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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe New Yorker - from 9/12/15 - Trump and Obama: A Night to Remember
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember
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Trump was then at the height of his unimaginably ugly marketing of birther fantasies, and, just days before, the state of Hawaii had, at the Presidents request, released Obamas long-form birth certificate in order to end, or try to end, the nonsense. Having referred to that act, he then gently but acutely mocked Trumps Presidential ambitions: I know that hes taken some flack latelyno one is prouder to put this birth-certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And thats because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? Andwhere are Biggie and Tupac? The President went on, We all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For exampleno, seriouslyjust recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprenticethere was laughter at the mention of the programs name. Obama explained that, when a team did not impress, Trump didnt blame Lil Jon or Meatloafyou fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.
What was really memorable about the event, though, was Trumps response. Seated a few tables away from us magazine scribes, Trumps humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him, not an ounce of the normal politicians, or American regular guys Hey, good one on me! attitudethat thick-skinned cheerfulness that almost all American public people learn, however painfully, to cultivate. No head bobbing or hand-clapping or chin-shaking or sheepish grinninghe sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage. If he had not just embarked on so ugly an exercise in pure racism, one might almost have felt sorry for him.
Some day someone may well write a kind of micro-history of that night, as historians now are wont to do, as a pivot in American life, both a triumph of Obamas own particular and enveloping form of cool and as harbinger ofwell, of what exactly? A lot depends on what happens next with the Donald and his followers. Certainly, the notion that Trumps rise, however long it lasts, is a product of a special skill, or circumstance, or a new national mood, is absurd. Trumpism is a permanent part of American lifein one form or another, with one voice or another blaring it out. At any moment in our modern history, some form of populist nationalism has always held some significant sharewhether five or ten per cent of the population. Among embittered white men, Trumps base, it has often held a share much larger than that. Trump is not offering anything that was not offered before him, often in identical language and with a similarly incoherent political program, by Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot, by George Wallace or Barry Goldwater, or way back when by Father Coughlin or Huey Long. Populist nationalism is not an eruptive response to a new condition of 2015it is a perennial ideological position, deeply rooted in the nature of modernity: a social class sees its perceived displacement as the result of a double conspiracy of outsiders and élitists. The outsiders are swamping us, and the insiders are mocking usthis ideology alters its local color as circumstances change, but the essential core is always there. They look down on us and they have no right to look down on us. Indeed, the politics of Trump, far from being in any way new, are exactly the politics of Huck Finns drunken father in Huckleberry Finn: Call this a govment! Just look at it and see what its like . . . . A man cant get his rights in a govment like this. Widespread dissatisfaction with all professional politicians, a certainty of having been sold out, a feeling of complete alienation from both political partiesNot a dimes worth of difference between them was George Wallaces formulation, a half century agothese are permanent intuitions of the American aggrieved. The feelings may be somewhat aggravated by bad times, or alleviated by good ones, but at the height of the prosperous fifties a significant proportion of Americans were persuaded that the entire government was in the hands of saboteurs and traitors at the pay of a foreign power, while in the still more prosperous nineties a similar faction was persuaded that the liberal President was actually a coke dealer who had murdered a friend.
Nor is it at all surprising to find a billionaire businessman representing this ideology, because it is not really members of the economic élite who are its villainsit is the educated élite, and the uneducated outsiders, who are. It is, on the historical record, much more a response to the ceaseless anxieties of modern life than to any financial angst of the moment. Probably the best student of this modern ideology is the conservative historian John Lukacs, whose 2005 book Democracy And Populism: Fear and Hatred makes clear how different the nationalist formula is from patriotism properly so called: it rests not on a sense of pride in place or background but in an intense sense of victimization. The cry of the genuine patriot is, Leave us alone to be the people we have always been. The populist nationalist cries, We have been cheated of our birthright, and the Leader will give it back.
The ideology is always available; it just changes its agents from time to time.
And this is where memories of the Presidents performance come into play and take on a potency that one might not have understood at the time. For the politics of populist nationalism are almost entirely the politics of felt humiliationthe politics of shame. And one cant help but suspect that, on that night, Trumps own sense of public humiliation became so overwhelming that he decided, perhaps at first unconsciously, that he would, somehow, get his own backperhaps even pursue the Presidency after all, no matter how nihilistically or absurdly, and redeem himself. Though he gave up the hunt for office in that campaign, it does not seem too far-fetched to imagine that the rageLukacss fear and hatredimplanted in him that night has fuelled him ever since. It was already easy to sense at the time that something very strange had happened that the usual American ritual of the roast and the roasted had been weirdly and uniquely disrupted. But the consequences were hard to imagine. The micro-history of that night yet to be written might be devoted largely to the double life of Barack Obama as cool comedian and quiet commanderor it might be devoted to the moment when new life was fed into an old ideology, when Trumps ambitions suddenly turned over to the potent politics of shame and vengeance. His even partial triumph in the primary still seems unlikelybut stranger jokes have been played on American philosophers over the centuries.
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The New Yorker - from 9/12/15 - Trump and Obama: A Night to Remember (Original Post)
malaise
Mar 2016
OP
AxionExcel
(755 posts)1. Drumph (R) shows his Achilles Heel
There is no there there. No substance. Just all BS & bluster, so easily deflated.
malaise
(268,957 posts)2. Yep I heard him supposedly discussing Foreign Policy this morning
absolute BS - there is no there there.
Yep.