Dealing with the Orange Devil
June 10 2020
There is no-one like Donald Trump. That’s something we can all agree on.
I was a hater. I watched Stephen Colbert every night, often for the sole reason of the catharsis his unparalleled mockery of Trump provided.
I’m not a hater now though. I’m still not sure what I feel about him, but it isn’t hate. And the world is a far better place now that I have rid myself of this hatred.
And I have some good news: you too can be free of this hate.
It starts with a very simple question: what if Donald Trump had been asked to run for President?
That is: it was not a chance for one last flex of his far from unsubstantial ego, consequences for America and the world be damned. It was not done on a personal whim, as a spiteful revenge to Obama calling him out and bruising this ego in front of the whole world at that fateful dinner. He was actually asked, begged even: and, if you can believe it, by someone or some people with good intentions.
Does this change how you see his Presidency?
This might not change in your eyes the terribleness of the job he is doing, and that’s fair enough. But if he was simply fulfilling the wish of a group of people who thought it was, at the time, the best thing for America and even the whole world, it may at least cause you to redirect some of the anger that has been focused on him.
If you want to understand why seemingly normal and intelligent people are suddenly throwing their support behind Trump, but you would rather not conclude that they were actually closet racists and misogynists this whole time, then I invite you to consider this possibility.
It may, like it did for me, force you to completely reassess your understanding of his Presidency.
I don’t know if Trump will win the election. I’m not sure if anyone does. But with the level of ardent support I see for him, and with Joe Biden as his increasingly feeble opposition, I’m ready for it.
So this is where you have a choice to make. Do you remain tied to the belief that the world simply isn’t unfair enough or your fellow humans horrible enough to reward this buffoon for another 4 years? That the polls will be right this time, even though they weren’t last time.
Or do you face an increasingly possible reality that Donald Trump as President will continue to be our reality, and work out how to negotiate it without resorting to utter despair.
Just to be clear, this is not an article to defend every and all of the numerous complaints made against President Donald J. Trump. It is not to argue that he has been a perfect President, that he is anything close to a perfect person, that his legacy will be seen as approaching perfect.
But perfect is besides the point: we have, thanks to his predecessor, been conditioned into an almost entirely fake perception of what it means to be a perfect President. Take this from someone with an Obama portrait now hiding under their bed.
I’m here to argue that operating at this level of awareness and discussion about who Donald Trump is and how he will be looked back on by history is missing the point.
Now, I’m not generally one for misplaced or irrational optimism (see any of my articles about music for evidence). But nonetheless, optimism in the goodness of the world is main reason I believe that Trump was actually asked to run for President by a group — let’s call them ‘white hats’ — who wanted to save America from a threat that lay within it. They decided that Trump, not in spite of his flaws perhaps but because of them, was the only man who could get the job done.
There are people who have adopted this understand of the greater role that Trump is playing — one that operates beyond himself — but who will defend him almost in his totality. To find an alternative explanations for his lies, for his boorishness, for his frequent questionable policy decisions.
I don’t agree with this, because I think the only way to understand Donald Trump and his role is as a profoundly flawed human.
But, that’s also not the point. And not just because, if we go full emo, we are all profoundly flawed human beings as well. We need to look deeper than that.
We need to understand what these ‘white hats’ are telling us that Trump is saving us from. What they say was actually at stake in the 2016 election: the bringing down of a group of sociopaths who have been controlling the world and manipulating its citizens for decades — causing untold amounts of suffering, pain and misery to humanity. And this is the kicker: these people at the same time had us convinced that they were the ones who would make things better.
This is not an agreeable theory for most people, obviously. It’s up to each person to investigate it for themselves. But I know this for sure: if you identify as progressive to any extent, then Hillary, Biden at al. are not on your side, and neither are the majority of the other people who make up the Democratic establishment (yeh, even Obama).
But this is also not a left or right thing. The Republican establishment are essentially just as bad, it just happens to be the Party where Trump was able to make a Presidential run within (watch this Letterman video if you don’t think Liberals used to be behind Trump).
This is, if you are really going to embrace this theory in its entirety, a good versus evil thing. It is, as Trump made clear to the whole world when he stood in front of that church, Biblical.
If you need a tangible archetype to box Trump into, maybe it can be this: as the devil we need. We didn’t deserve a good guy: someone who was, in the conventional understanding of the word, ‘good’. Why couldn’t he be attractive, articulate, composed, not orange? It would have been so much easier. Well, it wasn’t supposed to be easy.
Firstly, fundamentally, the person we needed would have to be able fulfil his purpose. He needed to be famous. And rich. And unnaturally self assured and shameless. Those were essential preconditions to win the Presidency from outside of the political system, which limits the pool of people that could have taken on the task.
But the fact is that we, as a society, have decided to elevate someone of Trump’s character into this position. It’s our fault that Donald Trump was the only person suitable to fill these shoes.
But Trump isn’t just playing a societal function. He is a test to each and everyone of us, and the framework within which we understand the human condition.
Trump is forcing a change to the constructs that we use to comprehend an individual in their full and chaotic complexity. We know people are complex — every person — but Trump is not a normal person. To be honest, I can’t see how anyone else in the world really comes close to him at the moment. Yet despite this, many people still employ sweeping generalizations in order to come to terms with Trump: they automatically assume everything he does is stupid and thoughtless, or they automatically assume everything he does is part of some genius master plan.
We too often give in to the most convenient explanation. And this is why we have gotten here, by letting convenience overtake reality. Trump wasn’t just chosen to challenge the establishment: he was sent to challenge us and our own established way of thinking that enabled us to give up control of ourselves to those who want to control us, mainly because it was convenient.
Trump was the devil, the good guy in disguise, that was necessary. He is that same patriarchal archetype we see throughout the Bible: the profoundly flawed man who God seems to choose again and again to move forward the plan of the Divine.
Or, if it is too much of a stretch to even see him as a good guy, perhaps this one works better: it is somewhat akin to choosing between a Mob Boss and a serial killer. If both have a chance of killing you, at least go with the one who is prepared to show his hand and will look after his family.
While I do subscribe to the theory that Donald Trump was asked to run for President, I can’t know Trump’s true motivations for taking it on. But his decision to do so is not one to be taken lightly.
Maybe he was happy for the chance to go on an extended ego trip on the world stage, and had been longing for this opportunity his whole life. Maybe the fact that it could align with bringing down ‘the Cabal’ was just a happy coincidence.
Or, maybe he genuinely didn’t want to be President, and he was instead convinced to run — and then self-finance this run — due to the seriousness of what was at stake.
Maybe — and this is where I will probably really lose people — he actually committed a selfless act to take on this role that he knew would expose his personality flaws to the world, that he knew would show him to be out of his depth, would make him the mockery of at least half of the population, and would make him responsible for the consequences of actions it really shouldn’t be left to him to be making.
While even presenting this perspective may seem like a shocking act of gas-lighting, it needs to be at least entertained if one is to understand why many people do not just tolerate Trump, but have an otherwise inexplicably profound and sincere admiration for him.
I wrote elsewhere that grappling honestly with conspiracy theories is the greatest test we have of our personal virtues, none more so than humility. Maybe, for the Trump hater, this theory is the ultimate test: if we can find the humility to accept we may have been wrong about him, then it may also mean we have passed.
And our reward is for all that hate to disappear.