Trump Rally

How Trump Rallies are America’s Last Circus

Donald Trump

by Guy Walker

Donald Trump is still campaigning to be president. He’d rather assure his last dreary-eyed supporters that his “Promises Made” are “Promises Kept”—as huge banners read at his rallies—than actually try to understand the complexities of tax code or health care reform.

Trump’s rallies have always had this same desperate tone, like a house party for high school dropouts who managed to beat the nerds in World of Warcraft. From the beginning, it was only about the rallies—a Trump-frenzied gala where he could stand over everybody and flail his arms and ramble on unintelligibly. If it wasn’t about him, then there was no point in going. In February of last year, Trump didn’t attend the Conservative Political Action Conference because it was rumored that around 300 attendees were going to walk out if he came to the stage. This time, he was the star.

And now he didn’t go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because he didn’t want to sit as a Muslim comedian stood, because he knew he would be publicly caricatured as a human pumpkin, a lasso-twirling madman who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He didn’t want to face the press because they don’t howl his name with smeared American flags painted on their chests; they don’t shove their newborns in his face, demanding that he autograph their little bald heads. The Correspondents’ Dinner was a black tie event, not the usual pageantry of red hats. Besides, Trump was in need of another hurrah, one more orgiastic blowout of nationwide tailgate parties.

Celebrating his 100th day in office, naturally, he wanted a party.  And, per usual, his speech wasn’t about anything other than why his party was better than the one in Washington he refused to go to.

“A large group of Hollywood actors” he retorts, pausing for the expected boos and sneers from people who unanimously forgot their conservative hero Ronald Reagan starred in such movies as Tugboat Annie Sails Again and Bedtime for Bonzo, “and Washington media,” he continued, pausing again, “are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation’s capital.” A girl can be seen in the background, looking around, booing because others boo, waving her thumb down in unison with everyone else, like a crowd waving the same gesture at a Roman gladiator about to make the kill.

This is normal and expected. During his campaign rallies, he didn’t wait for hired security to drag protestors out—he instructed his fans to “knock the crap out” of them. “I promise you,” he said, “I will pay for the legal fees.”

And now he might have to. During a 2016 campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, 75-year-old Alvin Bamberger shoved a black female protestor repeatedly, pushing her through the crowd. He was still wearing his Korean War regalia, his barracks cap as crisp and white as a burger flipper’s hat at In-N-Out, his shirt as stiff as cardboard. The woman is now suing Bamberger for assault; and he, in return, is suing Trump for his “urging and inspiration” to shove the woman. In other words, Bamberger is claiming to be a victim of ideological kidnapping—he’s just a slobbering troglodyte anesthetized under Stockholm syndrome. It’s the same helplessness that Patty Hearst claimed when she was supposedly brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, consequently robbing banks and later described as “a low-IQ, low-affect zombie” by clinical psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer.

How many more—and how soon—will admit under the open scabby firmament that they too are low-IQ zombies, barely literate, mesmerized by an orange mad clown with anemic circles around his eyes, blubbering upon his high stage about how rich he is? He currently has around a forty percent approval rating, which is notably high given how sloppy and thunderous his psychopathy is. More than anything, it illustrates the strength of Trump’s cult of personality—the more demonic and perverse he becomes, the more devout his followers are. In the preface to the psychoanalytic masterwork Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault refers to man’s innate lust for fascism—and not an external political fascism, but the inexorable fascism within us all that causes us to “desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” It’s why Trump’s comment during the campaign about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing a single supporter is so true. Man loves a good despot, and he will do anything he can to touch even the fringes of his garments.

This isn’t even a metaphor. Remember the viral Youtube video from September 2015 when Trump’s “spiritual counselor” Paula White, and some twenty other ministers all laid their hands on Trump, praying for his victory. At some point during the blessing, a messianic Jewish rabbi groped his face, like some hideous reenactment of Hook when the little black boy identifies the Robin Williams character as Peter Pan. There you are, Donny! There he is, the deep-fried Michelin Man who has now returned their prayers by allowing churches to meddle with future elections. But it’s more than Trump himself—it’s the true power of ideology we see at work, the stalwart allegiance that is especially emblematic of the GOP.

We can scoff at countries like North Korea for deifying Kim Il-Sung, when its citizens still hang pictures of the founding supreme leader in every room of their house, when his body is perfectly preserved and embalmed for public viewing, when a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl drowned trying to save a picture of him (and posthumously given an award for her efforts). But the apotheosis of Donald Trump is equally lurid and dangerous: because he seems to represent everything anti-Obama, many of his supporters will tumultuously follow him down into the fetid depths of depravity, like a Jim Jones or David Koresh character, the facts of his insanity perhaps not yet obvious or intelligible.

The eagerness for political cannibalization of the left, on the other hand, is the other extreme of how an ideology fetishizes in destroying itself. The recent wave of protests on university campuses that have succeeded in preventing speakers with different points of view isn’t driven by anything even mildly virtuous; it’s a wave of politically correct moral panic that suffers by its own impotence. When Stephen Colbert made a joke about Trump’s mouth only being good for Putin’s cock holster, the hashtag #FireColbert immediately began trending on Twitter—self-described American nationalist, Mike Cernovich, and his sickly band of puttering cretins began fuming behind their keyboards that the late night show host should lose his job for making a dick joke about King Pussy Grabber. They knew the hysterical left would take the bait—and they did. Colbert won’t actually get fired, but it’s emblematic of a key difference between the inordinately generalization of “left” and “right” ideologies, in how each treats their television hosts: Colbert simply made us imagine two rotting dictators blow each other, whereas Bill O’Reilly had to actually sexually assault many women to finally be let go. It’s a race for political suicide, but Trump and his marching cavalry of liver-spotted perverts are leading the way.

This image reminds us of General George Custer. An overt racist who had a knack for killing natives during the American Indian Wars, it was Custer’s cavalier nescience that finally did him in. He finished last in his class at West Point, and relished as a media personality; but it was his overconfident superiority complex that caused him to stroll into an Indian encampment in the Montana Territory, assuming he would easily round up or kill all two thousand natives. He was outnumbered and overpowered, and his unprepared invasion resulted in him and his entire 7th Cavalry Regiment being killed—the event now commonly known as “Custer’s Last Stand.”

We didn’t need a 100 days to know if Trump could competently govern a nation of 320 million people—we already grimly knew it would be this disastrous. But there’s more than a thousand days of this nightmarish acid trip left, and the only hope is how many more of his followers will pull back hard on his reins the way Alvin Bamberger is now doing. Whether or not there’s any habitable world left after Trump is gone, it will be determined by how many followed him into his own Last Stand, or if he was finally abandoned, left alone in the woods waving his jelly-soaked arms at the buzzing sky, yelling “Follow me this way! It’ll be so great. Believe me, believe me.”


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When We Sing, When We Throw Stones

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It seems like we’re on the edge now. A teetering fragility of peace, everyone at their respective political rallies—either there in support or there in protest—everyone frothing at the mouth, eager for a good excuse to stab each other in the throat. Every day there’s another viral video of Trump supporters mobbing a protester, and Trump himself cheering them on—bucktoothed white men draped in camo-gear attack a black man, or huddle around a Muslim woman and call her a whore, or punch a songbird, or claw at sunsets, or eat cereal bowls filled with pinecones and Natural Ice. They salute their blotchy-skinned leader by uniformly rubbing their crotches. And all hell breaks loose.

The Trump rally in Chicago that was canceled last week is testament to the cowing tribalism in and around politics these days; it’s more of a foreshadowing of the violence to come, just another transitory episode in the evolutionary buildup of street gangs killing each other over heteronomous trade deals, who’s leader has better hair, and the lawfulness of a penis touching another man’s butthole. The spurious autoschediasticism of the protest ended in very minor clashes  .  .  .  little blood was actually drawn, but there was lots of yelling and name calling, with Trump finally declaring that his freedom of speech was hijacked. Many Bernie campaign posters were seen at the demonstration, but Sanders himself quickly denied any involvement. Hillary Clinton condemned the protest by tweeting the old adage, ‘Violence has no place in politics.’ Even Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted ‘People who are anti-Trump are actually anti-Trump supporters—they oppose free citizens voting for the @realDonaldTrump.’ The only reason for writing out someone’s Twitter handle is in the hope that they will read it and retweet it. Not that the pop star astrophysicist is necessarily a Trump supporter, but he is trying to make some sort of vague taxonomical clarification, maybe striking the flint of the dialectic, a baseless claim that protesting against a wistfully nostalgic form of imperialism is an offense to freedom itself.

Hillary Clinton pointed to the families of the Charleston, South Carolina victims from last year’s shooting, They “came together and melted hearts in the statehouse,” she said. In her eyes, we should melt Donald Trump’s barely beating heart into a bloody fondu of love and youth. If you see a woman being raped on the street, you should protest peacefully, from the other side of the street, of course, making sure you stay on the sidewalk.

The epistemological axiom that “violence has no place in politics” is a queer Democritean slogan, something that dismisses the entire historical resumé of politics. At the end of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, a Win/Gallup poll declared the United States as the greatest threat to peace in the world. In the 1980’s, Clinton supported the Contra insurgency into Nicaragua. She supported invasions of Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, and Kosovo in 1999. In her words, she “urged [Bill] to bomb” Yugoslavia. She voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and backed the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and later the US bombing of Libya, creating the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to overtake the country. In other words, violence has everything to do with politics, as long as you are rich while doing it. It’s the same reason a black woman can go to prison for 12 years for a little baggie of weed, but when HSBC launders billions of dollars to Columbian and Mexican drug cartels, no one sees a single day behind bars.

There is something pedantic and selectively fussy about claiming that “violence has no place in politics.” It clearly does. The question is, what part do we as regular citizens play in the arena of political violence?

Take a look at Black Lives Matters, for instance, who made a strong presence at the Chicago rally. Black Lives Matters was formed for the same reason as when the Black Panther Party was created back in 1966: they were both a response to unchecked police brutality against black kids. But the Black Panthers initially began with armed citizen patrols, monitoring the activity and behavior of Oakland’s police officers. Black women with afros would stand on the streets with rifles. Panther leaders were assassinated or falsely charged with murder. J. Edgar Hoover called the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Black Lives Matters, on the other hand, barges into libraries and chants its club’s name into the ears of students studying innocently. There was the Weather Underground, formed in 1969, as a radical left-wing faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, in support of the Black Panthers and other militant left-wing groups. Its core principle was a militant opposition to the Vietnam War, as it initiated actions intended to “Bring the War Home.” They broke Dr. Timothy Leary out of prison. They bombed government buildings and banks, they initiated the “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, and issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government. There is widespread belief that Martin Luther King could not have achieved what he is attributed with if it were not for Malcolm X’s more militant approach. When antiwar protestors grew by the thousands outside of Nixon’s White House, President Nixon turned to Henry Kissinger in fear, asking for assurance that they wouldn’t break through the fence. When then President George W. Bush was asked what he thought about the antiwar demonstrations outside his White House, he skillfully responded that they pleased him—the evidentiary freedom of speech that American citizens have is why we were going to war, he said, so the Iraqis will one day have the same. Where are Brutus and Cassius? Where is the emerald sword that can pierce the sky? The ennui of our passivity is the force that doesn’t actually want to change anything. It organizes marches, waves banners around, and chants its cheerleader haikus  .  .  .  but we know this is merely for the ends of self-congratulation. We know we are merely swirling our farts in the wind, cheering each other on, finally flirting with women who proudly show off their armpit hair.

In Walter Benjamin’s Critique on Violence, the state needs and creates the conditions for a monopoly on violence. “Violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens [the law] not by the ends it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.” The antipodal fringe barricades itself against the powers of the state through what is termed Divine Violence—that inevitable reactionary force, preserving the gorgeous brawn of the sovereign. It is completely “law-destroying,” completely at odds with the systemic coercion of the state. It’s merely and wholely a strike at power, to value justice and principle over the law. Slavoj Žižek sees divine violence as an inevitable response against the superstructure. Men ought to scare where they must. But even the so-called radical Left today feels it should disassociate itself with the Jacobin paradigm. In Žižek’s Robespierre of the “Divine Violence” of Terror, he writes, “what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution that doesn’t smell of revolution.”

Donald Trump was rightly criticized for saying he would kill the family members of terrorists. This is dangerous talk. The problem is that Barack Obama already has. In a drone attack, 16-year-old American-born son of Anwar Al-Awalki was killed, and Obama has never answered questions addressing this. This is perhaps more dangerous, for the left slowly accepts that this is just the way things work. In an interview with CNN, Trump warned of riots if the Republican Party handed the nomination to another candidate. “I think you’d have riots,” he said. “I’m representing many, many millions of people  .  .  .  Bad things would happen.”

The Chicago protests were a glimpse of what could be, however grand and gorgeous and tragic. I don’t know. I’m too drunk to tell anymore. All I know is there is too much light, too much life to tell anymore. Too much everything. All it is is just an eruption of stars and worlds.