At this late date in the 2024 presidential campaign, what mystifies me the most about the election if how about half of this country's voters still support Trump despite his obvious vileness.
In an article in the October 21, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, a highly skilled writer and analyzer of current events, discusses the disease of Trumpism in "As Bad as All That: Donald Trump and the unmaking of America." (Online title: "How Alarmed Should We Be if Trump wins again?")
Download How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again? | The New Yorker
The final page of the article is a devastating, entirely accurate, warning of Trump's villainy and the danger he poses to the United States and the world should he regain the presidency.
Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do.
Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences.
He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?
Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies.
And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.
What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor.
In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following.
This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in "King Lear" and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.
Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon.
Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power.
One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.
Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.
Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.
It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.
During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue.
Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high.
Trump still leads in the most reliable probability indicator -- the political bookmaking sites:
https://polymarket.com/
https://www.oddschecker.com/us/politics/us-politics
Let's grant that Trump is a vile human being, and everything the Gopniks say about him is 100% true, and everyone knows it. How then to explain, after all that vileness, Trump has a 60-40 edge over Kamala Harris?
I can hear it now. "MIsinformation!" "Russia, Russia, Russia!" Crying wolf.
But let's face it. The more likely explanation for "vile" Trump leading in the polls must be that Biden did a horrible job, and few really have any faith in Kamala's ability.
Much of the public sees who's really been trying to destroy democracy, and they aren't buying the Gopnik narrative.
Posted by: sant64 | October 19, 2024 at 02:23 PM
There is of course one minor redeeming feature of Trump's compared to Harris and Biden.
He hasn't committed genocide and led humanity to the brink of WW3.
I know facts, honesty and truth are irrelevant in the ridiculous charade that is the US election, but I thought it worth pointing out that Biden and Harris will be remembered, factually speaking, as the genocide committing, war mongering barbaric monsters that led humanity to the brink of disaster that they are. Future generations will ask how people voted for such monsters even whilst babies, children, women and men were rounded up and slaughtered, burned to death, raped, entire familial lineages wiped out with their FULL military, financial and political support.
The inhumanity is unbearable, humanity is creaking under the yoke of Western imperialist, colonial, racist barbarism.
The videos of children being burned alive, hundreds of children being rounded up and put into what appears to be mass graves to bury them in, the snipering of children, pregnant women, medical rescuers etc, all from just the last few days alone as the massacre of Jabalia continues, televised, will be a cause of great shame and embarrassment for future generations. How did they not only manage to turn a blind eye to this hell on earth, totally disconnected from the suffering of others caused by their own government, but also actually cheerlead for their genocidal, monstrous leaders.
This is a terrible, terrible scar upon humanity that will take centuries to heal.
We should all be deeply ashamed. Some more than others. The inhumanity is unbearable, unbelievable, utterly disgusting.
Posted by: manjit | October 20, 2024 at 07:05 AM