You have to hand it to Trump, caricature of the grotesque
THERE have been fewer sightings in the press, have there not, of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s diminutive, psychopathic president since the Donald Trump circus began to roll across the world’s consciousness? I’ve always harboured a notion that, whenever Downing Street begins to be alarmed at any levels of unrest or seditious behaviour, it has the BBC or MI6 send out another tale of life beyond the 38th parallel. There was a glut last year.
My favourite was the one about President Kim declaring that the North Korean football team had won the World Cup. Alongside this there was a tale that Kim had become agitated by the inability of one of his generals to remain awake during one of his speeches and promptly had him shot with an anti-tank gun.
I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that his state television is playing Trump speeches constantly on a loop on those big television screens Pyongyang main square. But why settle for a few stories about life in the danse macabre of North Korea when you can have the daily slow-motion car crash of the Donald Trump US presidential campaign?
From encouraging his followers to take executive action against hecklers to threatening to “spill the beans” on the wife of Ted Cruz, his rival for the GOP nomination, observing Mr Trump is better than watching Kevin Spacey in House of Cards: he elicits a compulsive and terrible fascination.
Last week the Washington Post published a verbatim account of an hour-long meeting senior editorial executives had with Mr Trump during which he spent more time talking about the size of his hands than on so-called Islamic State, race, the economy or foreign policy. “Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands … A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. My hands are normal hands.”
Mr Trump, you see, had been irked that Marco Rubio had been unkind about the petite aspect of his hands and had detected a ribald implication in the slur
With Mr Cruz failing to gain any ground this week, Mr Trump is almost halfway to becoming America’s 45th president and the captains and kings of the Republican Party are wondering just how this grotesque Mr Hyde to Uncle Sam’s Doctor Jekyll managed to get here. Well, it’s not all about his property billions or because America’s blue-collar citizenry are a shower of six-fingered banjo players in dungarees.
This, remember, is a country where armed police can routinely shoot and kill young black males, knowing there’s a decent chance a jury will acquit. It’s a nation that routinely tortures those suspected of being Muslim terrorists and bribed European allies to turn a blind eye to rendition flights and waterboarding. In modern America judges still routinely condemn men, a disproportionate number of whom are black, to death in an electric chair.
America isn’t a two-party state; it has three political parties, including the unelected National Rifle Association. This sinister outfit, the most powerful lobbying organisation in the the country, possesses the voting record of every US senator on any issue relating to the regulation of firearms. Its answer to the routine high-school mass . shootings by adolescent boys is to arm the teachers.
The basic idea of the state helping to heal the poorest and most vulnerable in society is routinely condemned as dangerous socialism, even by those who would benefit. America is a deeply uncivilised country.
Rather than ask how it produced someone like Mr Trump perhaps we might ask why it hasn’t happened before now and how many other dreadful little Trumps will emerge from the backwoods.
The Economist magazine last week rated Trump the sixth biggest threat to world peace, placing his America somewhere between a new cold war and an armed conflict in the South China Sea. But he hasn’t done anything yet; all he’s done is talk, shake his fist and push up the share price of US brick manufacturing companies.
In Mr Trump’s popularity amongst some of America’s poorest communities are parallels with the popularity of the UK far right in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods of north west England such as Blackburn, Burnley and Bradford.
It’s not about the politics of racial hate; it’s about the sense of betrayal and alienation of some working class people at being left to feed on the scraps of London’s table and the failure of the Labour Party to redress the balance.
The great travel writer, Paul Theroux, has observed how the social disenchantment of America’s south is fuelling the Trump roadshow in a pattern being replicated in small towns throughout the US.
In researching his most recent book, Deep South, he witnessed how mass commercial outsourcing has led to distressing levels of economic and cultural disfigurement in some communities, writing: “The heat made it all the smellier, as of roasted flatulence. It was the smell of poverty, a stink that no one, not even someone in the submerged 20th century, could get used to.
“Manufacturing has been outsourced. Their jobs have been taken away, so there’s nothing for them to do. They sit crowded together in their shack and watch a jumbly picture on a TV set. It’s very distressing.
“You don’t see that in many other countries. The level of poverty, and the level of despair, too. Of people thinking, ‘Nothing’s ever going to happen to me. I will never go to college, I will never get healthcare’.”
If Theroux were to travel around Britain he would see the same patterns of alienation despair and social isolation in those towns and villages whose people once toiled in furnaces above ground and in muck below to fuel the riches of the British Empire yet did not share in the fruits of their labour.
The only reason someone like Mr Trump hasn’t been successful here is because we keep eyes averted by the fecundity of the royal family and the illusion that we’re all in it together. And it’s far easier to sell an illusion to a land of 60 million people than it is to one of 240 million.
If Mr Trump is the embodiment of social alienation in the US then we would be foolish to become complacent about the prospect of something even worse happening here. For one week in August 2011 riots, looting and arson erupted all over London and in towns and cities across the rest of England.
The sentences handed down to some of those involved showed just how scared the authorities had been; it’s the closest this country has ever come to a proper revolution in modern times. In the meantime rates of social inequality have risen and the sense of alienation has increased.
‘‘ Observing Mr Trump is better than watching Kevin Spacey in House of Cards: he elicits a compulsive and terrible fascination