The President has inserted his toxic brand of politics into every last corner of American life
One of the most evergreen tropes in our national political lexicon is that America is deeply, perhaps impossibly divided, riven between two competing ideologies. This idea stretches back before the founding of the Republic and seems to take on only slight variations over time. Today, those divisions are as cultural as they are political.
We argue about sexual harassment. Hollywood. Race. Statues. The honesty of the media. The precise role of religion in society. Feminism. The NFL. Immigration. You name it: there are at least a dozen topics, some of them only tangentially relevant to public policy, much less law-making, in Washington, but all reliably creating deeper divisions and seemingly unbridgeable rifts between one America and another.
And the man who salivates over and benefits from these divides more than anyone is a onetime liberal New York billionaire real-estate developer. Donald Trump, now President, fans the flames at every opportunity he gets — by creeping into every corner of our culture.
Some people like to say our nation is more divided than ever. Obviously that’s a laughable notion for a country that lost over a half-million of her sons in a bloody Civil War.
Still, there are sweeping, powerful forces pushing our society into Balkanized camps. The catalyst of today’s division isn’t royalists vs. patriots, freedom vs. slavery, or big government vs. small, or hippies vs. squares. Today’s cultural and political divisions are driven now by more potent forces: celebrity, and rage.
Trump hasn’t just infused every single aspect of our politics, but, like some Japanese movie-monster kaiju he’s furiously, inexorably consuming our culture, from entertainment to business to education and every other institution in between.
The personal is entirely political now, and Trump has accelerated the process by which we’ve become a nation where every... damn... thing is judged and presented through a political filter.
Ironically, that very idea — that politics have crept into and corrupted every corner of the culture — is one of the forces that drove many Trumpkins into their would-be savior’s corner. Now, Trump’s the one ensuring that nowhere and nothing is safe from politicization.
It’s a feature, not a bug, of living in Trumpmerica.
Powerful as it is, Trump’s cultural overhang even darkened the sun this holiday season. His incessant claims that he finally liberated Americans from an imaginary tyranny forbidding them from saying “Merry Christmas” were as everpresent as they were ludicrous.
It’s clear what is happening here. Trump’s relentless, overwhelming drive in life was never to become President. It was never even simply to become ubiquitous.
He is the ultimate fame monster, a rabid consumer of public regard, attention and adulation. No drug is more powerful for him than exposure. He is a man who lives by the philosophy of ratings uber alles.
He didn’t get in the race to Make America Great Again. His dream wasn’t to wisely yield the awesome power of the highest office in the land. It wasn’t to lead our nation in good times and bad.
His dream was always to be the most famous person in America, and beyond. By winning the Presidency he became the most famous person in the world, the center of every debate and discussion. Ask the British about the strains on the Special Relationship after Trump decided to beef with Prime Minister Theresa May on Twitter over phony “Muslim” videos, combining his special brand of bigotry, his love of fake news when it fits his narrative, and an itchy Twitter finger.
And so, now much to the President’s delight, just as reality TV is our national guilty pleasure, Americans can’t seem to look away from Trump Show. They can’t stop watching the daily catalog of outrages, excesses, mental infirmities, insults, sight gags, and moral and political pratfalls. Some of it is the pure absurdity of this President’s appearance and performance, a terrible novelty of the car-crash rubber-necking variety.
He’s the Uncanny Valley President as game show host — almost human in appearance, but with a set of uniquely and hideously arresting off-notes.
The visuals of Trump — the enormous, jiggling bolus of wattle-fat beneath his chin, his squinting visage, the pursed, prissy mouth, the wispy construct of his Manhattan mullet, the knee-length ties, the weirdly crypto-Papal gestures — make him creepily iconic. The constant outrages, the hair-trigger fury, the famously short temper all make him the biggest driver of news and entertainment coverage in history.
Every morning, I wake up and wonder two things. First, has he started a nuclear war? Then, when I thank God we’re not living in a post-apocalyptic radioactive hellscape yet — with the emphasis on “yet” — the next thing I wonder is, “What fresh hell will his tweets bring us today?” Because Trump is unconstrained in almost every meaningful way, and because the White House enablers surrounding him can’t take his phone away, there’s no escape. Anywhere. Ever. He’s become the face staring from every screen, the voice whining and bleating in every news broadcast. Big Bother, constantly present, constantly enervating, a cultural presence bigger than politics, and a thousand times more irritating.
If it weren’t so obviously random, shambolic, and self-referential, Trump’s culture takeover would strike some very dark historic chords. Fascists and authoritarians of every variety have desired a political homogenization through control of culture. Benito Mussolini was omnipresent in Italy’s fascist period, and we’re fortunate that Trump doesn’t have an actual political agenda.
We’ve barely survived a year of this without having a national ner-