We’ve all seen it happening for eight years now and I think we’ve all been either ignoring it or thinking it’s just a schtick. If you had told anyone in the country that an old crass, bigoted billionaire who cried a victimization river would get a following of 47% of the voting population, we would have laughed at you and told you that your imagination was very weird. Everything we have all been taught over the years about armchair abnormal psychiatry has been on full display on the national stage. It began with building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, and right away a defensive maneuver when anyone in the press called out the nonsense that he was spewing at all his rallies became the notion that no one has ever had the press so much against him while running for public office. I think of the infamous Checkers Speech by Richard Nixon in 1952 when he pleaded to the nation to let him stay on the GOP ticket as Vice President with Dwight Eisenhower…and to keep the gifted cocker spaniel named Checkers that his daughters loved so much. It was a tear-jerker of a speech and it worked all around. He was forgiven his trespasses and his “come to Jesus” moment in front of the nation was accepted and he went on politically from there. He had a slight revisiting of the “woe is me” approach to politics when he lost the California gubernatorial election to Pat Brown in 1962 after his defeat by John F. Kennedy for President in 1960. In that 1962 address he said ever so bitterly to the press that they “would not have Nixon to kick around anymore…” since he was declaring himself withdrawn from politics for good.
We all know how that story ended. It only took one extreme conservative named Barry Goldwater from Arizona, who lost the electoral college vote 486 to 52, making that the worst defeat in any presidential election in our nation’s history, and the GOP came limping back to Tricky Dick for the 1968 election cycle. How is it that some politicians can get away with convincing the electorate that they are the victims of unfair treatment? At least Nixon was not a billionaire who flaunted his wealth and projected every bad vice he had onto his political opponents like Trump does. We all came to know Nixon was a flawed man who had one image for the outside world and then cursed like a truck driver behind closed doors. But that did not become clear until he was unrobed after Watergate and its related coverup. Trump has been out there for all to see his flaws since his days on The Apprentice and even before. I had the pleasure in 2004, the year the show aired for the first time, of being invited to the New York Hilton for the annual Friar’s Roast. My lawyer at the time was a Friar’s Club member and he invited me to hear Trump get thrashed by all the local comedians, businessmen and politicians. Donald Trump was a Joke with a capital J in New York City long before the rest of the country even knew who he was. I remember watching one of the early Apprentice shows thinking that it was funny that such a vain man who simply could not laugh at himself in the least would open himself up to reality TV ridicule like Ozzy Osborne. For all of us in New York, we viewed the show like a comedy about a local buffoon. But here’s the thing…Trump thought it made him look good and powerful…and for some strange reason it did to a lot of the uninitiated in the rest of the country.
And then it was the famous 2011 White House Correspondent’s dinner when Trump was the butt of all the jokes from Barack Obama, the sitting president, and Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live. The entire world saw how badly Trump was angered and wounded by the joking at his expense and many think that is the night that the political monster was created that eventually ran and won the 2016 election, much to everyone’s shock. But where most people would consider that a vindication of epic magnitude and drop the victim act, Trump somehow needed everyone to admire him and could not rest if there was even one person who was still laughing at him. This is a fatal flaw of grand Greek Tragedy proportions. Trump wore his grievance on his sleeve and made no attempt to hide it. The liberal portion of the press found it all too funny and never hesitated to say so, while the Fox News people quietly nodded and demurred. It was clear that everyone saw the same thing and felt the same way about it, but for some reason, the people who supported Trump chose to ignore it, not occasionally, but literally all the time. That tendency has somehow now morphed into acceptance and concurrence, helped as it were by the more and more outrageous acts (criminal and civil) that have brought him to court over and over again. He is now officially a validated victim to his base of followers. They feel incensed that the deep state and the liberal media have put upon their demigod. They no longer tolerate his weakness in that regard, but actually empathize with him about how unjustly the world has and is treating him. It is truly a study in mass hysteria of some new sort.
But suddenly now, things are changing. Under the hot lights of one last election cycle, the Trump wax figure has started to actually melt. John Miller, who famously marketed The Apprentice for NBC, says they “promoted the show relentlessly,” blanketing the country with a “highly exaggerated” image of Trump as a successful businessman. “[W]e…did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader,” Miller has written. “I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.” Jimmy Kimmel put a Comedy Central video of a pro wrestler mocking Trump. It said, “He’s moody, he pouts, he throws tantrums,” and goes on to suggest that, “He’s cattier on social media than a middle-school mean girl.”
I wonder if ever in the world prior to this there has been such a successful effort to convince so many of the most prosperous people of the world (including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk) that we should all lay off of poor little Donny Trump and stop hounding him for all the things that he says and does? Perhaps finally, and hopefully in time to embarrass enough voters out of voting for this man-child, the cult of grievance has finally come to an end….perhaps just in the nick of time to save the world from a final pity play.
We can only hope…