Indeed, the politics of Trump, far from being in any way new, are exactly the politics of Huck Finn’s drunken father in “Huckleberry Finn”: “Call this a govment! Just look at it and see what it’s like. They look down on us and they have no right to look down on us. The outsiders are swamping us, and the insiders are mocking us-this ideology alters its local color as circumstances change, but the essential core is always there. Populist nationalism is not an eruptive response to a new condition of 2015-it is a perennial ideological position, deeply rooted in the nature of modernity: a social class sees its perceived displacement as the result of a double conspiracy of outsiders and élitists. Trump is not offering anything that was not offered before him, often in identical language and with a similarly incoherent political program, by Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot, by George Wallace or Barry Goldwater, or way back when by Father Coughlin or Huey Long. Among embittered white men, Trump’s “base,” it has often held a share much larger than that. At any moment in our modern history, some form of populist nationalism has always held some significant share-whether five or ten per cent – of the population.
Trumpism is a permanent part of American life-in one form or another, with one voice or another blaring it out. Certainly, the notion that Trump’s rise, however long it lasts, is a product of a special skill, or circumstance, or a new national “mood,” is absurd. Some day someone may well write a kind of micro-history of that night, as historians now are wont to do, as a pivot in American life, both a triumph of Obama’s own particular and enveloping form of cool and as harbinger of-well, of what exactly? A lot depends on what happens next with the Donald and his followers. If he had not just embarked on so ugly an exercise in pure racism, one might almost have felt sorry for him. No head bobbing or hand-clapping or chin-shaking or sheepish grinning-he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him, not an ounce of the normal politician’s, or American regular guy’s “Hey, good one on me!” attitude-that thick-skinned cheerfulness that almost all American public people learn, however painfully, to cultivate. Seated a few tables away from us magazine scribes, Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him. What was really memorable about the event, though, was Trump’s response. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.” Obama explained that, when a team did not impress, Trump “didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf-you fired Gary Busey. For example-no, seriously-just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice”-there was laughter at the mention of the program’s name.
And that’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And-where are Biggie and Tupac?” The President went on, “We all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. Having referred to that act, he then gently but acutely mocked Trump’s Presidential ambitions: “I know that he’s taken some flack lately-no one is prouder to put this birth-certificate matter to rest than the Donald. Trump was then at the height of his unimaginably ugly marketing of birther fantasies, and, just days before, the state of Hawaii had, at the President’s request, released Obama’s long-form birth certificate in order to end, or try to end, the nonsense.
Not only, as we did not know then, was President Obama in the midst of the operation that would lead shortly to Osama bin Laden’s killing it was also the night when, despite that preoccupation, the President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again. Luckily for the philosopher in me, it turned out to be an auspicious night. Once, and only once, in 2011, have I attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., on the grounds, as I explained then, that Voltaire is said to have cited when he declined a second invitation to an orgy: once a philosopher, twice a pervert.
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