"He Appears
Trump
is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is
strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea
captain: Alan Hale from “Gilligan’s Island,” say, had Hale been slimmer,
richer, more self-confident. We are afforded a side view of a head of
silver-yellow hair and a hawklike orange-red face, the cheeks of which,
if stared at steadily enough, will seem, through some optical illusion,
to glow orange-redder at moments when the crowd is especially pleased.
If you’ve ever, watching “The Apprentice,” entertained fantasies of how
you might fare in the boardroom (the Donald, recognizing your excellent
qualities with his professional businessman’s acumen, does not fire you
but, on the contrary, pulls you aside to assign you some important
non-TV, real-world mission), you may, for a brief, embarrassing instant,
as he scans the crowd, expect him to recognize you.
He
is blessing us here in San Jose, California, with his celebrity,
promising never to disappoint us, letting us in on the latest bit of
inside-baseball campaign strategy: “Lyin’ Ted” is no longer to be Lyin’
Ted; henceforth he will be just “Ted.” Hillary, however, shall be “Lyin’
Crooked.” And, by the way, Hillary has to go to jail. The statute of
limitations is five years, and if he gets elected in November,
well . . . The crowd sends forth a coarse blood roar. “She’s guilty as
hell,” he snarls.
He growls,
rants, shouts, digresses, careens from shtick nugget to shtick nugget,
rhapsodizes over past landslides, name-drops Ivanka, Melania, Mike
Tyson, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Knight, Bill O’Reilly. His right shoulder
thrusts out as he makes the pinched-finger mudra with downswinging arm.
His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted
street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an
imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally
complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has
just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not
about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it
was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it.
Once,
Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness,
got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be
first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump,
similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue
me, O.K.? I probably shouldn’t say this, but oops—just did. (Hillary’s
attack ads? “So false. Ah, some of them aren’t that false,
actually.”) It’s oddly riveting, watching someone take such pleasure in
going so much farther out on thin ice than anyone else as famous would
dare to go. His crowds are ever hopeful for the next thrilling rude
swerve. “There could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body
until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for
the unexpected and incalculable,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1960.
The
speeches themselves are nearly all empty assertion. Assertion and
bragging. Assertion, bragging, and defensiveness. He is always boasting
about the size of this crowd or that crowd, refuting some slight from
someone who has treated him “very unfairly,” underscoring his sincerity
via adjectival pile-on (he’s “going to appoint beautiful, incredible,
unbelievable Supreme Court Justices”). He lies, bullies, menaces, dishes
it out but can’t seem to take it, exhibits such a muddy understanding
of certain American principles (the press is free, torture illegal,
criticism and libel two different things) that he might be a
seventeenth-century Austrian prince time-transported here to mess with
us. Sometimes it seems that he truly does not give a shit, and you
imagine his minders cringing backstage. Other times you imagine them
bored, checking their phones, convinced that nothing will ever touch
him. Increasingly, his wild veering seems to occur against his will, as
if he were not the great, sly strategist we have taken him for but,
rather, someone compelled by an inner music that sometimes produces good
dancing and sometimes causes him to bring a bookshelf crashing down on
an old Mexican lady. Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?
Apply Occam’s razor: if someone brags this much, bending every ray of light back to himself, what’s the simplest explanation?"
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