Mr. Creosote Makes His Return

The Trump supporter's endless gluttony

I guess I was hoping Nikki Haley would do a little better last night. Not because I want Nikki Haley to do well, but because I want Donald Trump to do poorly. Because I hate him. I hate Donald Trump for all the reasons people who hate Donald Trump hate Donald Trump. But I don’t want to talk about him; I want to talk about his supporters.

For all the hand-wringing profiles of Trump supporters conducted at the small-town diners in which they apparently all hang out, nobody is just coming out and saying the simple truth. Trump supporters are voting for one thing: hate. Trump is a proxy for their resentments, jealousies, paranoia, and insecurities. He is their god of scuttled dreams, failed romances, petty rivalries, and self-loathing. They are Pandora and he is their box.

The reasons they give to reporters for their support of Trump are nearly always some combination of the economy, feeling “forgotten,” the “crisis” at the Southern border, combined with grudging admiration for this “brashness,” his willingness to speak his mind (such as it is), and his “toughness.” When it comes to the outrageous diarrhea that spews from his pucker hole, they shrug and say it’s just Trump being Trump. And that’s where they lose me. Because “Trump being Trump” is – or should be – disqualifying, if not constitutionally then morally.

Terry Jones as Mr. Creosote who absolutely would have voted for Trump.

Trump’s version of making America great again removes whatever greatness America still possesses. It’s an intolerant, suspicious, zero-sum game model of the nation. It’s a nation of gated communities and concealed weapons, a nation of laws for the lower classes and total permissiveness for the upper.

Maybe you’ve seen the videos of snatch-and-grab teams hitting various stores across the country. Trumpism is snatch-and-grab writ large, a system in which those who already have more than they could possibly use in a hundred lifetimes are encouraged to take even more. There’s that scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in which Terry Jones’s Mr. Creosote character eats so much he pops. You and I look at that as satire; the Trump supporter looks at it as inspiration.

Above all, of course, Trump’s America is a white America. I don’t think the average Trump supporter is “racist” in the classic sense. They’re not burning crosses or marching with Patriot Front in Kohl’s brand khakis or throwing around racial epithets. They don’t exactly hate people who don’t look like them. They just don’t understand why there’s so suddenly so many of them. They’re not hateful - they just want to rub a little 50 SPF suntan lotion into the national melanin count. They know white folks are destined to become a majority minority at some point, but can we delay that point as long as possible, please? At the very least, can we further rig the game in such a way that white people retain whatever institutional advantages we already possess? Our food is already spicy enough, thank you very much.

The Trump supporter flies the American flag on his truck but does not actually believe in the American promise, which states that anybody can rise in this nation. They object to policies that would expand opportunities for minorities, immigrants, and the poor. What is the “greatness” these patriots want to restore? They object to helping the least among us. They object to American international leadership if it costs more than the price of a postage stamp. They object to nearly all forms of tolerance, art, and personal expression. They claim to want a Christian nation but support a man whose every action spits in the face of their savior. Many people have correctly identified the inherent contradiction in making America great again; this is a nation that has always – always – used its various legislatures to neglect or exploit those who have the most to lose. Restoring America to any moment in its past is to return to a time when somebody is getting bent over the table.

It’s not that they want to make “America” great again. It’s that they want to elevate a subset of the American population, the subset that looks the most like them. One could, correctly, argue that this has always been American domestic policy. But the truth is, various presidents of both parties have worked to improve the lives of all Americans. Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about the underprivileged and he gives his supporters moral license not to care about them, either. The Trump supporter is eager to throw her fellow Americans under the bus if it will move her marginally up the pecking order. Trumpism has no conception of America as a nation. Instead, it seeks to further divide us into winners and losers, defined by race, religion, political party, and sexual preference. For all their complaints the Trump voter is far more guilty of practicing “identity politics” than any Democrat. It’s just that the identity for which they advocate happens to be white suburbanites with higher-than-average incomes.

Nikki Haley is an uncomfortable contrast with Trump. In previous election cycles, hers would be the feel-good story of the season, the first-generation daughter of immigrants running for the nation’s highest office. The reason her story feels so bad is that Haley is captured by the same nativist, bigoted forces to which Trump is beholden. She cannot present herself as a sane alternative to Trump without attacking Trump too hard, which she can’t do if she wants to keep his supporters, without whom she cannot win either the primary or the general election. As a result, Trump is allowed to take his rhetorical flamethrower to each of his opponents but his opponents cannot do the same to him. Hate for me, but not for thee. She’s done.

So we’re left with a choice between two octogenarians, one of whom represents an America I recognize, hopeful and striving to better itself and the lives of all of its people. The other is Donald Trump. Do I love Joe Biden? Not really. But I think he’s a competent chief executive with the nation’s best interests at heart. That’s a pretty low bar for the nation’s leader, but when one of the two remaining candidates cannot even clear it, there really isn’t a choice to make. One of our candidates enjoys the occasional vanilla ice cream cone. The other is Mr. Creosote. Choose your fighter.