Thoughts after the First Week Following Trump’s Election
The initial shock is mostly over. Yes, the American people elected a joke. A really, truly awful joke. However, in the midst of the hissing and groaning and jeering and other angrily vocal reactions, to my surprise, I noticed one particular person who isn’t laughing.
Donald J. Trump.
Recent images show a deflated, exhausted creature who apparently can’t be bothered with his traditional morning routine of coating his skin in his trademark combination of spray-tan and bacon grease. Photographs from his meeting with President Barack Obama are awkwardly amusing to look at. Obama sat through it with his usual air of poise and dignity, the hint of a smirk occasionally crossing his lips, visibly resisting the urge to say “I survived eight years of baseless accusations from you and swine like you, and in less than eight weeks you’re facing a fraud trial that could get your ass impeached.” It’s hugely unlikely he will get impeached with Congress and the Senate firmly in Republican hands, but it reflects how he’s in for a rough ride. He’s the dog who caught the car. He simply doesn’t know what to do now that he’s caught it.
On a very basic level, part of the problem for Trump seems to be that the Presidency is unlikely to offer the hoped-for chance to boost his already bloated ego. On the campaign trial, you have a legion of toadies and sycophants, spit-polishing your boots and screaming your name in almost evangelical ecstasy. It’s not like his supporters will disappear, or even stop singing his praises, but the energy they devoted exclusively to aggrandizing his negligible qualities and defending his questionable (if not downright appalling) behaviour will wane. Now is the time for hard work, and the concept of working for someone other than himself seems completely foreign to him.
Worse still, he owes a lot of favours to the legion of vicious geeks who got him into power. A lot of people had to put a lot of work into making him a viable presidential candidate, and he only has so many positions in his cabinet. Also – and I can’t stress this enough – Donald Trump is not stupid. He’s sleazy, morally bankrupt, the physical embodiment of narcissistic personality disorder, and a savage embodiment of everything wrong with America, but he’s legitimately brilliant. He had to pander to social conservative (and downright fascistic) goons while staying moderate on issues like marijuana legalization, and it won’t be long before even the legendarily ignorant American public realizes the extent to which he’s been talking out of both sides of his mouth. A man cannot serve two masters, and he’s been pandering to so many elements of the lunatic fringe that he’s a few missteps away from being ripped to shreds like an inconsequential character on The Walking Dead. When there’s no one else he can throw to the wolves, the wolves will turn on him, and he knows it.
Another thing that seems to be deflating the boy-balloon is the dawning realization that the scandals that have plagued him throughout his campaign are not going away this time. For decades, Trump successfully slithered away from being held accountable for his many misdeeds. While he was always famous and notorious in equal shares, there’s a difference between the level of scrutiny one faces as a celebrity (or fringe political candidate) than one faces as the President of the United States. If he was just the same old archetypal sketchy businessman we’d long since gotten used to, the Trump University scandal would just be one more civil case involving one more predatory capitalist. It’d fade from the public consciousness in a matter of weeks, if not days. As President, these are grounds for impeachment (hence why he settled out of court). After decades of being at best a creep and at worst a walking argument for castration, the sexual assaults and disturbing fondness for teenage girls are now public knowledge. Granted, a frightening number of people simply don’t care, but there’s no more hiding from his questionable past, and he knows it. Freakish public apathy aside, the truth has been laid bare.
And as an almost comical aside, you have his family. You can refer to Diane Baker Mason’s article on Melania for a more detailed dismembering of his wife’s questionable character, but I’ll say this: she’s no Michelle Obama. Hell, she’s not even Laura Bush. Trump’s daughter Ivanka – the one he called “a piece of ass” – is already using his position to hawk her jewellery. His sons are basically carbon copies of their father with maybe half the brains and none of the tact. I suspect that if you threw a thousand-dollar bill between his wife and children, the ensuing fistfight would lead to at least one death. I also suspect that the only thing that could make any of them shed a tear over said death would be the revelation that the bill was counterfeit. If anyone in my family behaved like anyone in the Trump family, they’d be disowned, and I say this as someone who is no stranger to embarrassing his relatives. I probably just handed Ms. Baker Mason another article topic.
Admittedly, this article’s been rather heavy on the outright vitriol. While I would generally agree that stooping to insults is a poor idea when making a point (and it’s something you should never do in your professional career), it is important to speak truth to power, and the truth can be insulting. Since I haven’t done it in awhile, I’ll leave on the words of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote the following in his scathing eulogy of Richard M. Nixon:
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.”
Replace Nixon with Trump, and it was as true then as it is now.