sentimental, reconjuring lost loves to soulful guitar riffs. I couldn’t help but dive once more into the political playground of my mind before this inevitable transition took effect:
My mind wandered to the roots of American inequality. From the displacement of indigenous American peoples to the enslavement of people from Africa, from Jim Crow to the modern police state, the war on drugs, law and order, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. Not to mention the large numbers of workers forced into unthinkable living situations in order to quietly hold up our food system. American institutions stand on the back of slavery.
Yes, Trump is a douchebag, but douchebags walk down the street all around us everyday. The people of America who are interested in making positive change must realize that defeating Trump in this presidential race is only scratching at the surface. We cannot be lulled into the dream of “Oh good, Trump is not going to be president; we avoided disaster, all is well, back to our daily lives.” We must understand that the hate that Trump is channeling is part of the foundation of American democracy and we must challenge it.
The Trump campaign and it’s supporters are always conveying the message that their way of living is the right way. That their values are the true values that everyone should hold. They demonize, ostracize and threaten anyone with an opinion different than theirs.
Is this not, in a sense, what American imperialism is all about? Imposing American values of “freedom” and “democracy” on unwilling subjects throughout the world, threatening them into submission with a powerful military presence since the mid 19th century.
Is this not what large American corporations are trying to accomplish every day when they try and dominate global markets? Propping up American capitalism, brands and material culture as the universal goal for world development. Destroying local knowledge and small businesses in the process.
Is this not what older men and women in my hometown have tried to drill into my head since I was a young boy? Telling me that I should study business or become a doctor, to ensure I have a good job, economic success, and privilege and power in my community, as if this is the only viable way to live a fulfilled life.
There is a major paradigm in American culture that demonizes the “other” (peoples and cultures different from ourselves that we do not understand). This American cultural divide creates hatred and blame among people dissatisfied with their lives. This hatred is rooted in historical American inequality. Trump is trying to capitalize on this culture of hate in order to lead a major political shift to the right. In order to oppose this shift in a meaningful long term way, we need to challenge the dominant American cultural trajectory. This opposition must take many forms.
We must be creative. We must address the ways that young Americans are learning what it means to be human. We must shift cultural importance back to the arts, humanities and communities in which we live, and away from monetary capitalist success as the pinnacle of the human experience.
