The picture of Dorian Trump
If we’re going to get into the good, the bad and the ugly of Donald Trump’s first foreign trip, let’s have the good first.
As supporters and commentators willing to give him the benefit of the doubt have pointed out, he spoke his mind without going overboard at one end and giving an inch at the other. He delivered the message he said he would. He was true to himself without shooting himself in his already bullet-riddled foot. Good for him and his admirers.
Now to the bad, and it ties in with the ugly. Trump proved once and for all that the ugly American is more than just a fiction turned stereotype over the years. It’s reality now, embodied in the president of the United States himself.
Trump hobnobbing with the royals that run the corrupt enterprise called Saudi Arabia. Trump pushing the prime minister of less-consequential Montenegro out of the way to get to the front of a photo lineup. Trump forcing and then losing a handshake contest with France’s youthful and newly elected president. Trump having his hand slapped by his wife for daring to fake an intimacy (for public consumption) that
clearly doesn’t exist between the two. Where was the statesmanship a great nation like the United States of America might expect from its leader?
There was a time when the term ugly American only applied to American behaviour abroad. With Trump, ugly has moved into the nation’s very civic heart. Boorishness, rudeness, ignorance, contempt, selfishness, crass materialism and
opportunism — it’s all become officially part of making America great again.
Trump represents the dark side of the American Dream as it’s being turned into a game show with him ever the first to clap.
Never mind the dream’s original vision of equal opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. In Trump’s world, you compete against increasingly grotesque odds where pride, greed and lust trump prudence, justice and temperance every time. The moral universe is turned upside down, with the deadly sins on top and the heavenly virtues at the bottom.
Deception is the name of the game, and Trump is an accomplished practitioner. He rails against fake news while his tweets are the biggest fake news of all. He vows to drain the swamps of others only to make room for his own fetid bog. He promises to make America great again when it’s really all about aggrandizing himself.
Even the name with which he signs his tweets is deceiving. POTUS (president of the United States) may be no more than a harmless acronym, but it also bears a strong resemblance to English words derived from the Latin word for power. POTUS the powerful. POTUS the great. POTUS the chosen one. And yet, so much of what Trump has delivered bears the stamp of a dufus, not a potus. DUFUS the bully. DUFUS the buffoon. DUFUS the mistake.
The American Dream. Once old Europe’s vision of re-inventing itself in the spirit of all that’s fair. Now the great American Lie. What, one is compelled to ask, is fair about the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the once fertile middle ground turning to wasteland? Wasn’t the objection to that very scenario what gave rise to the dream in the first place?
Contrary to what Trump would have unemployed and underemployed Americans believe, jobs are not the central issue. Rampant corporatism is. Where corporations rule, democracy becomes a shell game.
Trump is not only the head of a corporation built on that game, he’s all shell himself. He has no more natural authority than he has natural grace. The only time he comes across as genuine is when he looks lost. He’s the pied piper who plays the tunes people want to hear while he leads them into a lie where less, not more, awaits them.
Maybe he is the chosen one. If so, his appearance among us should be seen as a warning, not a destiny to be achieved. Trump is the perverted American Dream in flesh. He is the Dorian Gray picture of modern America. He is what America has coming for its sins.