Essays in Idleness

My curmudgeonly instinct is to dash to the support of the Republican Establishment. This would be easier to find if anyone would admit to belonging. More, I think, advertise their membership in the KKK. I am used to being a minority of one; used to supporting defunct causes. But the Republican Establishment is supposed to have living members, so where are they?

By a course of reasoning, I guessed that everyone who thinks Trump is “vulgar” must secretly participate. I have told gentle reader that I share this view, and thus await my invitation to a Country Club. Except, further inquiry reveals that entry is debarred to those previously blackballed by the Tea Party, who seem to have eaten all the Grand Old Partiers during the last couple of election cycles. This makes them (on Idi Amin premisses) the Establishment today. That is certainly what poor Mr Rubio, present à l’heure du goûter short years ago, discovered this time around. Yesterday’s disestablishmentarian somehow got pushed in, and now carries the mark of Cain forever.

My reasons for thinking “Little Donnie” a vulgar man are, however, not quite aligned. I hardly objected on this ground to (for instance) his proposal that supporters punch hecklers in the face (and he would pay their lawyers’ fees). Rhetorical thuggery of this sort can be “common,” but among the elegant and refined we have also a long history of chivalry and duelling. The candidate was not being vulgar in this case, rather girlish and fairy: he should have offered to punch them himself (and pay his own frigging law bills).

To me, skyscrapers are vulgar. Anything called a Trump Tower is in execrable taste. I have toured with Melania (via Fox News) the interior of the sprawling apartment in Manhattan, and it is what I call “Louis XXXIInd.” The furnishings appal me. The mansion in Palm Springs is probably worse. I haven’t read Trump’s various memoirs, but from the bits I’ve seen quoted — boasting of his sexual conquests — I can see he is no gentleman. That the three layers of his family speak well of him does not surprise me: his sons are clones, and the rest must be in fear of his lawyers.

His manner of public speaking clinches my argument: he says no coherent thing. Not one sentence follows from another, even when, by accident, they parse. Such a spray of non sequiturs (non sequuntur?) shows he nowhere received an elementary education. Granted, other politicians do that, too, but none with such ebullience. He presents no policies beyond “win, win, win,” but more to the point, no principles. (I am not counting “deport eleven million people” as a policy.)

Is he another Hitler? Of course not. Hitler’s mother wasn’t Scotch. And he is more Berlusconi than Mussolini. Perhaps, indeed, the American electorate is on to something the Italians learnt, by trial and error. If you elect, consistently, as Americans are now doing, the biggest jerk in sight, eventually the bureaucracy becomes dysfunctional, and people can get on with their lives.

On the liberal principle, of blaming the victim, Trump is held responsible for organized leftist attempts to foment violence at his rallies. I’ll have none of that: they’d be there even if the cissy hadn’t told others to punch them. If he wins the general election, or alternatively if he loses, there may be riots across the USA. But these won’t be his fault. I have no sympathy with rioters, paid or unpaid: spare the lathi and spoil the child. True, Trump has contributed to the decline in public morals, but he is only one clump of snow in the vast avalanche of Western Civ, beyond cause or symptom.

A correspondent, who signs himself Denis the Carthusian (from somewhere in Wisconsin, I think), has considered the matter deeply. He has a scheme to improve upon the Italian strategy, that would contain the violence before it spreads through the streets:

“My proposal for ‘electing’ a president is to have the various candidates duel with pistols. Last man (or woman) standing wins. We could use the same method for senators, congressmen, governors, too. … Just think how much better off a country would be with so many less politicians; how much money would be saved, rather than wasted on campaigning; how few would even step forward.”