Trump: Something to Share

Trump is giving something America needed: a common experience.

In Abraham Lincoln's time everyone in an audience had a shared familiarity with the Bible.   It meant that he could make reference to "a house divided" or the judgements of the Lord being "true and righteous altogether" or heaven sent its rain "on the just and unjust" knowing that his audiences caught the reference.   The Bible was the common experience of his listeners.  

"Let us judge not, that we be judged."  People "got" it. 

Cultures glue together because they share common understandings.

Some experiences are niche experiences or they depend upon being in the right place or time.  Sophisticates might "get" the way that Brooklyn is different from Queens while others do not, readers of The New Yorker get jokes that others do not, and Fox News viewers get a very different news than do viewers of the New York Times or Washington Post.    When I ask people in their 20s if they understand what it means to "prime the pump", they have no idea.   They have never primed a pump and don't know what it means either as fact or as metaphor.  A Fed Chair who spoke of monetary easing as a way to prime the economic pump would be making a mistake.   He would be better off saying it was time to "push re-set" but might confuse people over age 75.   

JFK's assassination and funeral was a common, shared experience.  So was the more recent 9-11 attack and response because nearly everyone observed it in the same way: a deadly attack out of nowhere as Americans were innocently going about our lives.   Later things became more nuanced and complicated, but for a few weeks it was clear and simple.

The OJ Simpson trial was a common experience, even though one element of the experience was the realization--in common--that two groups of people saw the events differently.  Most white citizens saw it as an obvious miscarriage of justice because OJ was obviously guilty while a great many black citizens saw it as "poetic justice" or payback for centuries of courtroom injustice to black victims of white crime.   We saw it together and had two views of it.

Trump is a divider, but he is also a uniter.  Trump is providing a common cultural experience for people to point to and pull lessons out of.

Iconic hair

The Trump campaign is a marathon, not a sprint.   It has gone on for 9 months so far and he is an endless subject of discussion.   Trump is unusually divisive, which is part of why he is so interesting.   We watched his disrespect for Mexicans, suggesting that most of them were criminals although allowing as an aside that some might be ok.  We watched him express suspicion and fear of Muslims.  We watched him demean Weak Jeb, Little Marco, and Lie'n Ted.  We watched him call every other politician but Sanders a sold-out puppet to the special interests.

Good hands

We watched his haircuts.   We watched him assure us his hands were big and other parts were "no problem, I assure you."

Some people liked what they saw, and that, too, became a item in the common experience. People appalled by Trump wondered who it was out there that was actually voting for Trump.  The notion of Evangelicals-for-Trump was a thing of wonderment.   How could sincere church-going values voting Evangelicals vote for a vulgar, casino-owning, womanizing thrice-married guy whose knowledge of the Bible was so laughably thin that he referred to communion wafers as crackers and quoted from "Two Corinthians?"   What could they possibly see in him?  They liked something, because, as Trump noted, "I do great with the Evangelicals", and indeed he did.

An American Patriot?  Another Hitler?

Trump is a Rorschach test.    People see what they need to see.   People from every political direction find Trump a rich source of material, as complicated and contradictory and full of ambiguous parables as scriptural text.   

Is Trump energizing the Republican party by bringing working class Democrats to it with talk of free trade or is he destroying the Republican party by separating the donors from the masses by attacking the bedrock capitalist belief that free trade was good for everyone and, besides, it was an expression of freedom: free enterprise?   Either way Trump is a parable to mine for meaning.

Is Trump being an honest and plain speaking voice of the rational fears and desires of native born white Christian Americans when he calls to tighten borders, ban Muslims, renegotiate foreign trade relationships, and say "Merry Christmas", making him heroic in condemning the straightjacket of political correctness?   Or is he amplifying the racial and ethnic prejudice that is an unlovely stain in American history and steering the GOP into a niche party of George Wallace mired in a shrinking region and demographic of aging white racists?  Another parable to consider.


The news media covers Trump because he is interesting and worth covering.   This blog's readership goes up when Trump is in the title.    MSNBC condemns Trump but covers his speeches live and in full.  Trump is giving America a candidate for president, a civics lesson, and a common experience.    People get the allusion to hands and haircuts and "Build a Beautiful Wall".   People realize that the GOP is dividing into Trump voters and Stop Trump voters and there is a common consensus that Trump is important enough to fight over.