A friend, Garen-Lavender Whitmore, posted this on Facebook, the words of an eloquent British man, Nate White, who is highly perceptive, but who somehow misses history’s greatest punchline:
Someone asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:
“A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
‘My God… what… have… I… created?
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”
As eloquent a reality-definition of Trump as this is—it is also lacking in the quality he wrongly finds lacking in Trump—humor—and specifically the transcendent, alchemical humor needed to help us realize we need to be in on the same brilliant cosmic joke—Indeed Trump is Frankenstein’s Frankenstein—a perfect creation sent by central casting—an amalgam of every aspect of the American/celebrity/inferior masculinity/collective shadow—he is an ongoing, cosmic sight-gag and running joke—every tweet and spoken word flawlessly part of the comic routine. Nate doesn’t get the perfect comic timing of the extreme contrast with Obama, the act he followed, the skinny-straight-man foil to the monstrously-inflated buffoon. That the basket-of-deplorable types who saw Obama as president Blackenstein, see Trump as their hero-on-the-white-horse champion is an hilarious, if over-the-top, part of the running joke.
I sympathize with his perspective, but it lacks alchemical humor to get the grandest cosmic joke to ever play out in the bloody pageant of patriarchal/inferior acting-out-masculinity story-cycle —HIS-story, what’s popularly known as “history” —-what James Joyce called “the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”
Trump is the nightmare-evoking and shattering joke sent by the cosmos to help those who get the joke awaken from the nightmare of his-story/history.
See: Take the Red Pill—Trumpocalypse Reveals that you Live in a Simulated Matrix or watch my Youtube compilation of most of my Trump writings: Dispatches from the Trumpocalypse
