Donald the Clown And His MAGA Carnival Show

Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth – hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the anti-sabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.

The above quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano. Vonnegut published his work in 1952 and set his dystopian story in the ‘near future’ of America. Well, that future has now arrived.

In the novel, two social classes have emerged as a consequence of almost total robotic automation of industry. The first class is composed of the managers and engineers who tend to the machines and live in luxurious company towns (like Campus Google today). Surrounding these control and command bubbles lives the second class; the vast and underemployed masses. Sound familiar? Long story short, a Leader comes to organize the (formerly)working class under the banner of his organization called the “Ghost Shirt Society”. In the end the Leader and his mob more or less attempt to Smash Industrial Civilization, but are put down by the military before they finish off the System.

What does this story have to do with Trump? Well, he is the leader of our present-day ‘ghost shirt’ movement; Make America Great Again. The only difference is that in the novel, the leaders of the rebellion were sincere. Trump, on the other hand, is playing his most ardent supporters–the white working class–for fools. This is exactly what the ‘left’ claimed Trump would do, by the way. The smarter liberals predicted that Trump would ply the white proles with quasi-nationalist rhetoric to get into office, and once there he would dutifully enact the System’s agenda of tax cuts for the rich (and money for Israel). And that’s exactly what happened.

The idea that Trump is some kind of God Emperor looking out for the nation couldn’t be further from the truth. Hell, Trump he isn’t even his own man—he belongs to Israel. Donald the Clown is more like a shady traveling revival preacher, here to give the country folk false hope and then swipe their money. The System no doubt saw the benefit of letting the Trump carnival roll into town. After all, the old Bush/Clinton show was getting a bit dull. The ‘Make America Great Again’ migratory tent-show tour of 2016! Get your red hat here!

Supposedly, Trump didn’t even care about the border wall idea originally. He only made it the theme of his campaign when a bunch of Iowans ‘went nuts’ for it when he offhandedly mentioned it at a rally. Now, a year and a half into his term, we know for sure he was full of shit—not even one mile has been built on the border. This just one example that demonstrates the cruelty and deep cynicism of Trump. He is a man who sees a beleaguered and demoralized people and decides he should be the guy who cons them just one more time.

Donald Trump is not the savior of Western White civilization, he is a grifter and a buffoon. He is just like Regan and all the other goofball politicians the System trots out every four years. But in many ways, he is even worse than the typical conservatives and liberals. As Jonathan Bowden said, if you are going to make authoritarian claims and lead a ‘right-wing’ movement, you have to have character and you have to actually try to live up to what you promise. The typical System puppets don’t even pretend to care about the white underclass anymore. But Trump pretended. He lured the white working class with his waving red MAGA flag, only to gore old white beast once again while pulling away the prize.