By james art i went to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried. I wanted to see it, feel it, know it. I spent two hours crushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, amidst belligerent talk, alcohol consumption, slander and racist posturing. There were older Jews, black families, Asian couples, and young Hispanic women. I’ve heard South Asian men call Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others say women should just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men displaying their jackets with artistic depictions of Trump as a bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I heard and experienced was a major complaint.
I always thought America was a bad place. And what I mean by that is it’s structured for meanness. It is a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be thrown away, a country built on the violent theft of indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of black people. It is a place where when a man’s status rises, he shows it to those who have less, instead of taking them with him. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth, clothes and fabulous lives every day and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most are consumed by self-loathing and despair.
We are almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say that one thing in common that this patriarchal racist capitalism has caused is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and what you are can be suddenly and forever cancelled.
And that uncertainty is the problem.
Because when the fascists come, when these narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking larger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do this by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less than who are other, making the majority feel special, superior and secure. This is the oldest but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize abstract self-loathing and insecurity, make them the real enemy and blame everything on them.
This demonization was exaggerated in Madison Square Garden. Whether it was a comedian referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” or suggesting that Jews are cheap and Palestinians throw stones, or Tucker Carlson mocking Harris – the daughter of a Native American mother and a Jamaican father – with a fictional identity saying, that she is running to become “the first low-IQ ex-California prosecutor from Samoa and Malaysia to ever be elected president.” Or for that matter, almost every speaker mispronounces Kamala’s name.
Then there was Trump, who rambled on and on for nearly an hour, calling those seeking refuge and survival savages, animals, horrible people who had occupied America, invading it, as if he had forgotten that except for the indigenous people who were here, and the African-Americans who were dragged here in chains, every other person is an immigrant who came in search of survival, safety and a new life.
I’ve always sort of understood the banal evil of Donald Trump. It dates back to 1989. This was around the time he was converting a 14-story apartment building in New York into luxury apartments for the wealthy, trying to drive tenants out of the building by turning off the hot water and heating in the middle of winter. We organized an event called Brunch at the Plaza and invited Trump, who was the owner of the hotel at the time. We bused in hundreds of homeless people and served them brunch on the Plaza lawn. The request was simple. Give 1.3% of your net income to specific organizations developing housing for the poor. Trump was not present. Cut to 2015. Months before he announced he was running for office, a few activists and I invited people to my apartment to see if we could start Stop Hate Dump Trump. A campaign to prevent him from running for president. Many told us we were crazy and extreme, told us no one would ever take this jerk seriously.
Perhaps my own childhood with the same kind of narcissistic, abusive, seductive father gave me the eyes to see Donald Trump, to understand that he is not necessarily dangerous in what he is (if you empty that piggy bank, there will be nothing in it), he he was dangerous because of what he wasn’t—a shiny American hologram, an all-too-familiar dream, or Dad, just unavailable, completely separate, except when he suddenly exploded with frustration and rage. This dad has really come home to relax, home to turn the house into chaos and terror, home to compare his children to each other so that there is always someone on top and someone on the bottom, creating fierce competition and hatred among his children so that they never learn cooperation and solidarity, but instead fight each other for his approval.
All night long, Trump’s surrogates have been spinning us into an opposite world. They talked about Trump as a man of peace and love, you know, one of the ordinary people with flaws like most of us, an endless victim, who has lived through lawsuits and impeachment, kicked off Twitter with no reason given for any of this may be it happened. The truth that night was as irreplaceable as the lives of immigrants, pregnant women, trans children, critical race theory, and our nation’s history.
There is a lot of blame for how we got here. A racist colonialist history with which it has never come to terms, Democrats have settled for the most rudimentary approach to identity politics, rather than seeing it as a gateway to an intersectional analysis of race and class. The list goes on.
We are a nation of the lonely and the abandoned, desperate for belonging and worth. Many have been seduced by Trump. They can’t believe that this rich tycoon and TV celebrity would actually care about them. And they’re right, because there’s absolutely no indication that he would ever invite most of the New York crowd to his mansion or golf club. Recall the reports that he referred to his followers as “basement dwellers.” He told the packed house Sunday night that he could be sunning himself on the beach or playing golf at Turnberry in Scotland, but he chose to be there with them as if the act of running for president was the highest form of altruism, not full power grab. Oh dear generous father.
But there’s always a real story lurking around the edges, always corruption, theft and dirty deals, always sexual abuse. A man told a woman I was with that he didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was the case and he said something about it having to do with sexuality, and my friend asked, “You mean because Trump is a rapist?”
But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s daddy’s projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Desired object and rapist. After all, thousands of us did not enter the garden. In retrospect, I realize that I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before I was found out. I couldn’t handle the metastasized energy of a nationalist, racist, misogynist mob in the service of its daddy master.
As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major criminal and a disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman performing an enthusiastic cheerleader number for “Daddy Don” with red pom poms, I know more deeply than ever that it is not enough to get rid of Trump, although that would be a very good thing. We must dedicate ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to it.