Playing the Trump Card

Nothing has disappointed me more about the astonishing ascension to power of Donald Trump than the accompanying white power sentiment that has followed it.

Trump has become a rallying call for white middle aged men and women everywhere, and not just those that had a penchant towards conservatism or blatant outright racism in the past. No, Trump seems to have reverberated with the middle of the road middle class and become a poster boy for even the meekest slightly left of centre man in the street to find his or her inner fascist voice.

Rewind a year or two, and DT was a bit of a joke. His brash flip flopping political aspirations were akin to references of President Schwarzenegger in movies like Demolition Man, somewhat of a nod to Americas fascination with celebrity but never a serious consideration in the hard knock Washington political scene (frankly he still isn’t).

Ratings of his show The Apprentice seemed to fortify the more he played up to the role of the ultimate patriarchal male capitalist businessman of centuries gone by. The more he dramatized this character of the entrepreneur made king, the more magnetic he became to an increasingly de-polarized mostly white majority across the length of breadth of America.

All of a sudden America saw on TV someone who could advance their interests, who could arrest the onset of their perceived emasculation and “put America first”, “make America great again”. They finally had their man.

Except Donald Trump the person and Donald Trump the “you’re fired!” TV star are two very different people.

One is a character on a carefully scripted long running television series, who has hundreds of producers, script writers, directors, advisers, studio execs and PR people controlling his every word and action. We also refer to them as actors.

The other is a racist, fascist, sexist, insecure, cheating, lying, tax avoiding bastard who should never be taken seriously. We also refer to them as arseholes.

But here’s the rub, even after all the bombshells, scandals and PR nightmares (many of them self-inflicted by idiotic Tweets he sent himself), nothing could derail his campaign after the voting public decided that the character from Trump Towers who carried the ambitions and dreams of middle America on his shoulders was in fact the real Donald Trump.

It’s like electing Martin Sheen because he was an awesome president on The West Wing.

And the rambunctious noise from the right continues to rise, on social media, in the news (fake or real depending on where you stand in relation to DT) and around every water cooler at every tea break.

Each misstep of his administration, of which there have already been many, just seems to embolden his fans and supporters a little more. It’s as if they hope cacophony of sound will drown out the truth that the man is sadly and dangerously out of his depth, and so the Whitehouse eggs them on into a myopic fervor.

It sickens me to think in this day and age, the age of freedom of expression, freedom of knowledge and freedom of communication that someone can rise to power on the promise of curtailing freedoms. It takes a special kind of evil to campaign to build walls, break down bridges and label entire religions and races as undesirable.

The margin of error in electing this man is astronomical. Sometimes when you aim for the moon and you miss, you hit the stars. But just remember that a star is just a giant ball of flaming gas that incinerates anything that comes near it.