Trump didn’t need briefing papers to refine the message. Lenin or Ralph Lauren but from their own downwardly mobile experience on the losing side of a class war waged over the past 40 years by America’s increasingly frightened and selfish rich against its increasingly angry and debtbound poor. A fair enough share of his fellow citizens screamed, stamped and voted in agreement because what he was saying they knew to be true, knew it not as precept borrowed from the collected works of V.I. Not the exact words in Trump’s loud and thoughtless mouth, but the gist of the message that over the next 17 months he shouted to fairground crowd and camera in states red, white and blue. The big money cares for nothing other than itself, always has and always will. A deus ex machina descending an escalator into the atrium of his eponymous tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in June 2015, Trump was there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. Trump staked his claim to the White House on the proposition that he was “really rich,” embodiment of the divine right of money and therefore free to say and do whatever it takes to make America great again. His smug and self-satisfied face is the face of the way things are and have been in Washington and Wall Street for the last quarter of a century. Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. Their viewing with alarm is bipartisan and heartfelt, but the dumbfounded question, “How can such things be?” is well behind the times. Trump, real estate mogul, reality TV star, 45th president of the United States. The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.Īt the higher elevations of informed American opinion in the spring of 2018 the voices of reason stand united in their fear and loathing of Donald J. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideals. A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
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