Biden’s Dismal, Sorrowful Vision Of America - Glitz, Glamour, And High Heels Will Always Win

Attending a Biden offering is like listening to a sermon by the Reverend Bark Phillips of the Westerly First Methodist Church, Reformed - penitential, secularly sacramental, uninspiring, dutiful, and thuddingly boring.  The black man, etc. etc.; the climate, women sharing America’s ill-gotten treasure, ad infinitum, ad nauseam until every last one of the congregation especially and even those in the front pews nod off to another of Pastor Phillips’s badgering notions about doing the right thing.  

Phillips, an ordained minister with political ambitions but left to feedbags and dry fodder while the President picked one black man after another as his spiritual advisor, the likes of the Reverend Al Sharpton who chased every racial ambulance that ever plied the streets of the inner city, or Pastor Edmonds of Anacostia store front fame, chosen at six years old to preach the gospel in the ghetto to lost souls, prison inmates, single mothers, and crack ho’s while he, scion of white Methodist secular evangelism, counsel to the rich and powerful of K Street, was left on the curb.

Biden did in fact attend Sunday services once, escorted by his wife, aides, and the Secret Service into the place of honor – at the acoustical center of the church to better appreciate the music of the Julliard-trained choir, the spiritual center as well, focal point for the Reverend Phillips as he honed his message and lasered it to the congregation.  

Phillips had debated long and hard over the sermon to be delivered that Sunday – a sermon which had to touch just the right chords, a blend of Biblical entreaty and practical progressivism – but because of the bewildering diversity of priorities in the Biden White House, he decided on a big tent approach. He would talk of general reform, progress, and the inevitable progressive Utopia.

Everyone in the congregation looked snappy and enthusiastic on the day of the President’s attendance.  There were chrysanthemums and zinnias in the planters, a hint of lilac and lily in the wings, and light music from a Telemann ode played on the organ as a processional as the President made his way to his seat.  A bit too Catholic, Pastor Phillips admitted, but the President was a Catholic after all despite his evangelical posture in recent days.

The event went well, the President nodded at the right moments, and the congregation felt honored if not blessed by his presence.  God – if there was one (the First Methodist Church, while nowhere near Unitarian secularism, was as close to it as a mainstream Protestant denomination could come while still belonging to the confederation) – would be pleased at this blend of traditional belief and modern utopianism.

Not far from Phillips’s church, Donald Trump was holding a campaign rally and it was a doozy.  Trump, in the early stages of his re-election bid, had pulled out all the stops for this extravaganza in rural Maryland, a Republican redoubt amidst liberal clamor for social reform – an electoral district still adherent to Christian, traditional, conservative values.  

Although the district was small and relatively insignificant to the final 2024 outcome, it was a perfect staging point for the former President.  It was but a hop, skip, and a jump from the White House, and the cheers of support would be heard there from the little town in the Shenandoah.

The former President was at his best – confident, hellacious, bullyingly politically incorrect, a one-man vaudeville show worthy of the big time.  His show was as perfectly orchestrated and magnificently staged as anything Rihanna, Beyoncé, or Lady Gaga ever produced at the Super Bowl.  It was a combination of Las Vegas runway glitz, New York glamour, and Hollywood fantasy.  Music, décolleté, high-stepping, and that particular brand of American bourgeois elegance that Trump understood and espoused so well. 

While Biden and his claques were somberly predicting the end of the world, a dismal, climatic failure, a social dysfunction never before witnessed, Trump was at his vaudevillian, Barnum & Bailey best.  The show was covered by news agencies as far afield as All India Radio and Agence France Presse, media outlets who knew a political phenomenon when they saw it.

MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and The Nation covered the event only cynically – the boobs, the unwashed, the insignificant, the irrelevant had been commandeered into the big revival tent of Trump evangelism – but there was no dismissing its importance.  The cheering, applauding, laughing crowd was a sign of the times; and the macho, brilliantly choreographed, master of ceremonies, The Donald, was not to be denied.

The nodding support for Joe Biden is tepid, unenthusiastic, reticent compared to that for Trump.  It isn’t simply a matter of one man, Trump, in his political, social, and personal prime, vs an old, doddering, incontinent man but a contrast of Americas.  It is Trump who is the real, familiar, legitimate American; for who among us does not want his yachts, model wife, arm candy, and Mar-el-Lago?  Who prefers the dowdy, basement Catechism of the Biden administration to the glorious, long-legged, sequined, starlit groupies of the former President?  

Trump is an American President whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of inner-America who want what they can’t have – a high-bourgeois, cotton candy,  life in St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls.

The political divide in America is not about political philosophy but culture.  While conservatives reject the historical revisionism of the Left, their presumptive claims to moral superiority, and value practical, longstanding, foundational values, their support of Donald Trump has less to do with Constitutional principle than oversized, outrageous, Wild West leading men, corrals, and victory.

As much as progressives cannot understand how the former President’s supporters ignore his treasonous, treacherous, un-American derelictions and dalliances, Trump supporters do indeed.  A steady diet of afternoon soap operas, prime time faux drama, sports extravaganzas, and rock superstardom can only produce solid citizens – American citizens, not Parisian intellectuals, German Goethe aficionados, or Deconstructionist heroes.  Trump is the first real American president, while Joe Biden is only a sorrowful, historically irrelevant political groupie and has been since his early days in Delaware.

‘A sorry state of affairs’, said the decommissioned host of a CNN morning show, a far more temperate appraisal than that of The View, a gaggle of feminist women whose meme is derogation – Trump is nothing less than evil, they say, and Biden is a latter day Christ, an incarnation for today.

Few Americans watch either one to the chagrin of progressives who have staked their reputations and their lives on the progressive vision.  America is a circus, vaudeville, Las Vegas runway, Hollywood soundstage place, and nothing will change it – not black, brown and yellow immigration, not hectoring from the pulpit, nor preaching by the likes of Al Sharpton,

Trump will win again in 2024 because of all this – a popular disgust with elitist cant and sanctimony and an end to the hectoring, preachy, depressing notions of America The Worst.  Trump is cut from the same cloth as Ronald Reagan, he of the Shining City on a Hill patriotism, but his suit of clothes is pop, new, and outrageous, just like America.