“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”

So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE

False prophets and siren songs

The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,”When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington in 1792.

One cannot and ought not underestimate the power and sheer durability of populism – a political style offering unworkably simple solutions to complex problems, an ebullient rejection of elite expertise in defense of homespun obscurantism. It is a particularly attractive to the many who cleave to populism, nativism, tribalism and atavism, and equate these with nationalism and patriotism – and feel that, nay believe that they’ve been ignored by the powers that be and left behind in life’s rat-race. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads throughout the ostensibly democratic world. And as the old epigram runs, “cometh the hour, cometh the man” …

We live, it feels, in a time of false prophets. A generation of different and dangerous populists now moves to centre stage. Some like Trump, are undisguised in their racial, sexist and selfish pitches. Trump knows the key to being a successful fraud is to be a grand fraud. He pledges “to make America great again” and wins wide applause. This is because he is an anti-politician, shaking the system, abusing the established politicians, trashing their ideas. He thrives on shock and extravagance in a culture drunk with mindless celebrity. He stands for economic nationalism, trade protectionism, xenophobic hostility,  towards Muslims particularly and a US strategic withdrawal from the world and much of its alliance system. As a wannabe autocrat, he admires actual autocrats, whom, he believes get things done because they break the rules and brook no dissent or contradiction. Nor Americans too averse to the prospect of an American strongman. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.

Trump is the vessel through which vast numbers of angry Americans can  channel their rage with the establishment. Back in March 2023, he told a Texas rally: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution!” His ascent reflects not so much his political brilliance but the absolute contempt an increasing share of Americans have for the nation’s institutions. Hugh Hewitt, in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, wrote recently: “Trump’s fervent supporters continue to believe he is a noble Jean Valjean of American politics being pursued by a mob of Javerts”. Columnist Maureen Dowd is more blunt: “His hallucinatory worshippers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandising con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village”.

Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Book on January 19th how Trump “… exudes a dark energy. His is perhaps the most radical mainstream presidential candidacy in US history. He offers a program of organized revenge, telling his fans that “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He promises a transformation of democracy into authoritarianism. He envisages a war on all the “vermin” who have thwarted him. He plans, as The New York Times has reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” He wants to build giant camps to house those awaiting deportation and to vet would-be travelers to the US for political (and presumably also religious) purity: “US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” The relentlessness of this determination to reshape the US into an autocracy may be horrifying, but it has the vigor of grand ambition”.

Small wonder the US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states.

Trump could well win, against Biden or against another candidate. The issues he’s running on – illegal immigration, the cost of living, lawlessness and crime – are huge and real. Trump may defeat himself if he campaigns about the injustices done to him. If he campaigns on issues as the champion of ordinary Americans, he’s got a big chance. He is is both instinctively talented as a campaigner but also capable of grievous self harm through wildly undisciplined statements – as with NATO – and narcissistic self-absorption. Driven by grievance and will to power, and behaving, some say, like a mafia boss, he is in so many ways lawless and dangerous.

So dangerous indeed, that many pundits believe that individually, many of his positions and actions, actual and promised, pose existential threats to the United States and its institutions that are far more threatening than any concerns raised by Biden’s age. Some rush to remind Americans of the time when Benjamin Franklin, one of the original framers of the US Constitution, was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him. Thomas  Jefferson to James Madison in 1787

[The quotations of the founding fathers come courtesy of Jeffrey Rosen, The Washington Post]

Found in translation …

British writer and columnist Gerard Baker does not agree with these latter day Cassandras. I republish below an entertaining and informative article written by this self-ordained translator of Trumpspeak, who describes himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon, writer and media critic. Actually, he is quite Right, a Eurosceptic and according to some, a closet Trumpista. But his piece is quite perceptive.

“Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task …There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message … in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they [his critics] miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.

The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country … Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens …Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, willfully ignored by the established political class”.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved.

For more in In That Howling Infinite on American politics, see My Country ’tis of Thee

Trump flogging joggers at Sneaker Con, February 2024

Trumpspeak crazy but attuned to Americans’ dissatisfaction with their burdens

Gerard Baker, The Times, February 16, 2024

The Republican presidential hopeful at an event in Iowa in January.  AFP

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message. The task of parsing this is so complicated that much of the media doesn’t even try. As with Pavlov’s dog, Trump rings their bell and away they go, barking like mad about some terrifying new thing the man is threatening.

The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country.

So when the permanently unfinished Rubik’s cube of Trump’s mind last weekend produced another multisided Technicolor shocker of an outburst – this time on the subject of the US and NATO – the media as usual gave us the version they wanted us to hear: “Trump says he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries who do not pay their bills,” says the headline on a story that is still on the BBC website. “I want Russia to invade Europe” in other words.

The first thing to point out is that Trump didn’t say this. He was instead recounting a story from his presidency – telling a campaign audience that when he was pressing European governments to spend more on their own defence, he was asked by a NATO country leader if the US would still protect them from Russian invasion if they didn’t pay up.

“No, I would not. In fact I would encourage them to do whatever they hell they wanted,” he said.

As your reliable translator of Trumpspeak, I’ll say there are three key takeaways from this. First, it didn’t happen. Don’t you think we might have heard about this some time in the past five years if it did?

Second, the point of the story is primarily to emphasise Trump’s own negotiating prowess. This has always been central to his bloated self-image. From casino construction to global security, it’s always about his unique ability to get the deal done. The irony is that the point of Trump’s story was precisely the opposite of what’s been said about it – instead of representing the end of NATO, it is about how (in his own mind) Trump saved the alliance with an act of bravado that forced Europeans to action.

Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, wilfully ignored by the established political class.

One of these is the idea that the world Americans inhabit is dramatically changed. It is 75 years since the founding of NATO, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War. It is remarkable how little the foreign policy establishment in the US, or America’s allies, understand the world as it appears to Americans themselves.

This is obviously true of the conspectus of global threats. In this century, first Islamist terrorism and then the rise of China have imposed themselves on the American consciousness. It’s true that NATO allies were reliable contributors to the war in Afghanistan. But that ended in disarray and disillusion – hardly an advertisement for the power of the alliance.

But more important than all that is Americans’ own, very new, sense of their own precariousness. This is not just about the changing global threats but their confidence in the success of their own country.

For more than two decades, with very brief exceptions, the vast majority of Americans have told pollsters they think their country is on the wrong track. For the first time in history most Americans think their children will be worse off than they are.

With a few exceptions, most European nations would be unable and even unwilling to stand up to an aggressor. Americans watch as Europeans have grown prosperous but dependent on US security and they resent the obligation, particularly from Europeans who seem to go out of their way to express disdain for America.

This isn’t 1930s isolationism, which reaped its own whirlwind in the 1940s. America then was an emerging superpower reluctant to get into another world war.

Today Americans see themselves as a nation in decline, under siege from global forces – uncontrolled immigration streaming across their southern border, terrorists pledging to murder them at home and abroad, a rising nuclear-armed superpower across the Pacific. And they don’t see where NATO fits in.

Trump’s words are typically extreme. Don’t let the crazy blind you to the deeper message.

The Times

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