Whiff of a bad egg but they love it in Alabama
Gorge rising, egg sandwiches threatening to repeat, I have just watched 10 minutes of Trump making a speech. He was in Alabama.
I have a connection with Alabama. A lecturer at a minor college there teaches a class on world trade. And one of his course texts is a book I wrote about Chinese underpants. Yes, I’m as astonished as you are.
But the upshot is that once a year I travel by Skype to a screen in his classroom to answer any questions his students might ask. Those students are all white, male, corn-fed, Alabama-born and Alabama-raised. They are very polite, though the questions they ask do not scintillate.
This year I asked them a question back. I wanted to know what they thought of Trump. And they told me, unhesitatingly and unanimously, that they liked him, that they thought him an admirable president in every way. They seemed not to see what you and I and anyone indeed who’s not from Alabama or somewhere similar cannot help seeing, which is that Trump is concerned with only one thing. And that one thing is Trump.
His egomania is without limit. It is his all, his purpose. As he sees it the world exists to serve his love of himself. This is the grandfather who had a fake Time magazine cover made up, with his own face on it and words praising him, and who had copies of it framed and hung in each of his golf clubs. An adolescent caught doing something similar would shrivel with embarrassment. Not so with Grandpa Trump. When the story came to light he was not in the least abashed. His vanity is undentable. His ego and he are one.
All of which was evident in the 10 minutes of speech I managed to watch. Ostensibly he was promoting some candidate for the senate. Actually he was promoting Trump. Trump needs praise as you and I need oxygen, so if others won’t supply it he does the job himself. ‘‘Isn’t it a little weird,’’ said Trump at one point, ‘‘when a guy who lives on 5th Avenue in the most beautiful apartment you’ve ever seen comes to Alabama and Alabama loves that guy?’’
Trump reminds me of the Victorian hymns we had to sing at school and by which we were supposed to be convinced of the existence and excellence of god simply by being told of the existence and excellence of god.
O praise ye the Lord! Thanksgiving and song to him be outpoured all ages along!
Months ago I offered a wager. A bottle of Australian shiraz said that by the end of the year Trump would have either been impeached or started a war. Well now, time is running short for impeachment. Though Mueller is on to Trump, and Trump knows it, I doubt there’ll be an indictment before Christmas. But the closer Mueller gets to Trump’s crimes, the more likely Trump is to go to war.
War’s a standard way of boosting popularity. Countries at war tend to unite behind their leader, at least in the short term. But what I didn’t realise when I offered the wager is that Trump loves the idea of waging war for its own sake. He sees the American military as an extension of his own potency.
So he has boosted military spending. He describes weaponry as beautiful. He has proposed a military parade on July 4th, with tanks, missiles and ranks of saluting soldiers. He boasts of US military might. And he loves to threaten.
In his speech Trump threatened North Korea. The crowd knew what was coming and Trump did not disappoint. He referred to Kim Jong Un as ‘‘Rocket Man’’. The crowd laughed and cheered and clapped.
What they were cheering was the paving of the road to war. For by the use of the nickname Trump turns his enemy into a cartoon character. This reassures his audience while at the same time lightening the tone, making war seem like an episode of Batman. And thus it becomes easier to kill actual people.
Any military action in Korea, however supposedly surgical, will kill thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, almost all of them innocent. Trump will know this but he just doesn’t care. He is itching to do it. The bully in him craves the sense of power. It has nothing to do with the safety of the United States. It has everything to do with one man’s psyche. And down in Alabama they don’t seem to mind. Let us eat our sandwiches while we may.
By the use of the nickname 'Rocket Man' Trump turns his enemy into a cartoon character. This ... makes war seem like an episode of Batman.