Part 1: The Concrete World of DJT
In this multi-part essay, I examine the mythology and reality of the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, enquiring into the meaning of his election, the trajectory of his presidency, asking if he can endure, succeed in whatever his mission may be, and end up changing America and the world for the better, or at least prevent it changing for the worse. The essay will touch on many issues I have written about elsewhere in the past, though never in an article devoted to the Trumplegend, now entering the final phase.
As we move into the final week before probably the most important election in the world ever, I want to set out, in a short series of articles, my general sense of what the presidency of Donald Trump has actually meant for the world, why it is vital for that world that it continue, and why that world radically needs to review its thinking about the current White House incumbent before some of the stupidity going around out there causes us to lose sight of the seismic importance of the Trump presidency.
I have immediately in mind an absolutely ludicrous article on the Spectator USA website as I write, by the BBC correspondent Paul Wood, ‘But seriously: Will Trump refuse to leave?’ I won’t dignify this article any further by quoting from it, but it is in a long line of articles by legacy media journaliars who for four years have sought to build an anti-myth of Donald Trump that will see him sprout an orange Hitler moustache and despatch tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue in the third week of January 2021 in order to defy the will of the American electorate.
I suppose there are people who believe this stuff. Actually, I know there are: I meet them practically every day, the kind of people who start conversations with perfect strangers with gambits that assume everybody within earshot to be on the same mind about everything. Wood’s output (memo to self: cancel Spectator sub once the election is over) is typical of the kind of drivel pumped out for four years by the legacy media worldwide, polluting with rancid clichés the minds of three-quarters of the world’s population, including people who desperately need to know that Donald Trump is on their side, and why.
I figured out who Trump was pretty early on, largely though the insistence of a friend of mine, resident 5,500 kilometres from Washington D.C., who had by late 2015 decided that Trump would become the 45th President of the United States. I was sceptical at first, hearing only the rodomontade, seeing only the bad hair (and who was I to talk with my Let it Be era Beatles cut topped-off — or not — with monk’s tonsure?)
I started watching Trump’s rallies and reading everything vaguely constructive I could find about him. ‘Constructive’ actually turned out to be an important word. I built a central theory of DJT around which innumerable apparently dissociated parts drifted in and clicked into place.
At first I saw something apparently dissonant: a rich Manhattan businessman reaching out to people utterly unlike him, the plain, hard-grafting, dirt-beneath-the-fingernails denizens of blue-collar America. It didn’t make sense.
Then something occurred: What exactly, behind the hype and the bling and the celebrity tough-guy image, was Donald Trump? He was a builder. He made things, buildings mostly, not with his hands, to be sure, but nonetheless was crucial to their manifestation in space and air. Moreover, he was — a much overused appellation — the boss. He was the guy who swung around the building site at a quarter to eleven and walked about in his shiny shoes. But as I delved into the personality of this odd specimen, I noticed something: the way people — usually men — who had worked for him had come to respect and even — whisper this — love him. And this was because, when he arrived at a building site, his first port-of-call was, all but invariably, a chat with the hard-hats on the scaffolding, or the crane driver, or the guys down in the foundations. And, discordantly, they had nothing but good things to say about him.
Out of this I built my theory about the Concrete and the Virtual. It went something like this.
The divide that has become so starkly visible in the world since 2016 has yet to be precisely contained in a definition, but I think I have stumbled upon the most precise way possible of seeing it. The old, conventional dichotomies are clearly redundant: ‘Right/Left’, ‘conservative/liberal’, ‘populist/progressive — all these are subject to ideological short-circuits that trip off the sclerotic conditions that words sink into when they become overused in political discourse. A useful insight is provided by David Goodhart’s concept of ‘anywhere people/somewhere people’, but this is more an elaboration than a categorization. Even ‘working class/elites’, though warmer, doesn’t quite get it, for it loses sight of what are sometimes called the ‘subsidized classes’, or even more disparagingly the ‘underclass’, nor does it cast much light on the fundamental shifts that have occurred.
I hazard ‘concrete/virtual/subsidized classes’, which though unwieldy embraces and illuminates more of the emerging world. By ‘concrete’ I mean those who do physical work—work requiring the expenditure of sweat and muscular energy—those who make and mend things, wash and clean, stitch things, paint stuff, cook and bake, as well as more particularized activities like apprehending malefactors, extinguishing fires, shooting at state enemies, and so forth. In short, the people without whom the Western world would grind to a halt before 10am any morning.
By the ‘virtual classes’, I mean the remainder of the ‘working’ population (there is almost no intersection, no anomalous or ambiguous territories): those who work at keyboards, overwhelmingly nowadays on the Internet, who deal in finance and information, governance, administration, pushing paper, those who operate from air-conditioned offices, those who ‘act’ in the acting as opposed to the action sense of the word. Up to a point, you might describe a division between labour and the sedentary sector, muscle and mushy, roustabout and penpusher, but these conceptualizations short into outdated designations and are no longer especially helpful. Membership of the sedentary classes long implied a degree of status, but nothing like today, when the ‘status’ is almost entirely self-attributed, claimed rather than earned. In the past there were some anomalies: for example, doctors were members of the sedentary classes, whereas nurses were ‘workers’; today the lines are more determinedly drawn.
The virtual classes have so journeyed on from the category of penpushers as to be unrecognizable as the same kind of people. There was a time when those who sat at desks, pushing pulp, operated in a symbiotic relationship with the working or concrete-world classes. They it was who calculated and wrote up the activities of those who made and mended the world, usually with a view to ensuring they were remunerated, or relieved of their tax contributions, or compensated when they fell off ladders.
In the old days, there was a kind of two-way respect between the concrete and sedentary classes, which, much as they dressed differently, spoke differently and took their showers at different ends of the day, nevertheless exhibited a mutual respect for the worth and importance of the other. The clerk and the poet had friendly nods for the plumber and the chimney sweep, who responded with a tipped cap (for the poet) or a barely perceptible jerk of the head (for the clerk).
The sedentary classes in general earned more for doing less than what was (interestingly) called the ‘working class’, though not so much as to cause outright enmity, and not invariably. In general, the two classes tended to vote for different political parties, but this was neither cut-and-dried nor necessarily indicative of some underlying mutual animus. The two categories simply had different interests, though not necessarily in conflict. No longer.
Today, the sedentary classes live in an altogether different world—and themselves divide between two quite different ‘worlds’. Some of them inhabit the virtual world, which is as far from the concrete world as hell is from heaven, which is to say that nobody can measure the distance or describe the spatial relationship between the two. The virtual is a location that is at once accessible and unknowable, a destination without being a place, a kind of constructed afterlife in the present, which confers a new and special kind of status on those who lay claim to inhabiting it. They also inhabit the more rarefied parts of the ‘real’ world, parts from which the concrete classes are essentially excluded, by virtue of culture or economics, except when their services are required to unblock a sink or paint a gate.
This, above all, is what marks out the concrete classes as comprising a distinct and particular kind of humanity: they do not, can never, belong to the virtual classes, can enter the virtual world only on short-term visas, usually to fix something. These limitations have altered their status by virtue of confining them to the spatial, non-virtual, or implicitly inferior world, and they have increasingly come to be defined by this not belonging. They are ‘excluded’, you might say, but not in a manner that entitles them to victimhood status, which the subsidized classes—who are paradoxically part of the virtual world without belonging to it, and whose status has changed too, but for the better—now claim as their exclusive prerogative. The subsidized classes are essentially the willing captives of the virtual classes, acting when called for as their housemaids, child-minders, dog-walkers, and so forth, but generally functioning as something like hostages or human shields, behind which the virtual classes posture about their compassion and ethicality while getting on with the business of looting and parasitising the world built by the concrete classes.
The subsidized class amount to an annex of the virtual world, but they are not really part of it. They are the people the elites refer to as ‘minorities’, though their chief purpose, aside from provide moral cover and insurance for the elites, is to bolster the numbers of the virtual classes on polling day.
Yet, there is here a difficulty: the virtual classes also continue to live in parts of the world as made and mended by the concrete classes, even while obtaining all of their new-found status from a place that the concrete classes cannot enter or even locate.
A standard rationalization of all this virtualism holds that it amounts to a new kind of economy, but this is largely humbug. The virtual classes do not make things, or create things, they produce nothing apart from provoking pseudo-activity under headings like finance, entertainment, news, administration or mass communications. And since most of these categories have been corrupted by the changes I’m speaking of, the tendency is for the attendant activities to be harmful rather than the opposite. If you work for Twitter, you cycle to the office to spend eight hours undermining Western civilisation. You are, for sure, a parasite, the peel masquerading as the fruit. Virtually the entire virtual ‘economy’ is like this, and is supported by a pseudo-economy founded on massive debt, which conceals the true nature of events in a mess of confusing, misdirecting data.
A clue to what has changed can be observed in the relocation of the subsidized classes from their prior billeting by way of attachment to the undercarriage of the working class: latterly they have acquired a new situation and function as providers of human shields for the virtual classes. The subsidized classes used to exist as a kind of teeming, amorphous blob of humanity that constantly rejoined and re-separated from the working classes, discrete in certain respects but sharing certain common outlooks and interests, and broadly the same cultural contexts. Their recent change of status places them above rather than below the working classes, so that permanent membership of what used to be the underclass is far more attractive than it once was. They vote with the elites who are at once their protectors and usurpers: advocating their interests but also hiding behind their victimhood and exploiting its power.
Trump has insinuated himself as the champion of the concrete classes in a time when they are being pushed towards a situation of marginalisation and serfdom by the combined forces of the elites and the subsidized classes. He became such by virtue of his capacity to express empathy with the concrete classes that he had attained by communicating with some of their number across a divide that was both economic and class-based.
He was, as I say, a builder. He made things, and had this in common with the concrete classes even thought he and they were operating from different ends of the matter.
Trump, this man who had made his name by raising up conspicuous buildings, who seemed to possess a destructive streak to match his appetite for construction, was as something thrown up out of the weakening immune system of America, a country whose salt of the earth people were being pushed towards extinction in a manner that strongly implied that this was actually possible.
Success tends to point people in one of two directions: behind high walls and tinted glass or out on to the centre of the dancefloor, where Trump finally fetched up as a global celebrity from turning money and its outcomes into a gigantic personal circus. The way people handle wealth is usually considered a matter of taste and breeding, but it may be even more a question of courage: the willingness and wildness to take things to the limit. If you abandon yourself to the material, it becomes, at a certain point, a game in which there is nothing to be lost by going the whole hog. To exercise restraint is to be a little bit pregnant. Mark Singer, a reporter with the New Yorker who profiled Trump in 1997, wrote that Trump had ‘achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumblings of a soul.’ It was a harsh and simplistic judgment, but not without a shadow of truth: Trump had come to embody the material dream to an extent that a combination of its competitive elements and rewards were seemingly enough to sustain his visible being. As his mythology grow’d and grow’d, the putative distance between his true self and his public image seemed to shrink without this costing him an anxious thought. His personality and lifestyle made him as though the incarnation of material promise, and yet he seemed almost a satire on the culture of materialism, the absence of signs that he was conscious of the joke being no more than a necessary part of the act. He had moved beyond the restraint of a society in which excess is rendered culturally taboo in part as a way of discounting its elusiveness, a kind of built-in sour grapes. Trump was loud, rude, vulgar, even arguably devoid of taste, but for him all this was at worst collateral wear-and-tear. He did not mind being thought superficial, because he had come to recognize that it was ‘smart to be shallow’.
Trump suggested himself as the man who could give America what its ingrown culture claimed would satisfy its people. In primitive societies, the natives liked to have a corpulent chief, believing that, if he has been capable of feeding himself, he might prove better adapted than a leaner leader to feeding his people also. Trump appears to understand this implicitly. His physical girth is merely an external sign: the true magic lies in his aura of affluence, the way it makes anything seem possible. Everything about his public life has been directed at the idea of conveying his adroitness at winning the things that modern society values. It seems not so much that he has enjoyed high living as that he relished provoking admiration and envy in others. In advance of a public ‘roast’ for charity in 2011, Trump imposed one condition on the comedians and pundits who were to make fun of him in public: they must not suggest that he had less money than he claimed.
It was a given for journalists writing about the 2016 election that Trump would do badly among minority groups, immigrants, Hispanics and women, but the results were less vindicating of these assumptions than almost anyone had foreseen. Commentators saw the conflict in ideological terms: left versus right, populism versus progressivism, but had forgotten the deep connotation of the word ‘populism’: of the people, with the people, for the people. They had forgotten, too, that sometimes women stand by their men, and that immigrants come to America in pursuit of a daydream that, for better or worse, Donald Trump seemed to embody more completely and irrefutably than anyone else. The legendary New York Daily News gossip columnist George Rush once observed that Trump was extremely popular among immigrants, especially recent arrivals. ‘He embodied the American Dream to them. Excessive, conspicuous consumption is not a bad thing in New York to a lot of people. It’s kind of comic what he was doing. I’ve always felt like Donald was in on the jokes. He knows he’s over the top, but that’s where he likes to live.’
Many formulations are used to describe Donald Trump’s alleged constituency: white-nationalist, redneck, uneducated, forgotten, middle American, and so endlessly forth. As with Brexit, the divide can be tracked in terms of wealth and privilege, but that leads into an ideological cul de sac. There is another way of seeing it: that Trump represents people who relate to the world in concrete ways, but no longer recognise the world that is presented to them and are discounted when the big decisions are being made. They are people who know how to build walls, among other things – people who fix cars, nurse people, bake bread, clean toilets, dig holes in the road. Deep down, the divides exposed by both Brexit and Trump are between those who are handcuffed to the tangible and those who have grown up thinking that the virtual is the only kind of reality. And it is a measure of the intellectual disintegration of our cultures that it is the concrete that is being left behind, that the thinking elements of our societies appear to hold that a virtual world based on debt and babble is sustainable in the long term.
According to Trump Revealed, an 2016 instant biography of Donald Trump by Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the idea for a wall along the Mexican border came from the floor of an election rally in Phoenix, Arizona, in July 2015, just a couple of weeks after Trump announced his decision to run. The candidate was letting loose about immigrants flooding into the US and promising to ‘take our country back’, when a man in the crowd shouted the solution: ‘Build a wall!’. Sometimes history shifts on the banal. This anecdote reminds us that, although Donald Trump may seem the most unlikely champion of the real, to think so is to forget that Trump was also a builder, the man who took charge and made things happen. He was not the world’s greatest listener, but he knew that the most reliable sources of information when things went wrong onsite were the men in the hard hats. He was The Boss, and that may have been his deepest, most subliminal appeal. On the campaign trail, he exhibited an affirming truculence to people whose defiance had passed unnoticed by others. Trump made eye-contact with these people and it was love at first sight.
Things get interesting when the most over-the-top individual in modern materialist society becomes the most powerful man in the world. The frustrating thing is that, thus far, the question has always been posed in moral terms. But it is first and foremost a cultural question: what is the relationship between the material aspiration of modern society, taken to its highest and most spectacular, and the functioning of the engine of the society? In the past, this question did not really arise, because democracy tended to place the question of leadership within a narrow frame of technocratic capacity and ideas. Popularity, in the sense of personal appeal, had always been a factor, but not the sole or even the most crucial one. Also important were intangibles like experience, gravitas, decorum. Now, in an age taken leave of restraint, in which complacency has unleashed a kind of civic recklessness, such criteria has become less important. Politics has become a kind of video game, in which the player might effect his whims and desires in conjunction with like-minded people, and observe the outcome as a form of entertainment. In such a culture, President Donald Trump cannot really have been a surprise. He was, rather, an inevitability.
* In the second part of this series, I plan to look at some of the things some of Trump’s own supporters find problematic about his presidency, and ask whether this is likely to be a fatal problem.