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Volgens George Blaustein, een Amerikaan in Nederland, is Trump een Europese Frankenstein: een samengesteld pakket nare Europese trekjes. Het enige écht Amerikaanse aan The Donald is zijn (bar slechte) stand-up comedy. (Pas op: Engels!)
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The rise of Donald Trump represents the Europeanization of American politics. I teach American Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and students sometimes ask for my assessment of the elections. If I detect in their question an assumption that Donald Trump is uniquely or ridiculously American, I give them this answer: he is, but not in the way they think.
I am not the first to note the affinities between Trump’s &#8216;America First&#8217; xenophobia and the ethnic nationalism of Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, or Nigel Farage (Trump supporters all). They are of the same species of illiberal democracy (we’ve come to call it ‘populism’). Trump’s ethnic nationalism is not new to the U.S.: it has long been a current of American politics. But it has never been espoused so baldly by a modern party presidential nominee. The American two-party system, for all its weaknesses, has tended to neutralize or absorb it on the national level.
What I’m talking about goes beyond those straightforward affinities. Trump represents a Europeanization of style as well as content. Look how eagerly he embraces European stereotypes: he brags Berlusconianly about virility. He wears Italian suits and French cuffs (though his own line of clothing is produced in China). He does not change into common-man clothes the way presidential candidates usually do in, say, Iowa or Wisconsin (my home state). To walk into Trump’s apartment in Manhattan is to be teleported to the Versailles of Louis XIV, or at least some deranged reproduction of it. We are so quick to insult Trump’s hair that we have failed to see it for what it is: an aristocratic wig from 18th-century France, rescued from destruction in the Reign of Terror, that’s been held in safe-keeping, at great risk to its protectors, through the revolutions and counterrevolutions of the 19th century. After all the history that hair has seen, it’s a miracle it looks as good as it does.
<q class="pull-right">Donald Trump is half pseudo-fascist, and half pseudo-aristocrat. He is not a businessman.</q>
Donald Trump is half pseudo-fascist, and half pseudo-aristocrat. He is not a businessman: he inherited a fortune built on rent, the aristocrat’s traditional source of income, and he parlayed it into a brand that accrues some strange, postmodern, reality-show version of rent. He imagines this brand to be a dynasty rather than an embarrassment, and he will pass it on to his children with minimal tax burden.
It is a grand irony of this election that this European Frankenstein of a candidate would emerge out of the Republican Party’s collapse. For several generations, the party congratulated itself on its Americanness, its moralism, and its non-Europeanness. Yet now it has produced, at long last, a presidential candidate who would flaunt a mistress in the French style.
We are thus left with the question: what, if anything, is American about Trump? Racism, xenophobia, attacks on the press, authoritarian fantasies – these are not unique to the United States. I think Trump’s Americanism lies in his closeness to the emphatically American tradition of standup comedy.
<q class="pull-left">I think Trump’s Americanism lies in his closeness to the emphatically American tradition of standup comedy.</q>
Watch him in his rallies, and you see it immediately in the voice and the gestures. He’s like an old Borscht-belt comedian, performing his petty, plaintive exasperation on stage. The glue that holds the routines together is the same as an old comedian’s mannerisms between bits: I gotta tell you, folks…; what are you gonna do?; etc. He seems often like an insult-comic in the classic mold, as if Don Rickles courted the alt-right and wasn’t funny. Or as if the eye-rolling Rodney Dangerfield, who claimed to get no respect, was misogynistic to his very core. Or Trump’s comedic shtick is more contemporary: a toxic version of the standup comedy that our era holds in such high regard. We’ve come to applaud comedians as modern truth-tellers, saying what we’re all thinking. And modern comedy relies on a certain intimacy with the performer. Comedians reveal to us their charmingly broken psyches, their narcissism, their foibles. They filter experience through that psyche and communicate it to us as wisdom.
By all these standards, Trump is a comedian – but a horrifying comedian. He tells only lies. He is as narcissistic in real life as standup comedians only pretend to be. His psyche is broken, but charmless.