Trump is astonishing in his disloyalty to subordinates. But he is loyal to one big thing. Trump. He gets political strength from that.
Trump is loyal to his brand, that character he plays as candidate and president. That makes his faithful to his base of voters.
Trump's overall message and tone create a political character of "bad boy rebel i-yam-what-I-yam." He is the playboy, rule-breaking, unapologetic, dominant, self-centered bully-hero. In high school terms, he was not the valedictorian teacher's pet (that was Hillary), but the tall, good looking rich boy who drove a GTO, made fun of teachers, and dated several of the prettiest girls, then left them for other, younger, prettier ones. In movie terms, he is James Bond or Rambo or Cool Hand Luke or Jason Bourne, or any of the other swashbuckling rule-breaking heroes contested by the un-cool authority figures. In political terms he is Putin, not Merkel. He is Patton or MacArthur, not Eisenhower. In The Magnificent Seven, he is the Yul Brenner tough guy in a black hat the townspeople call in to deal with other tough guys.
He is the hero who knows how to fight, and he is on our side, and the rest can be forgiven because that is enough for the great many people who wanted that kind of president.
He is loyal to not doing the conventional presidential thing, because he defined graciousness and empathy as "political correctness", and therefore mealy mouthed and weak and typical politician stuff. After Charlottesville, Obama or the Bushes or Bill Clinton would have said presidential things to re-affirm American values of anti-racism. Trump's evil-genius instinct was to recognize that his base doesn't really value that inclusiveness talk. It wants pro-American, pro folks like us, talk instead. No apology for traditional all-American our-kind-of-people thinking. We are we and we are OK.
Viewing a censored media from Asia helps clarify that his point of view is commonplace, fully familiar to readers who see Fox News in the US and Chinese state TV. It is not cosmopolitan and international. It is unabashedly one sided. Trump's political character embraces that one sided, no apology point of view that we are the good guys, and people with traditional cultural values, the less cosmopolitan, the politically conservative love that point of view, because it is the only "real" point of view? Ours. They want Trump to stay in character as that fighter for us, our-kind, regular Americans, real Americans. No apology.
1 comment:
Interesting that most of your comparisons were fictional characters.
It speaks to our societies' fascination with fantasy. The invention of TV and Movies created visual representations of literary characters who could do superhuman feats (I watched Flash Gordon serials as a child), and have most certainly contributed to a nationalist myth of American exception, including the myth of the "rugged individual".
Trump is this sense is not a real human being, but a cartoon of his own creation. One could almost have empathy for such an empty individual, almost...
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