Slime, Reince Priebus sounding three deep in the vodka, slobbers on about Scott “dead in the head” Walker and all he has done for the Badger State, as he wades into a rambling intro for The Donald, presumably waiting in the wings muttering, it’s going to be great.
I am live streaming Trump’s Wisconsin episode of his Rub This in Your Face Tour. Trump must be taking a dump because they actually drag Walker on and allow him to speak. He throws a canned verbal hug to the veterans, gets his blood up over Mad Dog Mattiss’s impending annihilation of Afghanistan, before droning on about yet more Republican victories all down the goddamn ticket. Can I listen to five minutes more of this bloviating? Walker’s speaking style, part pure asshole, part seemingly decent guy denying he drank your last beer in a slightly menacing or mocking tone, makes you want to punch him in the chops.
Out of the blue, the soulless, pretty eyed Paul Ryan is summoned and does his best impression of a human being with actual emotions and thoughts, repeating Walker’s widespread Republican victory gloating, before quickly handing off to human concrete block, Mike Pence. The crowd begins Hitlerian USA! chant. Mike Pence, although just introduced, announces he is indeed Mike Pence from Indiana. Pence has a preacher’s sense of rhythm, building dramatic tension before touching middling levels of hysterical, crazed white preacher from northern Indiana cadence. None of the words he uses remain in my consciousness long enough to know what he is saying. As he speaks, I realize he only has two riffs- start slow and build in cadence and volume, and every third phrase double the build up time. Pence does his bit, and retreats as The Donald arrives.
The crowd is is erect and engorged, more than ready for a hard Trumping. The phrase Make America Great Again gets used for the 53rd time, then he enters…standing tan in mid December, in front of a row of Christmas trees, dismissing Pence like a trained dog. He begins thanking the great people of Wisconsin. Gloats over 131 added votes after recount. Visually it seems Trump is in danger of actually exploding with arrogance, smugness, and unbridled self love as he pretends to like Paul Ryan. We are going to work on the wall Paul! You have to. The wall’s gonna be a big, big factor. He licks Priebus, describing him as a super star.
A woman collapses near the front of the stage. Trump calls repeatedly for a doctor in the house to revive her because “we love everybody.” He squints into the lights, pausing long enough to seem as if he gives a shit about some lady in Wisconsin giving up the ghost in the presence of true greatness. The body carried off, Trump turns on the politicians he just touted, calling them hopelessly politically correct because the crowd prefers the phrase Man of the Year, to Person of the Year, then pivots to yet more heaping scoops of pretend love of the troops and all veterans. We will honor your service and sacrifice. USA chant returns. We don’t like seeing people burning our American flag. We’re going to take a look at that folks. Links Vince Lombardi to Mad Dog Mattis. We’re going to win so much you are going to get sick of it. We are going to get ISIS out. We are in the process of putting together a cabinet with the highest IQ in history. The great Jim Brown was in my office today, Bill Gates, Kanye, Ray Lewis all want to be part of what we are doing. The real giants of silicone valley are coming out to talk about how we can stay great.
On and on it goes, like a once taught mind falling apart. The babbling is almost held together by his sprawling concept of greatness. Greatness without the thorny pitfalls of reality, a Trumpian greatness that filters out blunders, or any of the usual baggage associated with the toughness, tenacity and hard won wisdom of real world greatness. Here, in Trump land, we are to believe greatness is like oxygen, waiting to be ingested by anyone smart enough to breath, ad with the same amount of effort.
Greatness and good will, the pursuit of shared goals, all without being taken advantage of by other nations, while defeating radical Islamic terrorism. More veteran love. Peace through strength. All of this greatness requires us to be a very rich nation. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Cars, steel, medical innovation, all in America. One of the great tax reforms in history. Middle class tax cuts! Business tax cuts! The jobs will pour in. We will be one of the lowest taxed nations in the world. We will eliminate all costly regulations. Clean beautiful coal will put our miners back to work. I will spend one trillion dollars on infrastructure. It’s time to get Americans off of welfare and back into the labor market. Buy American and hire American! America First!
I can’t listen to it anymore and switch to an 8 hour podcast of ambient music. The thumbnail, a fat searing moon and pointed stars set in the vastness of space, compliments the anodyne beat-less whispering tones.
What is worse, decades old right/left cliches, or unrealistic promise making wrapped in a proud veneer of double speak, a speak where sexist or racist commentary is bookended with professed love of women and the greatness of (insert minority)? The worn cliche style died in 2016. This is most certainly a good thing. With Trump we have gone beyond cliche, conventional politispeak and what was known as “focus group tested talking points,” a kind of agreed upon comfortable mask we dusted off every four years. Wearing the mask, we were dulled by collective amnesia, open and willingly embracing the manipulation of our thoughts and emotions. The mask’s death does not allow us to hide from our own brains anymore. Any thoughtful Liberal knows Obama was an incredible disaster on many levels ( see extrajudicial drone murders, non prosecution of the largest financial crime in history, welfare state designed for insurance companies, media witch hunts, whistle blower mauling etc…). Any thoughtful Conservative would throw up when the name Bush is uttered. Trump burned away the mask by becoming the gas and match through which people could exorcise past mental abuse at the hands of professional political campaign engineers saying one thing, and often doing the exact opposite. The vapidness of his utterances, his peculiar inability to exerciser the slightest amount of self control, his willingness to shit in the political theater punch bowl was like a 17th century bleeding of the collective comfy mask in which the mask’s dark waters could finally release and cover us in bile. He is a stain, but he is our stain.
To be drawn to Trump’s fact free babble is an act of rebellion by a significant percentage of a population trained to take pride in a meaningless process that treats them like idiots anyway. Left without a real choice again, they voted in the clown. Why not stir the orange turd floating in the poison punch? The Left wants to frame the Trump madness as pure racism, sexism and xenophobia. This element exists, but to a greater degree I think Trump’s victory is the product of hopelessnessism, which isn’t a word, but it should be. The talking point game has been played and in a twist of deep irony, the Trump era just might be a first step towards reality.
Notice the sudden hysterical ravings concerning “fake news,” mostly by organizations that employ personalities instead of journalists. The System, for lack of a better term, is shitting itself because the programming failed to work this election cycle. The Rabble misbehaved. The DNC, who floated the Russia Stole The Election bullshit the same day Podesta’s emails were released, has clamped on hard to a dual narrative in which the alternative media, who supposedly invented the pizza gate story, and Vladimir Putin, who, they claim, personally ordered hackers to somehow penetrate a few email accounts (a feat that requires almost no hacking skill), subverted the democratic process and stole the election for Trump. Eventually this nonsense will fade away and the DNC will have to figure out how to unravel itself from the grips of globalist, corporate fascists and become a party interested in legislating for the American people instead of a party obsessed with sculpting the correct messaging. It’s time to get real…and it’s going to hurt.