The Imaginary Trump

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, November 27, 2020

 

Like Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump is man who represents the age in which he lived. Whatever you may think of the age. Jackson embodied a generation of men who had risen and made their mark in a young country. He represented their desire for greater representation, even if it had costs for slaves and Indians. He represented their desire to wrest control of a nation’s institutions, which had been monopolized by a small patrician elite. Jackson was partly a product of a new print-media culture.

 

Donald Trump represented an age of celebrity, the age of endorsement deals. His is the age of cable-news addiction in old age and sharing opinions as a branding opportunity. He represents a social-media age, which fixes a digital sewage pipe to the brains of every single person on earth and allows the mental diarrhea to gush upon an unready world. He represented the fantasy of a moneyed elite that used to slum it in Queens, but has settled into a Manhattan penthouse.

 

And because he is a celebrity figure and creature of Reality Television, he has become the object of fantasy for much of the public, and most especially for tub-thumpers, journalists, and public intellectuals. These people, most of all, recognized Trump’s weird charisma, and his power over a crowd. Often, being wordy people themselves, they envied his ability to communicate “seriously, but not literally” to an audience.

 

And so one of the most common forms of commentary during the Trump age was to imagine what Trump should say, or to wish he would stop saying the actual things that Trump says. We’ve had five years of people recognizing him as a star performer but wishing they could be Trump’s screenwriter.

 

Right-wing Trumpers tried to imagine Trump as King Cyrus, or Constantine — a strong man who could liberate God’s people from the grip of their tormentors. Most of his biggest fans don’t really have illusions about Trump. But, they still imagined a better version of Trump. One of my favorite examples of this comes from the authoress “Peachy Keenan” over at the American Mind. A COVID-19 hawk from the start, Keenan demanded a “war time Trump” come on the stage and even wrote a speech for him to give in the spring. She envisioned a sharp, rather strict 60-day shutdown, to ramp up the infrastructure necessary to take on the virus.

 

The real Trump would give a sleepy-sounding speech from the Oval Office. He would eventually give long briefings from the White House, poorly reviewed, in part because he would speculate rather freely about bleach and UV light being put in the body. The fantasy Trump took Churchillian control and responsibility for the dire situation. The real Trump wished vainly that the virus would go away, promised what turned out to be vaporware testing sites and websites, and then hoped (again) vainly that the ordeal would be over shortly and we could all celebrate Easter as normal.

 

How was your Thanksgiving?

 

Commentators imagined what a different Trump could do, a Trump who didn’t imply that a judge’s ethnicity made him biased, a Trump who didn’t make a target of Khizr Khan’s family. They imagined a true worker’s party Trump who cast away Paul Ryan’s tax cuts and instead revived America’s engineering and industrial leadership.

 

In the summer this year, Cal Thomas looked forward to a rally in Tulsa. “The president should not just use the speech to fire up his base,” he wrote. “He should propose something substantive that might provide, if not a solution to racial tensions, then at least begin to solve the underlying problem, something Democrats have only talked about for 50 years.” Thomas imagined a Trump who sought to unite white and black Evangelicals in common purpose and preached the Fatherhood of God over all.

 

The real Trump threatened the crowd. “If the Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control.” The real Trump encouraged the crowd to envision a day when their patience finally ran out and they annihilated the leftist mobs. “We had a bunch of maniacs come and sort of attack our city,” he said. “The mayor and the governor did a great job, but they were very violent people. Our people are not nearly as violent, but if they ever were, it would be a terrible, terrible day for the other side.” So much for healing.

 

Some racists imagined Trump would bring about endless racial polarization in our politics that would bring them to prominence. Some anti-racists imagined and feared the same. Strangely, he seemed to depolarize the racial divide in our politics. Extreme Internet reactionaries fantasized about a Trump who took absolute power, dismantling the Left’s institutions. And many progressives fantasized the same, if only to stimulate themselves with fear.

 

But beneath all these fantasies was the real Trump. When he leaves office in January, he leaves a hole in our politics, a gaping void where so many people deposited their most lurid fears and aspirations. The real Trump was a political phenom, but he never justified this.