May 16, 2016

Trump, yet again.

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Trump. Trump. Trump. Can’t get enough of the guy. I went to the bar last night, and my friend and I spoke with some American strangers. What did we talk about? What do you think?

And the night before I met an American academic; Sport, Germany, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Donald Trump says it won’t matter if the UK leaves the EU. Donald Trump says he’ll take on the major corporations, and ensure they remain in the US, protecting the jobs of workers. Donald Trump says that climate change isn’t real.

The man’s as ubiquitous as Obama was in 2008, but for all the wrong reasons. Obama offered hope, Trump’s got balls (and massive hands, and an enormous cock). Obama wanted change, Trump wants to take the country back.

Normally, discussions of power and its location and transmission doesn’t actually take the form of analysing the personality and potential a single individual has; Structures are analysed, institutions, exclusion is considered, legality thought-through. But when it comes to Presidents, we must say, it IS significant who gets elected. Unlike in the EU, for example, where individual nations must accept the broad policy packages delivered by Brussels, no matter who the premier is, in the US, the individual in charge of the executive has massive real and symbolic power.

The real power is interesting, since Trump could, and presumably would, wreck the global climate change consensus by pushing through careless pro-business laws. He probably won’t build a wall, by the way.

But the symbolic power is also interesting. He’s becoming a kind of cipher – a man on to whom America and the rest of the globe is projecting all their political hopes and neuroses, but just the negative of what Obama stood for. This is kind of obvious, but think of it this way: Obama represented a muzzle to the atavistic instincts of broad swathes of the American nation, who felt their freedoms and liberties suppressed by a burgeoning political correctness – particularly, their rights to curb the rights of others. Trump is the great anti-Obama, he’s the unmuzzled id taking on America’s superego – he wants to say something, he says it. He’s made it OK to say those things again. He’s the first to legitimate violence domestically in mainstream Western politics since – well, since the world was black and white and guys like Trump were ten a penny.

The danger of maturity is the blind belief that you want the life you’ve built – then comes the realisation and the mid-life crisis. Obama convinced America they wanted hope, change, dreams, and drones. No no, they want more that that. They want power, they realise, they want to bully, they want to throw their weight around and they want, above all, boots on the ground.

Writing in the early 20th Century, Kurt Tucholsky wrote of Hitler: ‘The man simply does not exist – he is only the noise he makes’. America should be warned about indulging their Trump mid-life crisis; They might just wake up 8 years from now realising those kicks and screams weren’t taking the power back, but the last agitated movements before death.