Explaining Donald Trump's Pre-Presidential Public Life to My Son Is Not Easy!
Yesterday my seven year old son Declan asked me if Donald Trump had appeared in any movies. I responded that, actually, Donald Trump had been in LOTS of movies. He’s something of a cameo king, having made cameos a condition of shooting movies in his many tacky hotels and casinos and whatnot.
But it went beyond that. I explained to Declan that growing up he was going to see Donald Trump being referenced in countless songs, novels, albums, television shows and other entertainment from the 1980s, 1990s and oughts but that the context for those references would be decidedly different than references to Donald Trump from 2015 onward.
It could be argued that the current incarnation of Trump, the one whose presidency we just barely survived, was born earlier, back when Trump decided to make his presence felt in the political sphere by loudly and repeatedly asserting, with little to nothing in the way of evidence, that our nation’s first African-American president had been lying about being born in the United States largely on the basis of having a foreign-sounding name and non-white skin.
When people talk about Trump now it’s generally in his role as a Fascist, racist politician with a terrifying cult of personality. That version of Trump evolved in the Birther days but it had its roots in 1989, when he bought full page ads in New York papers and loudly agitated for the Central Park 5 to be murdered by the state.
Despite these characteristically unsavory forays into racial/racist politics, when Trump was name dropped in a TV show or movie in the past it was not because of his political beliefs or virulent racism but rather because he was a VERY famous rich guy who devoted much of his time and energy to letting the world know just how rich and successful he was.
Richness was Trump’s brand. It was his whole deal. For decades, Trump was shorthand for celebrity. Trump was shorthand for ego. Trump was shorthand for narcissism. Trump was shorthand for wealthy real estate developer. Trump was shorthand for reality competitions.
In the past, Trump meant a lot of things, all of them superficial and materialistic but he did not yet represent the incoherent rage of a generation of white people who never got over the unspeakable injustice of a smarty pants African-American with a suspicious-seeming name being elected to the highest office in the land.
Declan is going to encounter this early Donald Trump repeatedly as he gets older. He’s going to see him in Home Alone 2. And Zoolander. And, if he’s really, really weird, Ghosts Can’t Do It. And it’s going to seem weird that a hate monger responsible for lowering the level of national discourse and single-handedly making the world an uglier, more hateful and toxic place is being treated with kid gloves as essentially a harmless clown, a big-talking self-promoter who personifies, in unusually pure form, a distinct breed of American hustler.
Obama was president when Declan was born in 2014 but he has no memory of him being in office. He’s too young to remember Obama. On a similar note, Jimmy Carter was president when I was a baby but the first president I remember was Ronald Reagan.
I remembered Reagan for the same reason Declan remembers Donald Trump: because my dad told me that he was a very bad man and that despite his ghoulish smile and army of sycophantic worshipers, he represented everything that we were against politically, and morally as well.
But I also remember Reagan because he was such an unusual and unlikely president. I vividly remember finding out that he was an actor who had starred in films such as Bedtime for Bonzo and experiencing intense cognitive dissonance. Why on earth would we elect a real-life Troy McClure President? That’d be like Cam Gigandet being elected Commander-in-Chief twenty years from now.
Reagan paved the way for Trump in part by proving that a show-business clown could get elected President. I fear that the precedent these terminally un-serious buffoons established will be followed by even worst pretenders in the future.
It would be nice if we didn’t have to explain to our children that sometimes grotesquely unqualified celebrities are elected to occupy the White House because they’re famous for pretending to be a soldier in b-movies or a billionaire business genius on reality TV or some other random nonsense unrelated to running the most powerful country in the world but I can’t see that happening any time soon.
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