In a world full of annoying things, one of the most annoying is the compulsion on the part of writers who agree with Donald Trump on many or even most matters and think his administration has been “consequential” (a much used adjective in the context) to hasten to add that the man himself is coarse, vulgar, noisy, Tweetful, narcissistic, selfish, unpresidential, and generally of a low character, by comparison( especially) with Joe “C’mon man” Biden. You might think Americans had never experienced a presidential vulgarian before, though a great many of our previous presidents have been exactly that. In modern times, we had Warren Harding fornicating clandestinely (as Mencken phrased it) in a White House coat closet. There’s vulgarity for you. And John Kennedy with his atrocious Boston accent and his sexual trysts with movie actresses in the White House. And Richard Nixon’s sordid cronies and the blow-up sex doll he had placed in Beebe Rebozo’s bed for his birthday. Lyndon Johnson pulling out his shirttail to display the scar from a gall-bladder operation. Bill Clinton’s sneaking fellatio in the Oval Office. As for Barack Obama, his considered and arrogant pseudo-elegance has a vulgarity all its own.
Me, I’ve never understood what the complaint about Trump is. By every account I’ve read, given by people who know him well, he is in private a kind, considerate, and gracious person. His public persona is a deliberately developed one, carefully calculated to express his disdain for the professional American politico, the career bureaucrat and place-server in the deepest depths of the Deep State, the liberal ideologue, the radical universities, the liberal media, and liberalism generally–in other words, for the Establishment as a whole. For going on five years now he has been tearing off imperial Washington’s clothes to reveal it in all its naked and hideous reality. Most importantly, he is the only president in living memory who drew up a list of campaign promises to the nation–and fulfilled almost every one of them, and in a single term, too. That takes political genius, as well as character.
Trump has committed every act of lèse-majesté hitherto imaginable, and gone on to imagine new ones. The man is a walking attentat upon everything the Establishment stands for, and by forcing it to respond to his aggressive candor and truth-telling he tricked the State into demonstrating that it is capable of anything—anything at all. Similarly with the media, who promptly and enthusiastically unmasked themselves to reveal what they actually are–not truth tellers and public defenders but liars and enemies of the public good. No wonder all these people despise him as they do. As I say, I’ve appreciated and enjoyed the show all along. It’s been exactly what our governing class has deserved for decades, but never got. As president, Joe Biden (should he actually take the oath of office) will probably exhort Boris Johnson, or the Queen of England, or Presidents Macron and Xi to “C’mon!”–around, that is, to his point of view on everything, but he won’t be nearly so entertaining as his predecessor was when he does it. Nor as effective.
Likewise, Trump has been frequently accused of vengefulness. If he really is a man of vengeance, however, he is outstripped by a thousand miles by Rep. Sandy Cortez of the Bronx who is demanding the establishment of a Trump Accountability Project to pursue, punish, and cancel (if not yet liquidate) anyone and everyone who supported and otherwise facilitated Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, served in his administration, worked for his re-election–and even, I imagine, voted for the man. Such a thing is unprecedented in the history of the United States. This vindictive vixen would, if she could, have hundreds of thousands of people shunned and denied a living for themselves and their families for having associated themselves with a legal administration that has been exonerated by every crime it has been accused of so far. Should she get her way (unlikely as that is), she would probably go farther still—and who can say how far? The woman, who has the character of Madame LaFarge, is in spirit and in thought a dangerous enemy alien, despite being an American by birth; an extremist even in the context of the contemporary Democratic Party. She would go far in a political career in Cuba, or in Venezuela. I suggest an Ocasio-Cortez Accountability Project whose aim would be her forcible deportation to either of those Turd World shitholes. She’d flourish mightily there for a while–and end up before a firing squad against a wall.
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