Donald J. Trump, folk hero

Great job, Dems! My misgivings about the man himself will be placed on the back burner. His fate and the nation’s are now inextricably linked.

I’m going to attempt to explain my complicated feelings regarding our once and possible future president, Donald J. Trump. I don’t really want to, because whenever I watch the get-Trump circus or the man himself, I always feel like I’m getting played.

We are in an information war and the hottest theatre of that war centres around Trump. It makes me extremely reluctant to commit to any position publicly. But this week’s indictment of him is so crazy, such a five alarm fire, that I’m going to force myself to write about it. Of all the essays I have sent out on Substack, this may be the most raw and the most difficult for me to write. It does not answer any questions, it only asks them. 

When Trump won the 2016 election, I was very upset and incredulous. As crazy as I knew US politics to be, I couldn’t quite believe that a carnival barker type character could actually have beaten someone who I thought, at the time, was a seasoned, cool-headed pro like Hillary Clinton. Trump’s performance during the campaign — so blusterous, inarticulate and deliberately offensive — just reinforced my dislike of him. Just a few weeks before, I posted on Facebook a photo of me, holding my overseas ballot for Hillary, with the hashtag #ImWithHer. 

As upset as I was, at that point I had been following for a few years the frightening rise of neo-Maoist ideology in the form of critical race theory. I had a sense that something was deeply amiss with the American progressive left. What I did not realise, at that point, was how unsalvageable the Democratic Party was. 

Time soon showed me what was really up. I began following the left-wing and establishment punishment of figures like Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson. I began noticing really weird and obviously fake Facebook posts about neo-Nazis stomping around American cities. I began noticing opinions that sounded like basic common sense to me — like skin colour should not determine your academic career, or that being a stay-at-home mom is a good idea — were being characterised as ‘far-right extremism.’ And that this was all done by mainstream media outlets that I had formerly trusted, like NPR and The New York Times. I was not paying attention to the allegations of Russian collusion, or what Trump was doing as president, but I was paying close attention to the rise of woke. I began to understand that for all Trump’s flaws, he was representing a swath of American society that had been thoroughly demonised, scorned and blamed for problems that were quite clearly not their making. That swath was The People. The working class. The men who did not pretend to be feminists and the women who did not girlboss. The people who did all the real work. The class war was blatantly obvious. 

During the 2016 campaign, I had seen many articles and social media posts about Trump’s scary, racist Svengali, Steve Bannon. In all of these photos, his face was a terrible colour and his skin pock-marked, his expression sinister. I absorbed the idea that he was some kind of demon. Then came the Covid lockdown. Suddenly, I had a lot of time on my hands and I was craving information. Media giants from the BBC to the Washington Post were all repeating the same stock phrases, and it seemed very clear to me that this was a crisis that was being tightly managed by the media, not reported on. I came upon Bannon’s podcast in April 2020 and from there, I learned about gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, I learned about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with high ranking Communist officials and other questionable foreign contacts, I learned about the massive levels of Chinese infiltration into the American elites generally. All of those stories were at first attacked as far-right misinformation, by the same outlets that had told me Bannon was a scary hate-monger, and all of them turned out to be true.

The 2020 election was one of the most unsettling things I have ever witnessed. The fact that the Democrats had picked Joe Biden as their candidate was the cause for my forever break-up with the party. I had only ever voted for Democrats in the years I had voted in US elections, but this time around, I had been informed of the longstanding corruption in the Biden family by Bannon’s War Room podcast. So I was done. 

Just as the corporate media had done with the Wuhan lab and the Hunter Biden laptop, they quickly toxified the election fraud stories. Well, with the exception of Time Magazine, which ran a remarkable, lengthy article broadly confirming much of what the populist wing of the Republican Party had been howling about. Except it was cleverly hidden in plain sigh. The success of anti-Trump groups in utilising non-kosher methods in voting districts across the United States was “fortifying” the election, not rigging it. The coming together of lefty activists with odd bedfellows like the chamber of commerce “saved” the election, or “protected it” — sure, if the thing they were trying to protect it from was the popular will. 

Then came the vaccine mandates. If I thought the election was bad, and I did, the vaccine mandates of 2021 were an absolute horror show to watch. The Biden administration turned out to be every bit as bad as the most fervent, paranoid War Room guest had predicted. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio (who I once had lunch with years ago, back before the glitch in the matrix) made a video of himself eating a burger and fries to lure skeptical, working class, black New Yorkers into taking the shot. CDC bimbo Rochelle Wolensky’s fear porn, crying on camera because of her sense of “impending doom” and praising the vaccine. Some total psycho on Tik Tok was making videos for little kids, trying to convince them that they wanted the vaccine. All of this was very obviously a ploy to trick people. It was not how sober, well-meaning, professionals conducted public health policy.

Bill de Burger, I’m not buying what you’re selling you absolute creep.

None of this turned me into an out-and-out Trump fan, but I no longer saw him as the biggest threat to the United States and western civil society. That threat was clearly coming from the people who I once thought were on my side. But listening to people on the margins of the discourse, the conspiracy minded folks who had been correct about so many other things, I heard their criticisms of Trump and took them seriously. That he was compromised, that he was also corrupt, that he was not the outsider that he pretended to be. 

But what became most clear to me — whatever the truth of those allegations — was that Trump was far too susceptible to flattery and had let himself and his administration be infiltrated with snakes — bad faith establishment actors who wanted to take him down, and largely succeeded. People with strong populist appeal like Bannon, who maintain their loyalty to him to this day, were booted out of his administration. Yet the RINO’s and the establishment figures never seemed to get the shellacking from the Trump that they truly deserved. He always seems keen to keep their approval. A true populist would have no truck with Tony Fauci, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Ronna McDaniels, Kevin McCarthy and that decrepit old turtle Mitch McConnell, surely? 

But if he was a secret establishment figure, why would the uni party establishment be coming for him so hard? If the smart conspiracy types are correct — that no one ascends to power who is a true threat to the secretive forces that really run things — why are so many levers of power being used to stop him? 

I fear that the Georgia indictments will turn out to be a point of no return for American democracy. They are stunning in their malevolent attack on the constitutional rights of all Americans. The crimes listed in the indictment include making telephone calls, being a lawyer, appearing at press conferences and sending emails. 

The Democrats thought they would finally kill the Trump brand of populism, but the mug shot immediately transformed him into a folk hero. 

Can this really all just be political theatre? Because to me it looks more like the continuation of a slow-moving coup to protect powerful, unelected and corrupt officials from the coming wrath of the regular American voter. So now my misgivings about the man himself will be placed on the back burner. His fate and the nation’s are now inextricably linked.

I hate this feeling of deep uncertainty and anxiety over the direction the US — and therefore the west in general — is taking. I absolutely loathe the fact that there exists no untainted source of information to guide us. We stand to lose so much — our freedoms, our futures. I’m too old and cynical to believe in heroes, but now sure would be a good time for one to come along.