People who use the word “buffoon” to describe Donald Trump do so too casually. They overlook the virtuosity of the performance. The yellow hair, the painted face, the histrionic strutting, the naïve egotism — Trump plays the part of Il Capitano, the swaggering soldier of the commedia dell’arte, with a skill the professional actor might well envy. Americans have never seen such a performance, not, at any rate, on the political stage; the country is transfixed, fascinated, much as the crowd is spellbound by the conjuror Cipolla in Thomas Mann’s political allegory Mario and the Magician.
“Who, whom?” was Lenin’s formula for the transactions of power. Trump would perhaps phrase it differently. Who kicks, who is kicked? In his acceptance speech in Cleveland (surely the most rhetorically novel utterance in American politics since FDR’s fireside chats), Trump eschewed the happy speak and literary flourishes heretofore compulsory on such occasions. Who kicks, who is kicked? America’s “forgotten men and women” are getting kicked, in Trump’s telling, by a motley crew of globalists, Islamic jihadists, sadistic immigrants, unresponsive leaders, “big business, elite media, and major donors,” cynical conspirators who have “rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit.”
Comments