Trump Follies

As someone who grew up in New Jersey and New York, the image of Donald Trump that immediately comes to mind is buffoon. Not only the silly hair, but his appearances on the Howard Stern show, his absurdist self-absorption, his clownish public persona. Obviously "The Apprentice" gave him the imprimatur of popular culture and the veneer of  earnestness that was largely missing from his personality before the appearance of the show. The Trump narrative is often obfuscating and the reality that he lost his fortune and got it back erases the fact that he grew up rich and often used predatory, and it appears racist, tactics as one of the richest landlords in New York City. But what does his flirtation with a Presidential run say about the state of politics today?

1) The nature of media today is so tilted toward spectacle and sensationalism that they seem to have completely lost sight of any role in being responsible arbiters of the public sphere and honest political debate. From making both Iraq Wars look like cool video games, to an irresponsible adherence to anything the Bush administration said (e.g., Gore said he invented the internet, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Saddam and 911, weapons of mass destruction, terror threat alerts, etc.), to a new belief that their jobs is just to report what people say without any checking of whether it's true (as for example with the critique of Cooper below) to their love affair with Sarah Palin, the media seems to be more about making the news interesting than deconstructing it.
2) Victimhood sells in American politics more than at any time in history. Reagan and Nixon both fed on the purported victimhood of working class men by women, blacks, unions, hippies and the government itself. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are popular based on this very tendency. Whites are still victims of blacks, of affirmative action, of a government that wants to destroy freedom, of the poor, of Muslims, of gays, of "illegal immigrants" taking their jobs, and of anyone or anything that challenges the idealized utopian past. Ironically, as is the case with many of the instruments of this reactionary, atavistic who are far from victims themselves, Trump is a billionaire who has only benefited from contemporary economic and political regimes. And yet he becomes the embodiment of this victimhood, turning the focus to the international arena -- where Americans are victims of China, OPEC, Iran, Iraq and anyone else trying to undermine our economic and political imperialism and hegemony.
3) As is a general strategy of the elite, hatred always sells -- but particularly when times are tough. And like so many pretenders before him, Trump is trying to harness that hatred and use it to catapult himself to the most powerful seat in the world. How? By feeding on the absurd ideas of the birthers and then turning immediately with the tide to say that Obama is an "affirmative action baby" who didn't merit his academic, or we suppose, political achievements. What is most startling about this is the way it ignores the more obvious benefactor of privilege -- George W. Bush (an average student who also has two Ivy League degrees).

I assume that Trump has little chance of success, but like McCain before him his turn to the right to test the waters of Republican Presidential politics shows us how extreme America is and how dangerous to our collective future that extremism might be.