I have heard it said that the 70-year old President of the United States (POTUS) is the last hoorah of the angry white right-wing male. I remember hearing something similar during previous presidential campaigns and I’m sure we will hear it again at the next one.
It is undeniable that white men, predominantly right-wing but not exclusively, hold too much power. The difference is the liberal left male is often clever enough to say it isn’t right before enjoying the fruits of centuries of inequality.
It isn’t right.
There is always the hope that true equality will arise one day like a phoenix from the swamp, but this has been a hope for decades. If you consider the centuries of equality that preceded it, the twentieth century has seen rather swift improvements. But I digress, it still isn’t right.
It is also more complex than that. For example, the liberal left in the UK have never had a female leader, but the right has had two. Strange facts. Many will say that a woman must become a ‘man’ (by this they mean heartless and bossy) to become leader. This, of course, is simplistic in the extreme. Whether you like her or not, Thatcher was an efficient leader. She was strong and an unsympathetic character. Churchill was a great leader (forgetting the post war premiership) and he was a strong and unsympathetic character. Cameron was male, a weak ineffectual character and a rubbish leader. It isn’t necessarily that being a feminine woman isn’t enough to be leader of a country, it is that the job demands a certain type of person.
So what of Donald Trump? Is he just another angry white man? Yes, he is but I would say it is truer to say, Donald Trump’s election isn’t the result of a mafia-like conspiracy of the angry white male, and rather it is the logical conclusion, and possibly the end product, of 1980s ‘Greed is Good’ society.
Forget the fact he is male. Forget the fact he is a Republican because he wasn’t for years. Forget the fact he is white. He cannot help the fact he was born white, just as Cameron couldn’t help being sent to public school. To attack them for these things is to miss the point.
The thing that really jars with Donald Trump is that people think he is a SUCCESS. Why? He boasts about it. He screams about it. He tweets about it. He is rich. There is no denying this. He is very very rich and he believes in conspicuous consumption and displays of his wealth – gold elevators anyone? Like a petty dictator propped up by the West, he loves a house bathed in gold – dictator chic.
But, if we go back in time, these displays of wealth were often strictly controlled by those who led us. In the Satyricon, Petronius lambasts Nero by portraying excessive consumption in the character of Trimalchio. But ultimately, Trimalchio, the arriviste, is a failure. He doesn’t have the grounding to perform the job and to cover that, he shouts louder, flashes more of his wealth before his guests, and in his pomposity fails to notice the guests (true Romans, true citizens) are laughing at his pretensions. Ultimately, they run away laughing at how his excessive displays of wealth are a sign he isn’t a good leader.
This is not to say there isn’t a clear link between wealth and power. Look at how many of the UK parliament wen to public fee-paying school. Everyone is aware, rightly or wrongly, of the link between wealth and power. Like Victorian England, the wealthy were very clearly richer and therefore ‘more important’ than others, but they tried to hide a bit of this because of good taste. Big houses in England are often behind big hedges so the hoi polloi can’t see you.
In the 1980s, I remember my father rose to a position in his company where he was allowed a BMW as a company car. One of the ‘extras’ was to pay to not have the version of your car written on the back of the car. In theory, this allowed everyone in a company to have a 3-series BMW, but the top managers could have the all-singing, all-dancing version and the façade of equality was maintained.
A few weeks ago, Theresa May was photographed in leather trousers – the end of the world on social media and in the press. We know they were nearly £1000 and oh my god! A male politician wears a suit. FOR EVERYTHING. Sometimes without a tie! But most of us can’t tell at a glance if it is Savile Row or ‘Suits You’. The façade is maintained. Theresa May suffers in this respect because a woman doesn’t have the equivalent of the ubiquitous suit.
This is the way the West has, broadly speaking, maintained power for centuries. Ask anyone with a basic grasp of UK history and they will know that Charles II and George IV all spent tons of money on lavish parties. Nero and Elagabalus were similar in Rome but did they really spend less on parties than Augustus (deified). And have you seen the gowns Elizabeth I wore? They were not cheap but, along with many other factors, they weren’t thrust into the faces of the populus.
Then the 1980s happened. Exemplified by Gordon Gecko and Del-boy Trotter, suddenly conspicuous consumption is all the rage. You’ve worked hard for your cash so why can’t you show it off? That man living on the street just hasn’t got off his arse and that is why he hasn’t got a Ferrari. It is their own fault and there is no reason why I shouldn’t show off my success. The size of my Filofax really does matter.
Donald Trump exemplifies this. He is rich. His father made all the money and Donald has continued that trend. It is much easier to make piles of cash when you start off with piles of cash. One of Donald’s many many many business failures would have wiped out most people but he has the cushion of excessive wealth to break his fall. It also helps when you, presumably, don’t pay any tax.
I have no problem with him being rich. Good on him. It has zero effect on my life. I do, however, worry when he thinks being rich is a transferable skill. It isn’t. Politics isn’t like business and you get the feeling he is starting to see that. Because your wealth cushions you from failure in business doesn’t mean it will cushion you from failure in politics. Shouting at your minions and blaming them won’t help either. Politics is built on consensus and they is no I in consensus, only US – see what I did there? It’s like when people do that awful thing with Team.
At a time when the wealth gap between rich and poor is at its greatest in the US and much of the West, we’ll forget the rest of the world for the moment as that is generally what Trump’s supporters would like to do – whistles with fingers in their ears. Is it wise to have man who is so obviously super-rich highlighting to inequalities of life?
Donald Trump came to majority in the 1980s. In many ways, he exemplifies the culture of the 1980s. He is rich, he is flashy, he is, in every 1980s sense, a success. So why does he look like such a failure? Behind those piggy little eyes, there is a look of failure. His tweets, hilarious though they are because they are the ramblings of a senile toddler, are not really the actions of a man in control. They are not demonstrations of leadership, they are, each and every one of them, an admittance of his failure.
In the brash and garish world of reality TV, no one really cares whether you are a success. They want shouting and they want a weak form of gladiatorial sport.
‘You’re fired!’
‘Not really, I wasn’t even employed by you, I’m just no longer on this cheap to make television programme.’
Donald Trump inherited the money, he didn’t make the money. He is a fraud in that respect. It is reported, and I am too busy to check if this is true, that his inherited wealth was so great that, if he had just put it into a bank and taken interest, he would have more wealth than he does today. Now, this sounds like an Alt-fact to me. It is a great way to attack a man with so many business failures under his belt.
The American people elected him. Well a minority, but in the right places, voted for him. Whatever the idiocy of the system, it is the system and there is no point complaining about it now. No, a large percentage of US citizens were taken in by Donald Trump’s words and actions (and their rabid dislike of a Democrat woman called Clinton). To a percentage of those voters he must appear like a complete success. He is the living embodiment of 1980s success. His populist rise, carried on the shoulders of the downtrodden people, show the power of television and wealth.
But America is poor. Large parts of it are in a bad way. Those voters will see before long that conspicuous displays of wealth, shouting, bullying and declarations of intent are no substitute for substance. Every time he holds up the leather-effect wallet with his latest presidential decree, he looks more and more pathetic because it achieves nothing. Factors that define the world are bigger than one man, no matter how rich he is.
So, his coterie of followers look more and more hollow every day, Sean Spicer has the haunted look of a bullied man, and they will not be able to take this for long. Trump is an old man, he’s needed a holiday two weeks after he started the job! His wife signed on to be a trophy wife to a very rich man. She did not sign up to be First Lady with all the scrutiny that entails. The America people who voted for him will see that nothing is getting better and America isn’t Great (because what is the ‘great’ they are talking about and is it the ‘great’ Trump is talking about? It’s all rather ambiguous). As all those people step away from him, what is Trump left with? Nothing. He has failed his whole life to achieve anything meaningful and money won’t cushion this fall.
A percentage of people in America put their faith in wealth being a demonstration of success because that is what we’re been told for the last 30+ years but it isn’t. Substance is what success is made from and you have to be willing to be unheralded to be a real success. Trump wants to be lauded and told what a success he is, but he can’t achieve that.
It is perhaps too much to ask that we move away from the petty attacks on the wealthy by the liberal left, but perhaps the populus in general will start to look for substance in their leaders rather than a failed rich man who happens to have shouted a lot on television. Perhaps this might signal the end of the equation of success equalling wealth.
It is not hard to envisage Trump, just as Trimalchio at the end of his cena, left alone as his coterie abandon him. In the Satyricon, Trimalchio is left as a husk of a man – rich but empty. The trouble is, while Trimalchio was a big fish in a small sea, Trump is POTUS and that will cause a lot more damage and hurt a lot more people when he inevitably crumbles.