Donald Trump’s Magical Mystery Tour – A Welcome Relief From The Humdrum World Of Facts

The American Left has insisted that it has a hold on the truth, and that the President is the dissembler, the liar, the charlatan, the purveyor of untruths.  He has woven a quilt of lies, distortions, and confabulations and asked the American public to believe him - a master of deceit and legerdemain.  He is a con artist, a carny barker, a common huckster, a snake oil salesman.

Of course he is.  He is a vaudevillian, a huckster, a man of image and promise, a comic book hero, a spinner of yarns, a master of sea shanties and tall tales; and Americans like it that way. After suffering the penitential Biden years – the hectoring, the badgering, the moroseness and God-awful guilt, the Trump presidency is a welcome change.

Ironically it was always progressives who were the confabulators, insisting that men could become women, that reproduction was a technical affair, easily dispensed with and relegated to the broom closet, allowing for the full expression of the diversity of sexual choice.

The black man was not a former slave, chosen, marketed and sold for his brawn and reproductively, but the highest form of human evolution.  A sentient man of the rainforest and savannah, attuned to the environment, grouped in natural, tribal communities and not those confining, arbitrary social gulags enforced by white colonialists.  The world was everyone’s oyster, borders were artificial, racist, restrictive barriers to a universal New Age. Wealth was fungible, rightfully taken from those who earned it to those most in need. 

The Devil in D0stoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is a vaudevillian, and without him the world would be a deadly dull place, a predictable, sanctimonious slog.  With him there is magic, mystery, romance, and intrigue.  Who wants to hear tales of a faithful marriage, an honest politician, proper little boys and chaste little girls?

‘The truth is overrated’, says the Devil. ‘Just look around you, and tell me what you see.  Nothing is what it seems.  If the truth simply stared you in the face, all guesswork gone, all pomp and circumstance retired, every bit of image, fancy, and presentation put back in the dressing room wardrobe, you would invent your own stories.  Rumor and innuendo would take the place of fact, the invented would replace the real.  An oxymoronic circle – truth turned into a confabulation which becomes truth.  I am the one who makes that all possible’.

Liberals have asked Americans to look for the inner woman and dismiss the folly of beauty.  Commonality is to rule individuality – women are a protected class, all the same because of a universal inner worth.

Donald Trump has rejected this and all other confected notions out of hand and replaced virtue with sequins, jewelry, eyeliner, and high heels.  Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but absolute.  There is no difference between Venus de Milo and the Hollywood starlets of today.  Theirs is symmetry, perfection, the lines and contours of health, wealth, and stature.

This has always been the case, of course but the Trump illusion is that this historically iconic character – the essential, universal standards of female beauty – is an apotheosis, not something irrelevant and dismissible. Hollywood is not fictitious but high reality.  Image, timeless beauty, limitless appeal and seductiveness are its stock-in-trade.

Trump has created a vision of perfection– the perpetual classic beauty of history.  His reality dismisses the fictitious assumption that everyone is beautiful.

Bill Clinton said that he wanted his Cabinet to ‘look like America’ and opened the door to DEI – Diversity Equity Inclusivity –and by the time Biden was in office, that was the cultural ethos. There was no such thing as ugly, misshapen, disorderly – all were in the same welcoming basket.

Trump said that he wanted America to look like the most beautiful of its citizens. It was his version of Camelot, JFK’s own fantastical vision of the American presidency as a royal court. No one cares about the inner workings of government – the travails of governance – but what it looks like, what it reflects; and the parade of svelte, young, blonde, blue-eyed beauties parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue headed for the West Wing are the new reality.

So the Devil has had his due – fantasies masquerading as competing truths, all made possible by a friendly demon who only wants to brighten what Thomas Hobbes said was a short, ugly, brutish existence.

‘Fake news!’ shouts Trump to a CNN reporter whose questions reflect a progressive reality while the real truth is in the fable created by the President.  America is the greatest country in the world, hands down, and don’t you forget it, and with the spangles, fireworks, glitz and glitter of the 250^th Fourth of July the truth was writ large.

Politics has always been a smarmy affair with the truth only a febrile dream.  Politicians have lied through their teeth, inventing the most impossible cover-ups to their sexual dalliances, war records, political journeys; and since it takes two to tango, it has required a credulous audience; and the American public has been more gullible than most, perhaps because of our long history of snake oil salesmen, hucksters, and shell game tricksters.

Trump does not lie, he invents, and voila la difference. As a man of Hollywood and Las Vegas, he is a master at his trade.  Don’t lie, create. Use a kaleidoscopic lens, not a microscope.

America prefers Trump’s fantasies to those of the Left – who wouldn’t?  The progressive vision has been squeezed dry of beauty, romance, and fun.  A life in a grim, windowless basement with no exit.

Philosophers have always known that there is no such thing as absolute truth.  The moral precepts taught by Cato the Elder are not God-given and absolute, but simply a proven code of civic behavior.

Psychologists have long understood that all perception is subjective – eyewitnesses see what they want to see.  Durrell, Browning, and Kurosawa have all written about lives that had no reality but that ascribed to them by different viewers.

The truth is not all it is cracked up to be.

The contest between Left and Right is like the epic, fabulist battles between right and wrong, Siva vs Ravana in the Ramayana – pure fantasy, epic, metaphorical, and a romping good ride.

Who cares about the truth?  Who could possibly care in a world with such confabulation and storytelling?

The Trump years are satisfying for many reasons, but the most compelling is that of the impossibly diametrically opposed fabulist visions of the political combatants – magnificent, sometimes perverse, but always fodder for epic battles.

Trump will always be the master of ceremonies, the impresario, the producer- the first cause while progressives can only manage a freak show, interesting in and of itself, but nothing to match the bombast of Donald Trump.  When the Donald Show leaves town, we will all be disappointed.