Preventing Enda and his bowl of shamrock going out to the White House would achieve nothing
Donald Trump’s presidency will not be undone by an outbreak of adolescent foot stamping by his opponents, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
IT’S becoming increasingly, if not soul-destroyingly, clear that the news for the next four years will consist entirely of people losing their minds over something that the new President of the United States has done or said or tweeted. Especially tweeted.
Donald Trump may be mad as the proverbial box of frogs, but now he’s making everyone else go bonkers too — an insanity which manifested itself in Ireland last week in calls for the Taoiseach to cancel his annual visit to the White House on St Patrick’s Day in protest at the President’s executive order imposing a 90-day halt to foreign arrivals from seven, mainly Muslim, countries.
Essentially Enda Kenny was being urged to jettison one of the longest and most important relationships which Ireland has with a foreign state — and for what?
So that a few puffed-up radicals back home could tot up some virtue points and feel high and mighty for five minutes.
The good feeling was unlikely to last longer than that, because President Trump could merely have replied: “Ireland? Isn’t that the place that keeps its refugees and asylum seekers in cramped direct provision centres for years on end awaiting a decision on €19.10 a week? The same place which has opted out of directives which require minimum standards for the treatment of refugees?”
Enda Kenny, having no possible response to that rejoinder, would have been sent away with his tail between his legs, for absolutely no gain.
The calls for Enda to boycott the traditional St Patrick’s Day ceremony came from People Before Profit/ Anti-Austerity Alliance, whose shouty representatives were doing exactly the same thing of which the critics accuse Trump, namely substituting emotion for reason, and treating the formulation of foreign policy as recklessly as the composition of a late-night tweet.
Richard Boyd Barrett even declared that President
‘Donald Trump will not be undone by memes about his hair or his small hands — you can’t fight idiocy with idiocy, or celebrity with celebrity...’
Trump had “declared war” on “Muslims, immigrants, ethnic minorities and refugees.”
He calls Trump dangerous, but this overheated emotionalism and hyperbolic magnification is not only dangerous too, it’s symptomatic of the same dumbed-down culture which created and sustains the former reality TV star.
An orgy of triviality is swamping the mainstream media as much as its oft-maligned social media counterpoint. Stig Abell of The Times Literary Supplement identified on radio last week a tendency for contributors to namecheck Trump, even if writing about 16th-century Dutch art or something equally unrelated.
This is how celebrity works. Everyone wants a piece of it. It sucks everything into it like a black hole.
Donald Trump will not be undone by memes about his hair or his small hands. Scorn will wound his ego, because he’s a big man baby, but you can’t fight idiocy with idiocy, or celebrity with celebrity.
Whether it’s calling on Enda not to visit the White House, or making mock-up pictures of Trump with sarcastic captions, or marching in silly hats, the more hysterical opponents of the new President are just reinforcing his power — because they’re making it all about him.
As a walking embodiment of narcissistic celebrity culture, that’s all he really wants. The critics might be getting attention with their stunts and capers, but only because his name is attached to it.
Just as he was the first to recognise the commercial power of branding and selling an image, so he is branding politics in his own persona; and the sillier fringes of the anti-Trump opposition are becoming part of his PR team whether they realise it or not.
In seeking to undermine him as a political leader using the tools that might work against him if he was merely another celebrity, they’re missing the target every time. And they’re missing it because they think they’re dealing with some mysterious new reality. They’re really not. He does certain things differently. He tweets like a sulky teenager; he doesn’t command the stage with lyrical eloquence when he talks, the way his predecessors and opponents have learned to do. All that’s proving is how irrelevant these things are. Had they been sufficient, he wouldn’t be President.
Meanwhile, as his enemies become frustrated and angry at their own inability to subvert him, Trump has been meeting car manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies; laying the ground for bilateral trade deals; talking to workers and unions on job creation; reducing regulatory restrictions on business.
Next week in Washington he’ll be meeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose government is busily putting together a trade deal worth an estimated 700,000 jobs for American workers.
Running America as if it was a business might not work; but if it doesn’t, it won’t because the old way worked either — and if it does work, what then for his opponents?
Keep mocking his hair? Keep waving placards comparing everyone with whom you disagree to Hitler?
Once the theatrical outrage has exhausted itself, the same rules will apply. Politics doesn’t change that much.
If the critics want him gone, then they need to go away, grow up, and quietly figure out why they lost in places such as Ohio and Indiana, and why Hillary Clinton got 230,000 fewer votes in Wisconsin than Obama — and then find a credible, serious candidate who can win on Tuesday, November 3, 2020.
If they can’t do that, and Trump actually does what he says he’ll do on the economy, then, not only will he win again, but he will deserve to win again, and no amount of adolescent foot stamping will make a blind bit of difference.