U
sually, when something akin to Donald Trump rears his ugly Whack-a-Mole head and people — readers, close friends or family at those gatherings that teeter dangerously on splintering family arguments — ask me: “So whaddya think about this guy? About what he is doing?”
I keep at the ready a stupid, escape-hatch reply like this: “Oh, that is much too easy. It is like clubbing a baby seal, like shooting fish in a barrel.”
And, under normal, time/space continuum equations, that would be the end of things like Trump and the subsequent train wrecks of the GOP nominating process.
If every 10th thoughtful journalist and every 50th reasonably intelligent registered voter had ignored the man at the outset of this circus then this whole debacle would be a non-issue, right?
Well, look where that got us: All Trump All The Time, like one of those bamboo-shoot-under-the-fingernail type of all-Christmas music radio stations that, when you accidentally land on it during the holiday season, makes you realize that you had no idea just how obnoxious, expansive, indefatigable and vapid secular Christmas music really is.
I have said all of that to say this: I have been intently listening to and reading the invisible ink between the lines of Trump’s utterances, and we have not given him nearly enough credit.
He is, I dare say it, a much more complicated man than we know him to be.
For example, what he says at the outset of what turns out to be one of many mini-riots at a campaign rally stop — during which a man of color is sucker-punched by an old white man who makes you feel like you would never be heard from again if your car broke down in the country and your black ass knocked on his door for help.
Trump said something — not-rhetorically — like, “You know what would have happened to him if this was some place else? He’d have been carried outta here on a stretcher.”
Was he using coded language to say that if this nigger had scuffled with this righteous white brother a few years ago in this nation’s history that he’d have been strung up in a tree for an array of lynching photos to be sold at the next church picnic?
’Cause that is sure what it sounded like to me, since people of color back in the day really did not receive dignified stretcher treatment post-injury unless, of course, they were being transported from their own colored neighborhoods.
And when he beefs with women like Rosie O’Donnell — who should undoubtedly remain regimented on her medications — calling her ugly, stupid and fat, isn’t he really showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder? He has moved his obsessions onto many other women, including news anchors and the wives of opponents. There is something with Trump and women.
At the risk of calling his sexuality in to question, which I am not doing here, I think he is a woman-hater of the first order, and the fact he is a serial-marrier of blond, icy-veined, Nordic and strong-boned women tells me he at least understands that those types of women have just the right kind of stand-there-be-quiet-and-look-dead-eyed gravitas they both need to get this thing off.
And now, in what passes for his brand of foreign policy, Trump wants America out of NATO, which is in Brussels, which is the beginning of extracting America from important, peaceful and meaningful relationships with other countries.
It all smacks of Adolph Hitler’s kind of isolationist bullying that will tug America into all kinds of ridiculous spats, ground conflicts and perhaps even war.
Peggy Noonan of The New York Times said a frightening yet insightful thing on the morning news when she said, assessing Trump’s call to leave NATO, “Trump always acts as if ‘I’m kidding now, but when I become president, I won’t be kidding.’ ”Humor as a deflection of serious intent.
It is not old or new.
It can be maniacal if it is not caught (in therapy) and used for good.
Taken altogether, Donald Trump is not so much “dangerous” as he is a complex double-talker who has massive appeal to “dangerous” people who pander in mob mentality thinking and action.
These people have dreamed of taking over the government and getting their needs met: all brown, funny-speaking people out; bombastic bullying and torture of our enemies (who could be just about anybody by their squishy definition); and German, brew house types of meetings that look like drunken squalls of white men who are strangely drunk off their own disenfranchised status despite — or because of? — their white-male station in America.
It is like looking into a funhouse mirror that also forecasts the future. In it we are distorted, separated, funny-looking and alien to one another, and it is far too late to get out of that funhouse because we have paid a bittersweet admission price.
That is?We largely stayed, too late and too long, in the Donald Trump Amusement Park, disbelieving “this guy” could blunder and bluster his path all the way to the White House.The lesson for the rest of us is that we need to drop the naiveté of disbelief and dismissiveness and instead take seriously people ascending to power and control by reading them as closely as we read stock pages, sports scores and other people’s texts on other people’s phones.
Why are we so afraid to do analysis of people who want and assume so much from us? If you say you want to “lead” me and my country, then I am going to turn you inside out and upside down, and then I am going to run and tell the others. After that, y’all can do what you want, which you will do, anyway, but because ours is a democratic process, sometimes to a fault, usually the more pensive and sensitive among us are actually victimized by the larger, more excitable mass.Ugh.Isn’t it just a mess?It was laughable for about the first seven minutes.Now it is pure tedium.I only know that if Donald Trump and all this brouhaha were cast by black and brown people, some (white) bodies would have surely gathered together and pulled themselves away and made another country with its own government like Texas once tried to do.
And this secession would have been led by the likes of Donald Trump.
Because no one would have been expecting that from him, which is precisely why he would have gotten away with it.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: [email protected]
