The Weekly Screed (#785)

Donald Trump’s
Parisian sweetheart
by David Benjamin

“When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:11

PARIS — My friends in the Trumpkamp think that non-Trumpniks like me don’t understand them. They see themselves as exceptional and abstruse (partly because they don’t know what “abstruse” means and they’re proud of that, and even prouder that they refuse to look it up).

The counterpoint to this self-styled distinctiveness is that there are tens of millions of Trump believers gathering in arenas and roaring in unison. In a crowd like that (all wearing the same ugly baseball cap), it’s hard to call yourself unique.

More significantly, this mass claim to peculiarity reflects a tradition as simple and American as blueberry muffins. Trumpians are a permanent class who see themselves on the Outside, looking In. They’re stuck out there pressing their noses to the window at Bloomie’s because some ill-defined but pernicious “elite” has denied them their rightful place, on purpose, personally. This is not a rare and and recondite grievance. We’ve all been there. Very few of us make through life unscrewed.

Whenever a lot of us feel entitled to a piece of the action, but see invisible (or obvious) forces holding us back — who then compound the affront by handing out favors to the less deserving — we chafe and bellyache.

We’ve been kvetching since Plymouth Rock. The Boston Tea Party was an early and melodramatic outburst. Its equal and opposite recent counterpart was the even more melodramatic Tea Party, which is pretty much gone, most of its faithful now chasing Trump’s limo.

My favorite feel-good iteration of the eternal Nobody-Knows-the-Trouble-I’ve-Seen theme is Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), in which the followers of a mythical social outcast — played gently by Gary Cooper — call themselves the John Does. If Capra had made the movie today…

Wait. Capra filming Meet Donald Trump? No way. Capra would recognize Trump as the archetype of the big fat rich men whom he always depicted (often played by Edward Arnold) as conniving windbags, blind to reality and drunk with ego.

In 1968, Richard Nixon birthed John Doe’s evil twin. By glorifying America’s inchoate mass of grumblers as the Great Silent Majority, he assured them that he heard their stifled voice. Tricky Dick shared — he said — our anguish at being passed over, unfairly, whenever he (we) reached for a position that would set him (us) apart from the vast herd of faceless johns. He wanted to be president. He wanted to run California. They (we) wouldn’t let him. Well then, up yours, big shots. I’m Richard Milhouse, I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.

Yes. Nixon foreshadowed Howard Beale, who foreshadowed Trump, whose minions borrowed Beale’s best line but probably never saw that movie either.

Which brings me to last week in a Paris wine bar, where I stumbled felicitously upon an eloquent spokeswoman for the John Doe-Howard Beale ethos. She was twenty-something, slightly drunk and cute as a bug’s ear. Her name is Marianne, and she said, “I love Trump!”

Now, the joint was loud (Frederic, the proprietor, had been trying to close up for an hour, to no avail), and Marianne was speaking Franglish. Hence, I didn’t gather her every word, but her message had the advantage of familiarity. I’d heard before — really often! — that democracy in both America and France is a shambles.

“There is no democracy,” quoth Marianne, passionately.

All that’s left of our once-Revolutionary dream — she said — is a technocratic “establishment,” riddled with cronyism, nepotism and baksheesh. The republic needs a Trumpoid figure to disrupt the entire structure and shake it, instantly, to its foundations, creating the cracks, fissures and crevasses where Great Silents, John Does and Sans Culottes can infiltrate, seize the establishment, remake it in our own image and quietly behead the fatcats of the ancien regime.

The clincher in Marianne’s philippic was the example of one Adolf Hitler. I could tell she was speaking more in precept than praise. Too young to remember the Feuhrer, she perceived him and the Donald as rhetorical soulmates. They’re like characters from Upton Sinclair, symbolic rousers of the rabble and disrupters of a ruling class that has played out its string and must be deposed in toto, leaving nothing behind but politically pure peasants and scorched earthed destined to become the topsoil of Utopia.

We drank lustily to scorched earth and to the great Franco-American phoenix rising from its ashes. Then Hotlips and I kissed Marianne on both cheeks and moseyed home, gingerly (we’d had a lot of wine). As we passed apartment blocks, vast gardens and public works erected by the decadent establishment, I pondered Marianne’s tender age. She was enamored of her political vision, and pleased with herself — rightfully — for having one. She was free now to think and speak her mind, because she’s a grownup engaging older grownups who asked her opinion, listened to it and toasted her insouciance.

I bowed to Marianne’s novice populism because I could tell how curious and smart she is. I knew she would change, grow up more, and come to see the shades between the Black and the White. Why argue with a passing fancy?

Although merely an amusing abstraction to Marianne in Paris, Donald Trump in America is more accurately a fairly violent mass tantrum. Like toddlers collapsing to the floor in the supermarket, screaming and kicking a hundred boxes of forbidden Froot Loops all over the linoleum, Americans who aren’t getting what they want — right now — are acting out.

Trump is Froot Loops for the left-behind, discontent and dispossessed. He’s every loser’s winner. He’s the simple answer to the quandary of real life, and the latest of those “childish things” that so many of us can’t quite put behind us.