Donald Trump: Action Hero
Donald Trump has successfully, and probably unintentionally, transformed himself into a comic-book character. That, I think, is the secret of his appeal, and his remarkable success, and really says more about us than about him.
Comic Book Characters Don’t Ask Questions
I’m nobody’s idea of a comic-book nerd. I’m too old, and of the generation that always thought of comics not as graphic novels but more as time-passing entertainment for idiots. You can get as nostalgic as you want, but really, something like Archie Comics, or even most of the old-timey superhero stuff was really dumb. I mean, dumb to the point that it was hard to understand or imagine who actually liked this stuff.
There had always been Superman television shows and movies, of course. At some point, someone got the bright idea of ferreting through the other action heroes to see if there were additional characters who might work in movies. Boy, were there. The genre exploded. Total ticket sales for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man, Wolverine, X-Men, the Avengers and so on) just crossed $30 BILLION. And that’s just one of several movie franchises out there based on comic books.
I have to admit – actually, I don’t have to, but I’m going to – that I enjoy these movies, too. There’s something satisfying about movies featuring one-dimensional characters who aren’t mired in the same limitations and down-to-earth problems that ordinary humans deal with.
Comic-book characters are simplistic expressions of emotions or need, presented as human beings. Gods have always served the same function – they don’t agonize, or equivocate. They just are, and do, and they stand for things inside us that we need to express. There’s a great line about this in the film Hancock: “Gods, angels, different cultures call us by different names Now all of a sudden it’s superheroes.”
Tony Stark doesn’t sit in his living room at night wondering why Pepper Potts doesn’t find him as compelling as she used to. Deadpool doesn’t get bogged down in being just plain tired. The Hulk, my favorite, doesn’t not know what to do. He just gets angry. Ambiguity, doubt, genuine shades of grey are not part of the superhero world.
When Things Get Scary
I think this is kind of a reflection of the times. When things in the real world are frightening, or out of control, or seem to be filled with forces that are powerful and inhuman and unstoppable, people have always taken emotional refuge in one-dimensional, sometimes ridiculous, entertainment that allows audiences to vicariously escape. During the Depression, for example, there were all kinds of crazy comedies, or big Busby Berkeley musical movies. They were dumb beyond belief, but they let you immerse yourself in a simple, happy pretend world with the same kind of one-dimensional characters.
This is exactly what Donald Trump has done.
First, just think of Trump’s public persona. The apex of this, of course, is the imagery that emerged during and immediately after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. There is Trump, lying on the floor, face down, then there is Trump, on his feet, blood streaked on his face, raising a clenched fist and defiantly telling the audience to “fight”. That, people, is straight out of a comic book. It’s a kind of impressive thing to do seconds after coming very close to getting your head blown off. It’s also brilliantly manipulative. The man knows what he’s doing.
More action hero behavior: Trump wears the exact same thing every day, like a uniform – white shirt, red tie, blue suit. This reminds me of the scene in Last Action Hero when Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing Jack Slater, a … well, you know what he is, opens his closet to get dressed and it contains dozens of the same outfit – jeans, red t-shirt, leather jacket, including his gun.
Trump flies around in his own special giant plane, with his name on the side, straight out of the Avengers. He’s a billionaire. His wife is a mysterious, beautiful Eastern European woman nobody knows much about. He actually sells trading cards of himself, drawn as various kinds of superhero. His home is in a golden skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, with his name, again, on the side. All of this, as well as dozens of other examples, are straight out of a comic book.
His policies are equally one-dimensional. They’re like something out of comic books. We will build a giant wall. We will send out our special soldiers and deport everyone. We will become the biggest exporter of energy in the world. And so on. Simple, overwhelming, one-dimensional answers.
Whatever you happen to think of his policies, or him, the man has been unbelievably effective. Remember that he won the Presidency from Hillary Clinton in 2016 with one-third the funding, no lead time, no real organization and, of course, no political experience. He is one of the most widely despised figures in our culture these days. I have never seen a political figure, including Nixon, take the beating in the media and on social media that Donald Trump has. And he just keeps coming. I lived in New York City in the 1980s, and the media mercilessly mocked him back then. They haven’t stopped.
All of this feeds into the comic-book approach as well, which is tinged with a fair amount of paranoia at this stage. He has packaged himself as the lone defender of us all, valiantly battling the forces of darkness, striving to save the world. Remember that line from his campaign, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be in the way.” Batman could have said that. George Bush, who was an actual war hero, never would, even if it were true.
One of the most interesting features of comic books is that they require a kind of suspension of common sense. For one-dimensional characters to work, the reader has to agree to overlook a lot of obvious questions, plot holes and details, and just buy into the character’s fundamental superiority.
For instance, Superman always has a girlfriend. How the hell would that actually work? How do you, in the real world we collectively inhabit, build a relationship with someone who can, for instance, throw railroad cars around when he gets upset. How do you fight? Have sex? Buy groceries? Trump’s base, I think, has adopted a similarly logic-free embrace of the idea that he doesn’t obey the same rules as everyone else, and doesn’t need to.
Who He Is, Not What He Does
If you look at the polls, something very interesting emerges. Here’s the 538 Project, which is kind of a mashup of all the political polls out there, and to my mind, one of the most unbiased and reliable. According to them, Trump’s popularity numbers looked like this during his time in office:
Basically, shortly after he was elected, they settled in at around 42%, and compared to other Presidents, hovered around that number for his entire presidency. Compare the stability of this number to the popularity of any other President in the last hundred years. Every single one, going back to Truman, has had big swings in popularity, depending on what’s going on in the world. Even Eisenhower, that symbol of boring Fifties stability, had ups and downs. Not Trump.
What this tells me is that there is a solid, granite-hard core of Trump supporters who don’t care what he says or does, or what’s going on in the world. They identify with him, they support him, maybe they want to be like him. You know, hot wife and giant plane and all. Comic book. They connect with the character, and don’t think much about what he actually does.
This is new, in degree if not in kind. Back in the day, Presidents took enormous pains to present themselves as exceptionally serious adults. Intellectuals, even. These guys were responsible, grounded, reliable, and essentially highly polished versions of us. When they did step out of character, it was with some minor gesture or symbol that accented, but didn’t change, their basic sobriety. Bill Clinton plays the saxophone with sunglasses on. Barak Obama plays basketball with his staff. Even poor old Joe Biden has aviator sunglasses, and that’s as far as they swing out.
Trump, our comic-book hero, doesn’t observe any of these principles. Over and over and over, he’s the master of the big, dumb gesture, the exaggerated claims and statements that may be true or may not be. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t even have to make sense – it still doesn’t matter. I listened to about ten minutes of an interview with him and was struck, and bothered, by how he just seemed to say random shit that had no connection with the actual question. I mean, at least someone like Gerald Ford, slow as he was, made sense. Not Trump.
And then there’s Melania. I am fascinated by her. She’s the first First Lady in American history to have had plastic surgery, to be photographed naked, and to play no real part at all in her husband’s Presidency. The whole role of the First Lady as an icon of boring respectability was blown out of the water by Melania.
Her heavily-accented English makes listening to her speeches painful. She’s heartbreakingly beautiful, which may be due to having work done. That doesn’t matter either. On more than one occasion, she’s behaved in public as if she hates her husband, which is understandable. She’s not Eleanor Roosevelt, or Laura Bush or hell, even Pat Nixon. She’s a symbol. She’s a decoration. She’s a comic-book ornament for a comic-book President. She’s an operative. She’s a gun moll. She’s a trophy wife. She’s a completely different First Lady.
And she’s also, one imagines, absolutely stone-cold, impenetrable, and all about a kind of brutalist beauty and self-possession that, in a weird way, dovetails beautifully with Donald Trump’s comic-book persona. I imagine a Swiss bank account with $50 million in it on the condition that she cooperates. She makes Jackie Kennedy look like Laura Ingalls Wilder in that way.
Which leads us, of course, to the final question, which is, “What the hell is going on?” How did we, as a culture, end up electing as President someone who not only has solid gold bathroom fixtures, but finds it necessary to tell everyone about it?
I, of Course, Blame The Internet
My theory: the Internet. Technology is always a double-edged sword, and the change that has happened in the last generation has been overwhelming, unlike anything human beings have ever experienced. We are not wired for this, or prepared for it. The price tag that comes with the ability to order stuff on Amazon has been a delamination of our society that we are, as a species, not equipped to handle. The Internet, and social media, are an evolution-shifting change in our environment. By the way, twenty-five years ago I was part of a startup that made all this possible, and looking back, I’m struck by how naïve we were.
People used to work in offices or factories, alongside other people. Not anymore. If you wanted to express an opinion, you had to express it face-to-face, or in a medium that was moderated, and lasting, and considered. Not anymore. And finally, if you wanted to become famous, it took some time, and some talent. Not anymore. A young blonde girl in a cowboy hat pithily explaining her blowjob technique now becomes famous overnight.
And most of all, the Internet, and mobile phones, insulate us from consequences. You can say the most vile, stupid, hateful things to a complete stranger, and not have to deal with them, or even know who they are. You can attack people, and not see them as people. Nuance is long, long gone. I have a bad habit of arguing with people online, and I’ve learned that all of us who engage in this dumb game tend to say the same things over and over and over. Nobody really knows, in detail, anything about tax policy, but they will go to war over the paper-thin concept that the rich (whoever they are) don’t pay their fair share (whatever that is).
Which brings me to my final point. Trump is a comic-book character. It’s been unbelievably effective. And maybe, American politics has been like this all along, and he’s simply, finally, undeniably demonstrating it to us. As I think back on the Presidents who have been elected in the past century, a lot of them made it because they packaged and sold similarly simplistic personas.
Eisenhower: war hero. Obama: reasonable, non-angry black guy who didn’t scare white people. Reagan: good-looking, charming, traditional guy from California. I mean, “Morning in America” isn’t that far from MAGA. And so on.
And of course, the kings of this were the Kennedys. The whole Camelot brand was absolutely amazing and utter bullshit, but the American people ate it up like a hungry dog presented with a bowl of Alpo. In fact, the Kennedy family was funded by a patriarch who was a brutal, ruthless capitalist; the good-looking sons were champion skirt-chasers who had no problem boinking young girls; and JFK himself was not an especially competent leader. Yet, I personally know now-elderly women who were utterly transfixed by his “charisma” and did not wash the hand he shook for days after meeting him. For them, it was like meeting a movie star.
Or a comic-book character. The bottom line with Trump, I think, is that he’s not doing anything new or different than many of his predecessors. He’s simply doing it much more intensely, and with fewer guardrails, and a lot of us are just fine with that. People get the leaders they deserve, after all, and perhaps we deserve this. Perhaps we brought this on ourselves. Perhaps this is who, now, we really are.
Wonderful analysis. Love the observation that the Dems have benefitted from their own version of this phenomena