The Deluded Donald

I often find it a reassuring technique to start off a piece with some nice exaggerated comedy; it of course keeps the reader hooked for the invariably hard hitting political underbelly that each post uniquely provides. However, in the case of the leader of the free world, such hyperbolic witticisms simply aren’t possible: it isn’t possible to embellish his actions into something more bizarre than they already are.

In this vein, it may thus be worth analysing what he’s done this time: has he punched a dolphin? Has he perhaps grabbed another woman’s private parts? While both are plausible, it seems that this time Donald really is intent on showing the world that he truly has lost the plot, first by withdrawing all US funding to the World Health Organisation (at time of pandemic, no less) and then hiring former WWE president Vince McMahon as an adviser to help get the US economy back on track. Now, hopefully my points in the first paragraph are nicely vindicated because you really couldn’t make this up.

Rather than focusing on the Donald for the rest of this piece (I do somewhat value my sanity), it may be worth looking at a couple of interesting things: first the implications of these decisions and then the rationale of his supporters in their continued backing of the man.

It, I hope, goes without saying, that the implications in halting funding the most promising means of halting the pandemic is problematic. Trump has shown himself, now explicitly, willing to sacrifice untold numbers of his own citizens in the vein pursuit of political point scoring, even rolling a de facto campaign ad during a recent press briefing: a truly sickening undertaking. He has once more regarded himself as so far above the ordinary US citizen that he is quite literally willing to allow preventable deaths to take place for his own self gain. If there was any doubt before about his neo-fascist credentials, surely these doubts have now been alleviated.

What, then, is to be said of the supporters of a man who is willing to end lives and hire a WWE star to fix the economy? Are they merely stupid? Bigots? I think there’s a degree of oversimplification to the nature of his support when words such as these are tossed about. Indeed, a sector of Trumps support base are bigoted racists, but this is far from the whole story.

Rather, it is a reasonable assertion that his support can be seen as derivative to his ‘outsider’ portrayal of himself. Trump has presented himself to his base as an outsider to the Washington political order, the same order that has allowed the middle classes to be stagnant and social mobility to become near non-existent over the last 50 years. If you were in the shoes of an American stuck in an impoverished rut as a consequence of the actions by the usual establishment faces, wouldn’t you be tempted to give Trump a try? What’s there to lose?

This is of course a vast topic further rooted in economics and ideological struggle, but I think the point remains valid. The hope now has to be that the same people who saw Trump as an outsider in 2016 now see him for what he is – a deluded neo-fascist crony capitalist, or just a total nutter.