Relax, We’re Fucked: How I Learned To Love Donald Trump

By Charlie Tetiyevsky

Donald J. Trump is no surprise to me, and not just because I have this indigo child shit going on wherein I can predict disaster.

Donald J. Trump is the perfectly formed lump of coal that has emerged from years of American pressure on an economic system that is effectively mummified, the reasonable end of worshipping television and personae past its natural Warholian endpoint. Americans pushed showmanship to its ends and while we were all off venerating the overripe Kardashian fruits of meaningless modern labour we forgot to maybe stop and consider that we had made some sort of a fucking monster.

You can’t talk about Donald Trump without talking about people’s fears, because Trump is not a person inasmuch as he is a small-handed embodiment of a collective American id that everyone knows about but no one wants to take responsibility for having perpetuated. He’s that dirty little secret twitter account where you talk shit about your coworkers. You knew it was only a matter of time before Carol found out, and now here she is with that stupid mallard mug in her hand, the one you posted a picture of, and she’s got that face on like she knows what’s going on because she does, and now what are you going to do? Just look up and smile all primly and say, “Hey, Carol, how was your weekend”? You and I and Carol all know Carol won’t go quietly on this, and now I’ve lost the thread of where I was going with this analogy but it’s fair to say that that mad face Carol is making now every time you pass her desk is the same one lots of people in America are waking up to find themselves stuck in.

And everyone’s doing that quintessentially American brand of denial wherein you saw a thing happening and then tried so hard to forget about it that you somehow propelled yourself into plausible deniability of ever having known about it to the point where everyone else can’t even be mad at you; you couldn’t be mad at a terrier who shat on a throw, for example. Look at those sad eyes.

A few months ago I was walking home and passed two guys talking in a laneway. “So,” one said while fingering a rainbow flag tied permanently to a phone pole (I love my neighbourhood), “has Donald Trump’s campaign exploded in flames yet?”

What I said when I inserted myself into the conversation was “not yet,” when what I wanted to do was tell him the truth: that I’d grown up my whole life with this orange monstrosity talking so often on the TV and radio that it seemed like he was once told by an old, forest-dwelling woman that he’d die if he ever shut up for a second. This was a man who would never be caught doing anything but loudly failing upwards into said immortality.

When it comes down to it, Trump is not what’s remarkable here. The more I consider everything from the distance of the other side of the world, the more I’m not even sure that anything is remarkable about the situation if you consider how many decades America has spent fetishising the concept of the eccentric contrarian. We would have been as likely to get a suited Candidate Trump as we would some bearded cast member of ‘The Duck Storage Cake Bachelor’; it was only a matter of time before someone came around to just say “yes” to whatever middle America grumbled about. Who needs private confessionals when you’re not afraid of what people think when you speak, when you can use every switched-on camera as a pulpit?

Lying is not exactly a complicated campaign strategy, and it clearly only took someone with Trump’s ego to prove how little of a liability outright lying really is in elections when people aren’t really looking to vote based on/for a candidate (that is, when people are less concerned with which individual is selected to be president than they are with, say, defining a specific legislative direction for the country [considering historically high unfavourability ratings for Trump and Clinton,  it becomes clear that the vote is simply a referendum on which minor variation of militarised corporate capitalism Americans would like to continue to live under–or, if you’d like a more moderate take, people’s choice of what they see to be “the lesser evil”]).

Donald Trump has existed for my whole life and longer, and is I’d imagine only one of many narcissistic crowd-pleasers out there who will say and do whatever to get what they want (Trump, as you may have noticed, has a hard-on for “winning” [and gold, which makes it a wonder he doesn’t compete in the olympics until you remember there isn’t a category for World’s Hardest Working Weave, unless that’s in the winter games because who even watches those]). He’s a conman to the core, so much the quintessential showman that American late night television has made him out to be the literal Wizard of Oz.

But other than his vocal unpleasantries, what really makes him different from the “career politicians” he loves to rally against? His views consistently score as “more liberal” than the person who came second in the Republican primary race, Ted Cruz, so it’s obviously not the case that his is somehow a new element in the American political landscape. The reality is that it’s only just hardly even a new package for these ideas.

Armchair psychoanalysis of Trump, while super fun and one of America’s current pastimes, misses the point. In Trump’s place could be anyone, especially with those ever-changing opinions of his, and the fact that this candidate happens to be someone I’ve cultivated nearly three decades of distaste for is essentially just chance. It might not be the case for the electorate in Trump’s party, but I can’t be the only independent voter who sees him as the same old shit in a more ill-fitting bulletproof vest/suit combo. My complaints about Trump are natural extensions of years of disenchantment with candidates like him—sexist and racist interventionist oligarchs so far removed from society that they seem to have permanently eroded any capacity for empathy or even reason within their own heads. Trump is just being loud in public where conservatives were previously saving their vitriol for private campaign events and fundraisers.

If there’s going to be a wolf in the room of politics (and there are so many), I’m glad that this one is at least not dressed as a sheep. The reason many “party elite” Republicans have taken opposition to Trump is not that they have fundamentally divergent political opinions (many are jumping onto the Trump Train anyway [by the way, that’s the name of the new interstate high-speed train, it’ll be yuuuuge and beautiful]); it’s that they do not like seeing someone hold their conservative cards so far from their chest in public.

It’s no secret that conservative political opinions present, regardless of whether you agree with them or not and in addition to their other qualities, a virulently unsexy image to overcome. Being considered a “presidential” candidate has been tied to this concept of “likability” at least as far back as 1960, when the handsome and composed John F. Kennedy beat a sweating and awkward Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debate (and later in the general election). But with two remarkably unpopular presumptive frontrunners, the presidential election has for most necessitated overlooking whatever serious grievances people have with their party’s candidates (that lack of “likability”) and instead voting for a Democratic candidate to voice opposition to the Republican party as a whole, and vice versa. People aren’t voting for a party’s candidate because they like what that person or party has to say; they’re voting for it because they hate the other party. It’s oppositional, not constructive, politics. The politics of minimising harm, or so it seemed.

That sort of distanced attitude, of a political discourse centred around the word “no,” has brought us down an apathy-paved road to right here: to where we no longer have a choice about whether or not we need to make some sort of a definitive choice about America’s direction. Donald J. Trump is the most natural result of decades of kicking a can down the road instead of dealing with the fact that Americans have a huge country with divisively separate ideological discourses and that, at the end of the day, to stay a united country in the existing sense much of the system we have become complacent in will have to become flexible to change.

Call it accelerationism in action if you want, but it’s pretty clear that with Trump around people on all sides are at least actually talking and protesting, and in a place that’s seemingly been much more concerned as of late with exercising trigger fingers instead of a vox populi, I’m relieved. Because as far as I’m concerned, every single election the matchup is between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich, and at least for once it seems like everyone knows what’s on the menu and is thinking maybe it’s time we go to a different Denny’s or just skip dinner altogether.

Sure, like that guy screaming on the bus, we’d all rather not have to listen to Trump talk. But there has to be some moment where everyone acknowledges that there’s nothing laudable about smiling politely in denial while the world around you sinks into itself, and if Donald J. Trump has to be the loudmouth shitbag that finally makes everyone realise how far things have really bottomed out, well, I can put up with hearing him spew his rhetoric until the election in November.

But not a fucking second longer than that, America, so y’all get your shit together.