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Trump’s America is a gangster’s paradise

He has stripped the country naked and revealed the ugly secret beneath our idealism: money and corruption.

By Lee Siegel

Man is born free, but he is everywhere online. As Trump, just a few days into his presidency, signs one executive order after another in a murky blend of transaction and retribution, he acquires the uncanny nature of a human computer mouse. Click him and, if he is your man, you satisfy an impulse. Trump is a participatory president for a participatory culture.

The internet has made the country furiously impatient with reality. You want to restart a relationship with a friend from second grade, leaping over the boundaries of time and space and mortal change? Click. You have the urge to buy, gratify, gamble, lie, cheat, prey upon, ruin, all without leaving the comforts of home? Click.

If you desire to stick it in the eye of the liberal elites by referring to a violent Capitol attack as a “day of love” and want to free from prison people who assaulted police officers, then click on your new president. If you wish to strike back at the experts who made you wear a mask and get a vaccine, click on your leader and he will, as Trump has done, forbid the federal government’s health watchdogs from communicating with the public – even as bird flu threatens to leap from animals to humans.

After the Watergate scandal broke, Nixon grew increasingly paranoid, drinking heavily and flying into rages. Trump is lashing out in rage having reached the apex of political triumph, following the most remarkable comeback in American history. He still talks about his false belief that the election was stolen from him in 2020. In his first press conference, mere hours after his inauguration, he called Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, and one of Trump’s chief antagonists on the January 6 committee, “scum”. He has taken away official security details from former Trump officials who have displeased him. The vindictive rage that people often fly into after they have failed or been defeated is something that Trump indulges in as a prerogative of success.

You might call this behaviour “transcendence downward”, a term coined by the French philosopher Jean Wahl to signify a search for exalted meaning in the most sordid human actions. When Trump was asked how it felt to be back in the Oval Office, he said, with a knowing, sensual grin, that it was one of the “better” experiences of his life. Presumably second, or third, to eating, orgasming and making money – and not necessarily in that order. It is a hurling downward of lofty values and ambitions to the clay we all come from and will all revert to. As the resplendent mansions of liberal elites smoulder in ruins on the cliffs of Malibu, Trump is returning Washington to its original state, memorably described by Henry Adams in his autobiography as white-stoned buildings streaked with and sunk into mud.

There is a sort of anti-glamorous glamour to all of this. A burgeoning status in desecrating the social and political heights of yore. Transcendence downward is still transcendence. Dig down far enough, startlingly enough, disruptively enough, and you strike a new vein of power. What Trump has brought to Washington is an anti-Camelot, an inversion of the mythic citadel the city supposedly became with Kennedy.

What Kennedy inspired with his movie-star looks, his culture – he was said to read André Malraux while putting on his tie in the morning – his eloquence, his intelligence and wit, Trump has turned on its head. Of course, Kennedy’s Camelot was always a palace of sleaze. Behind Kennedy’s idealism, 60 years of deconstruction has revealed secret escalation in Vietnam, corruption, election rigging, ghostwriters, manic predatory sex, and the Kennedy fortune built on Joseph Kennedy Sr’s bootlegging and illegal manipulations of the stock market. Mud, in other words. In American memory, the Kennedy White House still shines, but through a thickening haze of rot.

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Trump was born from a culture that relentlessly deconstructs its ideals; he sneers at the very notion of idealism. In his embrace of wealth and power, Trump is enacting, in a spirit of raw democracy, America’s ugly truth. The premise of so much American popular culture is that behind lofty appearances lie money and corruption, which are then shamed or vanquished. Think of Gatsby, and the “foul dust” that “floated in the wake of his dreams”. But now, as Musk prances and Trump dances, the ruthless multimillionaires who also built museums and universities and hospitals have given way to ruthless multibillionaires who build nothing but Bitcoin server farms.

The sometimes richly consequential myth of American fairness and decency has been giddily destroyed. Kennedy pardoned the great jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, who had been imprisoned for possessing heroin. In one of his first presidential acts, Trump pardoned the founder of Silk Road, a lucrative criminal marketplace that sold illegal, sometimes lethal, narcotics.

What America has always been, it now nakedly is. Maga – Masks All Gone Away. What does it matter that Trump is again in over his head, as he threatens tariffs against Russia, which the US barely trades with, or tries to abolish birthright citizenship, which, thankfully, has little chance of becoming law? What empowers so many is the new transvaluation of values, in which virtues are replaced by sins. Money is the brute, non-elite reality behind the bright, shining lies of liberal ideals, the Trumpists say. And the emotionally warped, morally apathetic billionaire is the hero of our time.

[See also: Donald Trump’s disaster capitalism]

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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War