Trump’s America Is Dead. Long Live Trump’s America
By: Sam Corey
Tags: Election 2020, Joe Biden, Humor, Politics, Donald Trump

Trump’s America Is Dead. Long Live Trump’s America

Trump may have lost, but America is forever remade in his image

If D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people, then it only made sense that Donald Trump was the demi-star of this enduring big-budget apocalypse movie. Americans, some in more notably more comfortable seats than others, were trapped together in a gilded theater, suspended in an eternal election night that was both prolonged and disorienting. This wild and sickening ride concluded with a pop and a hiss, with a delusional incumbent shouting “STOP THE COUNT!” as a nation watched his illusory leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia vanish. This Dollar Empire is wheezing, and this was a choice between remembering the fonder, more “normal” times or going out screaming at the sun. Joe Biden’s victory is titular, an anti-heroic feat of grieving that seems beside the point. In what was billed to be a broad repudiation of Trump, a historically high Election Day turnout barely gave Democrats a mandate: They lost six House seats and appear to have fallen short of a Senate majority. A sigh of relief feels more appropriate than a jovial celebration, like poppin’ bottles after being hit by a bus.

The entire sphere of acceptable political debate in America concerns itself with the degree to which we are willing to maintain facile pretenses. Putting the old mask on isn’t going to convince anyone, the moral gloss has lost its sheen. Biden’s razor-thin victory is the outcome of a deeply and luridly broken society. This isn’t who we are became an unofficial slogan to prove an opaque point about our more redeemable qualities, or maybe to convince ourselves that the detention centers, outbursts of hatred, cheesy corruption, and flagrant ineptitude weren’t a series of fundamental and even essential American quirks. Over 70 million Americans witnessed a lazy and uncaring leader evince executive indifference toward mass death and a collapsing economy and decided four more years of this was appropriate.

This is undeniably Trump’s America now. He heightened the stakes of politics as entertainment and escalated cultural tensions through his unconscious, maestro-like ability to pluck people’s sensitive spots. We are in the realm of the epiphenomenal — a mirror shade freak show where aesthetics is now ideology. Thanks mostly to the sheer persistence of his immovable self, Trump turned the presidency into primarily about perpetuating and justifying the centrality of one man. Sure, there was the pursuit of weird personal feuds and expression of lifelong bigotries, but it mostly maintained the status quo. After four years of the Mad King, America is, characteristically and axiomatically, unchanged. A nation made merciless by stupid appetites and anxious aggrievements, a slave to vanity shoved haphazardly into delusions of its own exceptionalism, brimming with gormless choads who binge too much Netflix.

Media discourse devolved into self-defeating nonsense that reduced everything to a series of irrelevant and unfalsifiable claims about who Donald Trump is. Journalists who spent their careers as access merchants trying to emulate Chuck Todd began imagining themselves as witty quipsters and poignant Jon Stewart types. Blue-check #resistance Twitter shoved their heads in the snowglobe of political media, shaking around and getting frenzied over every one of Trump’s gratuitous, thirsty, unreasoning tantrums. MSNBC titillated over the idea of Vladimir Putin installing Trump as the Manchurian president through fifth-dimension cyberwarefare and good old-fashioned kompromat. The Fox Cinematic Universe became a hellacious sinkhole of anti-reality where the most unlikable people alive attempted to portray what they think an intelligent person sounds like. Even late-night comedy turned into a Teddy Ruxpin cassette tape of stale, toothless jokes: OMG Trump tweeted something stupid, Trump is Putin’s bitch, Trump is a Nazi, Trump is a Cheeto with silly hair. Trump has destroyed irony and the concept of subtext entirely because his life has centered on the single-minded and miserable pursuit of fame to fill a howling void — then he became president by accident.

After November 8, 2016, Lib America breached out of a shattered reality and into a quantum state that was both contingent and consequential. Of course, the Democratic Party did what was essentially programmed and required to do by its own internal algorithm, which was tack right toward disaffected Republicans who were grossed out by what their party has mutated into. It was inevitable. This was more or less concealed by a manic spectacle fantasy narrative about a singularly evil president who was an aberration rather than a symptom. Russiagate, sarcastic claps, the tearing of a printed State of the Union address, a halfhearted impeachment attempt that was doomed from the get-go — they gave the impression of confronting Trump without ever really challenging him. The Democrats are a hangdog bunch mostly filled with Oxford-buttoned Draculas who used roller backpacks in middle school. They seem for the most part to accept the Republican’s rancid priors as reality and its own job as fundamentally janitorial. A party that was strong and a base that was sure of its values would not have run Joe Biden in 2020. He’s the perfect candidate for people who think Friends is better than Seinfeld.

For all the hopeful tales Democrats tell about unity and working across the aisle, it might be that Republicans have dispensed with the obtuse euphemisms forever, and will commit themselves to brazenly snatching whatever they want. Whenever in power, they reliably turn institutions inside out and against themselves, and so made its strange, self-serving, anti-government faith real. Most of Trump’s signature accomplishments — funneling money to plutocrats, deregulation, stuffing the judiciary with right-wing cranks — were ho-hum Republican orthodoxy. But we’re not dealing with conservatism as a set of ideas anymore; this is conservatism as a lifestyle brand. Superannuated elected Republicans and terminally delirious MAGA acolytes are trying to cop the free-jazz bluster of Trump’s style, but the bleak truth is they no longer have to pretend to care about anything other than white grievance and white power. The GOP is a distillation of pure human evil, and their base of lumpy malcontents occupy a hive-mind fugue state where everything dissolves into a cartoon fantasy of Antifa storming into preschools and force-feeding children halal meat. Conservatism can be summed up in images of chuckle-headed, Jimmy-Buffet-concert-going, parrot-dorks doing the YMCA in parking lots basically waiting for an instant replay call.

Living in America for the past five years was like taking a potato peeler to your frontal lobe and a cheese grater to your soul. The national electorate is trapped in this partisan box where everyone is biting each other’s faces off because they’re mostly bored suburbanites watching TV. Politics, in any meaningful sense, is nothing more than strident cultural hectoring, a sadistic urge to blame other people for your problems. America is a collection of 330 million individual consumers who have lost faith in their ability to change anything structural; this has been our collective lived experience since this nation put a bullet in the heart of the working class in the late-1970s and compromised its political system for bubbles and various naked aggrandizements. Big problems are deemed to be inherently unsolvable, necessary costs to Keep The Economy Going. The horror is baked into the choice.