Street-Corner
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
Assessing the damage President Donald J. Trump’s street corner smart ass politics has done begins first with defining the domain.
National and International, surely. On the national scene, with a phony warrant declaring “waste, fraud and abuse,” he’s taking down “The Deep State,” that dark imagined fortress standing in the way of his own will to power. The psychopathology here infects a national scene already more inclined to see criminality in the Federal government than in the exploitering, profiteering, and immiserating abuses of the private sector’s Market Rule.
More disastrous is this president’s pushing our political divide down to the level of family and friends, to Everyday Life of Everyday Americans, as phrased by Hillary Clinton, in search of a signifier for those with whom she had lost connection. Americans hadn’t seen this penetration of political fear, hatred, spleen on this level since the War Between the States, as described on one side, and the Civil War, as described on another side.
I experienced a smaller version of this down to your local bar level of animosity in the Viet-nam war protest days of “Love It or Leave It.” The Counter Culture wanted to green America and dismantle the Corporate State. The results? Marketers branded hippie clothes, music, memes, pot and hair and in short time the Counter Culture commodified in shops on Rodeo Drive and vaporized in the headlights of Watergate. “Make love, not war” neither produced a Good Trump icon or caught on like Trump’s description of “people flowing in from Haiti: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” or Mexicans who are drug dealers and rapists though a few might be good people. Trump assumes.
What Trump assumes is what 77 million have assumed. Or are for their own self-interest ready to assume. What Trump does is stay within, or just on the edge, of the passion range of the Have Nots, which are those Trump would say “don’t have a card to play” in the competitive arena of who wins and who loses. They have no leverage to move politics their way. But Trump promises to give them that leverage. He will become the owner of the political order and he will work on their behalf. He needs just enough votes from this class to win the presidency for them. It’s a con that works because he reads the passions of anger and frustration, impatience and destruction that have been on the boil since Reagan upturned a middle-class rule.
Class warfare is shuffled off so that “Lawfare” takes its place, a simulacrum without any grounding. Racial warfare is shuffled off so that a war against immigrants, asserted to be all illegal and all criminal and all denied due process, is the new terrain. The bottom line here in regard to both racial warfare and class warfare is that Trump runs his plow over both. He’s not absorbed in the traditional warfare of the past except as possible triggers to achieve his personal ends. He brings all the messiness of long standing debate positions regarding class and race down to street corner Smart Ass. And it works.
Trump didn’t create the populace’s attitude toward the Federal Government, bureaucracy, people of color, the LGBTQ community, socialists, Jesus, taxes, welfare, guns, women, regulations, militancy, punching back, Liberals, and the “Guy With the Most Toys at the End” wins. He straight out applauded some, dog whistled others and in total energized and elevated all of it to a level – Presidential — the populace had never seen before. It all resonated with their own gut feelings. He can’t rain down retribution and pain fast enough. When Trump chuckles at imagining immigrants in Allegator Alcatraz concentration camp running from crocs, he knows his people are laughing too. A casual enjoyment of cruelty will not be easy to dissolve in the American Heartland. He’s a mean smart ass Savior, obviously preferred to what Democrats put in the ring.
I’d say his presidency is enjoyed by a whole lot of people, though it’s a nervous enjoyment. His smart ass nasty is hard to miss. I’d say there is some enjoyment Trump is having in dismantling and undermining parts of our government, such as faith in the trustworthiness of our due process of alleged criminality, our jury trial system, our trusted elections, the reportage of the Fourth Estate, the wisdom of our co-equal branches of government, and our peaceful transition of power. He’s having his day after being opposed in some way beyond his or our calculation. At bottom, the politics of his mocking smart-ass are deeply pathological.
We were all naïve before Trump, at least in regard to a pathological presidency. We were sure of the solid ground upon which our trust was built, respectful of the 236 years of American history, not without tragic moments, but able to carry on Constitutionally, and patient that somewhere the truth would appear and reality would crush the fantasies of one twisted man.
Little of that trust remains. Donald J. Trump has, like Iago in The Tragedy of Othello, placed doubt of all in the American Mass psyche. That he has done this not to bring us to a more perfect union but for reasons so much like Iago’s that the comparison is eerie. When asked why Iago destroyed Othello’s faith in his love for Desdemona, he says this: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”
After the millions of words written in an effort to understand this man Donald J. Trump, who is dismantling our government and our trusting and respectful relationships with each other, we will I think be left with what Shakespeare left us with in regard to Iago. This was a behavior, a motivation, a crime not cipherable in any human terms and yet human.
The ”Big, Beautiful Bill” the Senate has just passed is damaging on so many levels but Congress can always pass new laws to amend or repeal previous legislation, regardless of its original designation as “permanent.”
The destruction of our faith in every aspect of our government, in the words we used to represent what is real and true, and in our respectful honoring of the differences each of us display – none of this is easy to ignore once planted in our minds. Yet, for example, the dreams of the French Revolution ended with Napoleon and were not somewhat re-established until 1870”s Third Republic which lasted until WWII. What history seems to tell us then is that distrust built on fear and hatred are as “permanent” as tax cuts to the wealthy in the Trump Regime’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” And because there is no Napoleonic genius to the politics of outer borough street corner Wise Ass, we can expect no permanence to Trump and minions.
