By
Christian Schneider
Thursday,
August 10, 2023
On July
2, 1991, as Guns N’ Roses roared through its set at an amphitheater near St.
Louis, lead singer W. Axl Rose spotted a man in the audience taking photos of
the show. After urging security to take the man’s camera, Rose launched himself
into the crowd to wrestle it away himself.
The
ensuing “Rocket Queen
Riot” lasted three
hours, with over 60 people being injured. A year later, Rose was arrested for
inciting the riot. He was cleared on that charge but was found guilty of
property damage and assault, ordered to pay $50,000, and given two years’
probation.
As
everyone knows, Rose’s arrest and conviction ruined his reputation with his
fans, and he was never heard from again.
Just
kidding. Even after a string of his other criminal activities, his followers
loved him more and more, the band kept selling millions of records, and his
fans stuck with him even as it took him 15 years to finish the band’s
album Chinese Democracy. The full band has mostly reunited,
and this summer they played in front of 200,000 people at England’s Glastonbury
Festival.
Sadly
for Rose, his riot incitement took place three decades before such boorish
behavior could have vaulted him into the lead of a Republican presidential
primary. But just as Rose’s repeated legal problems further endeared him to
fans, former president Donald Trump’s travails in the federal court system have
boosted his own standing among his supporters.
This is
because Team MAGA views Trump not as a politician but as an entertainer. He
isn’t scrutinized as a traditional stuffy old senator or ensconced mayor might
be; instead, Americans stare agog at his outrageous behavior in the same way
they follow the latest shenanigans of a rock band full of scofflaws or a drug-addled
actor. In many cases, it’s the legal trouble itself that can entertain us.
Celebrity
culture allows famous people to misbehave both because we get to live
vicariously through them and because it gives us permission to behave badly.
(As a famous philosopher once said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything.”) Celebrity culture is aspirational — they get to do all
the crazy stuff we would do if we weren’t encumbered by jobs and families and
consciences.
To wit,
unless you’re a hypocritical ghoul like Bill Cosby, society will forgive you of
almost anything. Remember the young, up-and-coming actor in the late 1990s who was
repeatedly arrested on drug charges, including once when he was carrying a
weapon and another time when he wandered into a stranger’s house and fell
asleep on a bed?
That
actor, Robert Downey Jr., eventually went on to star as the beloved Marvel
superhero Iron Man and is now all but assured an Oscar nomination for his role
in this year’s Oppenheimer.
Or take
Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil, who in 1984 drunkenly went on a liquor-store
run and crashed his car, killing his passenger. Neil was found guilty of
vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to a meager 30 days in jail. He and his
band took off in the mid-1980s, and they still play to huge crowds today.
And do
we even need to talk about Michael
Jackson?
In some
respects, Trump has cultivated this reputation as a celebrity by hanging out
with actual rock stars. Poison frontman Bret Michaels once won a season
of Celebrity Apprentice and later played a Trump inaugural
ball. In fact, before assuming the presidency, Trump’s most meaningful decision
had been to fire singer Meat Loaf from the show.
Coasting
on the celebrity gained as a game-show host, Trump was plucked out of the 2016
presidential field by disaffected Americans who didn’t believe the government
worked for them anymore. So why not pick someone fun?
And
while Trump is a thick-headed, dishonest, corrupt reprobate who certainly
belongs in prison for crimes against America, it is easy to see his appeal.
Being able to fire off crackpot theories in front of a national audience
whenever you want sounds like a great time. I was once a teenage boy — I can
confirm acting like a moron in public is liberating.
And
Trump’s many fans certainly think so, too. Like many rock fans who adopt their
favorite band’s persona, a bumper crop of Trump boosters have accepted his
invitation to act like there are no unwritten rules holding society together.
They claim his lying is fine as long as it isn’t
technically illegal, they brush aside court judgments that found Trump raped a woman, and they cheer on his nonsensical
social-media posts, many of which are intended to intimidate
witnesses in
his upcoming trials.
Trumpism
isn’t an organized philosophy, it is an emotion. And like many music fans,
Trump’s backers have organized their lives around their new pro-Trump personas.
This is a new, and wholly unhealthy, phenomenon: Pledging fealty to a
politician with the same fanaticism one might reserve for Taylor Swift or Beyoncé
can only lead to an America that succumbs to a wannabe strongman.
This
explains why Trump has such staying power. For his fans, breaking from Trump
would not only feel like a betrayal, it would be an admission that they were
wrong to have embraced him with a passion invested in very few American
politicians to date. It’s easy to sour on a traditional, run-of-the-mill
politician; it’s much more difficult to divorce a celebrity for whom you have
changed your entire personal ethos. It’s like a Deadhead waking up one day to
realize the 46-minute live
version of
“Playing in the Band” they heard Jerry and the boys play in 1974 might have
been a waste of their time. It’s never going to happen.
Given
this bond between Trump and his followers, none of the mini-Trumps to have
emerged in the 2024 presidential campaign have a chance against the genuine
article. They are politicians. Trump is a star. Why cast your vote for a
sycophantic weenie like Vivek Ramaswamy or a Diet Trump candidate like Ron
DeSantis when you can have the real thing? Neither of them even
knows Bret Michaels!
Of
course, the criminal travails of celebrities are of far less consequence than
those of the president of the United States. One does not have to worry that a
drug-crazed President Axl Rose is going to order Secretary of State Slash to
fire nuclear warheads at North Korea — or, conversely, invite Kim Jong-un to a
White House state dinner. Vice President Hootie is not going to order the
Blowfish to overturn the results of a national presidential election.
Idolizing
politicians as celebrities, and being amused rather than aghast at their
criminal acts, has dire consequences. Waving away politicians’ felony
indictments, much less convictions, based on celebrity fandom harms the
democratic ethos and American security. It will make future celebrity
candidates expect similar passes for misbehavior. And it also means that Hunter Biden, in addition to having fashioned
himself as a painter, had better quickly learn to shred on the guitar.
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