'He is vulgar, crass, lowbrow, and bourgeois', said Esta Gittleman about the President who kept defiling the image of Camelot with his arches, uber-tacky ballrooms, kitschy makeovers of the traditional, and turning the White House into a gross, plastic, tasteless monstrosity.
Esta was well past her prime - never an attractive woman, but in the Sixties when good looks were signs of elitism, Esta's wiry hair, sallow complexion, and oddly-arranged features were entry tickets to the radical Left.
Until you got used to it, Esta's face was hard to look at. Everything was so off-kilter that your eyes could not take in the whole and saw only a nose that was somehow not aligned with her mouth, an eye that wandered right, and a jaw not quite prognathous but suggestive of it and which when still gave her an Easter Island look but when in motion, a strange, misshapen character of its own.
As much as she and her colleagues in the East Village were loathe to admit it, there was something alluring and desirable about Camelot, the White House of John Kennedy, an appeal which lasted long after the young president's assassination and maintained a hold on Esta's generation.
Camelot was far from the rancid basements and lumpenproletariat of Avenue A, far from Prince Jack and Princess Jackie surrounded by the glitterati of Washington, hosts to the best and the brightest, the epicenter of high culture, good taste, and marvelous manners.
Of course Esta said she hated everything about Camelot, how it symbolized the worst American instincts of class, privilege, and entitlement; but as she looked around and saw only crummy looks and dopier, stoned grins, she admitted her desire for the top, not the bottom - and make no bones about it, this existence was nowhere, and despite its sloganeering and counterculture self-assuredness, it was going nowhere.
But the die had been cast. As she looked in the mirror - which she never did because it was a sign of bourgeois vanity - she was taken aback. She was indeed ugly, a twenty-five year old fright.
She ran her fingers through her hair, but the wiry thatch was permanently frazzled, unkept, and a tangled mess. She had always wanted straight, blonde, silken hair and hated her parents for having given her misshapen Mediterranean looks and not the American Dream; and now, looking in the mirror, she saw what the few years since that hopeful adolescence had done. She turned her eyes away and started to cry.
Esta grew up of course, learned to live with the bad hand she was dealt and learned how to trace her very ethnic, plebian looks to her advantage. She became a star in the progressive firmament. She had dismissed her girlish fantasies of Prince Charming, a boudoir, and life in a castle, forgotten Camelot, and turned her former envy into political fodder.
She became a progressive's progressive - a woman devoutly obedient to the canon, a warrior in the cause of social justice, and the reform of everything privileged, endowed, and inherited.
She was surprised at the level and intensity of her hatred for Donald Trump, a bourgeois bottom-dwelling bombastic fool. Although an extension of the halcyon Biden years - a cabinet and White House filled with people of color, of alternate sexuality and full figures - might not be in the cards, and any overblown childish Camelot fantasy was long gone, this travesty...this absurd, ungainly, fat fool of the worst of American culture was unexpected.
She would have welcomed a continuation of the Biden years and even tolerated a channeling or incarnation of Kennedy's best and brightest; but this? This expression of the very worst that America had to offer - tacky, sequined, tinseled, big titted and absurdly over-made up, vainglorious in its embrace of the most god-awful American excesses - was too much.
She - and the Left - hated Donald Trump not for his gestapo ICE troops, his relegation of gay and lesbian Americans, his downright racism and crony capitalism, and his military adventurism but for who he was. They couldn't stand the fact that he was one of the masses that they hated and saw as ignorant obstacles to social progress. He was a fake as they were.
She abhorred his oversized yachts, mansions, and hotels. She hated his beauty queens and arm candy. She hated this classless, culturally clueless monstrosity.
It was class and culture that mattered, nothing more. A President without such aggressively bourgeois taste with the same political agenda would have been objected to, fought, and countered but never hated or dismissed like Trump. The Left hated him for his defiant embrace of class in what they hoped would be a classless society. Not only that, his class was the worst imaginable.
Esta felt outraged and insulted by each and every gross obtuseness of the man. It was bad enough that he built the White House ballroom, a Rococo monstrosity, but when came the kitschy makeover of the Kennedy Center, followed by the victory arch and the field of heroes, she could only ask, 'What next from this clown?'
Never before had such virulent ad hominem hatred for a sitting president been seen. The inchoate rage, the apoplectic misery, the absolute incontinence of hatred is new even for the smarmy affair that American politics has always been. Even Richard Nixon, the disgraced President who lied and cheated for political advantage and was forced to resign, never generated such visceral, blind hatred.
LBJ withdrew from politics rather than face the excoriating rage of the American people. 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today', shouted thousands in front of the White House demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Yet, his Great Society social reform and signing of the Civil Rights bill were hailed as milestones of progressive politics.
Trump gets no credit, no acknowledgment for any of his programs and policies. Opponents simply cannot get past the all-consuming virulence of their personal hatred.
Yet, no President has been as American as Donald Trump. No one has embodied the lowbrow culture of the bayou - the glitz and sequined glamour of Las Vegas and the treacly romantic vision of Hollywood, the marvelous creation of European Jews, Goldwyn and Mayer who wanted to reflect a country as far from the European shtetl and ghetto as they could imagine. They helped consolidate this unrealistic, dreamy image of an America which never existed nor would ever exist.
Donald Trump has never hidden his Americanism - not his stars-and-stripes patriotism but his love of yachts, mansions, and arm candy. He is as vulgar as a pipe fitter, as dippy as a soap opera addicted housewife, as obsessed with not just money but a show of wealth.
He wants - and has - what we want. Not Pablo Casals and Robert Frost but Merle Travis and Taylor Swift. Camelot was a lace-curtain Irish fantasy, that of the son of a bootlegger and bar fighter. Trump is like Kennedy in his oversized imagination, just different in the dreams he creates.
Americans loved Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, two Edwardian period pieces about the English upper classes and their downstairs maids. A series about class and democracy but loved for its royalty - and such is the contradictory tale of American culture. We gave up Camelot for Donald Trump and are more American for it.
Esta never got over her bilious hatred for Trump and finally lost her hold - on her marriage, her community, on reality itself. Hate, as social psychologist Brent Underwood has noted, is far more powerful and all-consuming than love; and once it takes hold it can only grow, metastasize and eventually destroy the host.
Everything went by the wayside - Esta’s progressivism nurtured since a young women in the basements of the East Village and the cafes of Bleecker Street, he passion for social reform, her commitment to the black man...everything gone with the wind, and all that was left was a crochety old lady.
Americans are proud of saying that they live in a society without class, unlike the British, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Despite all the fol-de-rol about race, gender, and ethnicity, it is class which still defines us; and we are shamelessly bourgeois, graspy, and romantic about our absurdly impossible dreams.
Esta was a victim of class. Had the President been anything but a lowbrow buffoon she might have been less addled and more focused; but such is politics and such is the tenure of Donald Trump and his Second Coming.
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