Angry America Recasts the Redeemer Cult

THAT IMAGE, IN RETROSPECT, forms the centrespread of American mythology: His face bloodied, his fist in the air, the man who just defied the assassin’s bullet stood there, rising from near-death, chanting, fight… fight… fight… Donald Trump has been fighting all along, as candidate and convict, as provocateur and pariah, alone in his ambition but with millions on his mission. And on election night in America, he stood there on the stage history erects exclusively for non-quitters, to reclaim the destiny he believed was stolen from him four years ago. He fought… fought… fought… and won.

And he won in spite of:

THE PROGRESSIVE FEAR PROJECT The Inauguration Day on January 20, 2017, was, in the alternative universe of liberals, the formal launch of American Apocalypse, and the man who dared to gatecrash Washington’s power party was a vulgarian, the orange man they called him, who descended from the golden tower of wealth and kitsch. The outsider was the idyll-breaker, and in the cultural portrait by the elite, a pornographer who was all set to wield power without moral constraints, exuding not grace in victory but grievance. Be prepared for the worst, they warned, freedom was about to shrink, and institutions were about to fall. That didn’t happen, but the warnings didn’t wane.

It was as if the piteous and the pitiless from the left joined hands to ward off the evil, for, in the progressive profusion of fantasy fiction, Trump personified the worst instincts of a nation recast. His politics, an epic of accusation and com­plaints, was nothing but a plot against the idea of America.

Prosecutors joined progressives in the political exorcism of the century. The twice-impeached president became a criminal with 34 counts of felony. The man who was qualified to be the prisoner-in-chief of America campaign­ing, testing the limits of biology and turning America’s oldest political tradition into an oversized personal credo, to become its commander-in-chief had to be stopped. In the great American show trial, the serial punishment of Trump, made easier by politically motivated prosecutors, didn’t give birth to a villain. For the shirtless of Middle America, he was the victim. Manufactured fear didn’t sell. Neither did the woke wave.

THE MEDIA INQUISITION The first edition of the Trump presidency was the best thing that happened to the liberal media with a vanishing readership. A bogeyman who could withstand moral thrashing was urgently needed, and there was no one more suitable than the president who vowed to seal the southern borders but crossed with impunity the borders of decency. The venerable American media tradition of the separation of the church and the state was breached for the higher cause of saving the shining city on a hill from the savage.

Trump’s campaign for reclaiming the White House was characterised by his political opponent as fascist, as if he was the hate-monger promising a culturally unipolar republic in Weimar America. The liberal media portrait of Trump was not different: the figure who emerged from the verbal gulag of the editorial pages was a 78-year-old fantasist trampling upon freedom. Historians like Timothy Snyder had already provided the intellectual framework to fit him into the mould of a classic tyrant. At the beginning of the Trump presidency, in a little book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, he told America: “We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.” Containing the dark force of Trumpism was a liberal media mission that refused to ask why or how it was allowed to turn into a cultural movement. No politician has been reduced to a profanity in his lifetime as Trump has in the liberal media.

CONSERVATIVE BRAHMINISM They all still wallowed in the memory of Reagan­ism, the high noon of American conser­vatism in power. The blue-blooded right could not accept the aesthetics of Trump­ism—or the man’s character, particularly the trait that resisted a peaceful transfer of power. Even as pundits from the lofty perches of the right expressed their disapproval of someone the Economist called “an underwhelming machine politi­cian” (still they went on to endorse her), Trump remained too much of an embar­rassment to earn their public approval. As conservatism came down from the higher realms of society to the resentful grassroots, some conservatives refused to accept the class makeover of a concept. Not being Trump was a qualification good enough for them to accept a triangulating Democrat.

And Trump won because…

REBRANDING THE AMERICAN DREAM The MAGA cap was a metaphor and a talisman. In an America that made that Bill Clinton catchphrase of 1992 vintage, ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’, very contemporary, the cap makes the present a despair and the future a desire. The despair is an indictment of the Biden era, which made America poorer, the market gloomier. As the Wall Street Journal headlined, it was an “economy-is-everything election”, and nearly half of the electorate approved. It was a paradox of American politics that it took a billionaire to mobilise the sighs and sorrows of the Americans who languished outside the Dream, abandoned by the traditional left and right. In the MAGA invocation, “great” was interchangeable with “rich”. The man who came from the tower of privilege stood there in the vanguard of a movement from below.

RAGE AGAINST THE ELITE In the end it was a class war. For the uppity bubble dwellers, Trump was a pathological liar whose ambition was larger than the size of his lies. The Trump supporters were mere “deplorables” in the book of Hillary Clinton; in Biden’s demented outburst, they have become “garbage”. In the delusion of the elite, the Trumpian universe was a corruption of the American Dream, and it was the message beautiful people like Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen sent out to the fans. The urge to take back control, which began with Brexit, has peaked in Trump’s rage against people-like-them. It was the revenge of the natives as rootless cosmopolitanism, as condescending as ever, frowned upon them.

THE RETURN OF THE NATION To be a patriot, in a world radicalised by doctrinaire identity politics, was a crime against the cultural well-being of a civil society. In the post-George Floyd moral homogenisation of American liberalism, nationalism was a repressive, racial attitude. The nation was reduced to an apology; and its worship could only make neo-tribalism easier. Still, nationalism remained an emotional affinity for most Americans, like their counterparts across the Atlantic and, increasingly, in Europe, silent and patient. Trump brought the nation, threatened by unchecked immigration and culture wars, back to the conversation. Its veneration didn’t make him a fascist. For the base, it made him a redeemer. And on election night, the winner of this century’s fiercest argument for power.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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