Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has created a mesmerizing political “theater of the absurd” that has produced a mass following and further polarized a deeply divided America.
A paranoid American president with racist animus and religious bigotry can be more dangerous to the world than Islamic State militants. You can drone-strike a militant to oblivion whether he is in the badlands of Pakistan, Yemen or Syria. But neither the U.S. Congress nor the judiciary, the co-equals in power, can do much to control an unprincipled, whimsical man, once he gets into the White House and becomes commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. The checks and balances system does not always work.
Trump has employed irrational rhetorical exuberance, outrageous stage performance, aggravating “truthiness” and the use of personal insults as a political weapon against his myriad fallen Republican opponents.
Big Trump donors include the super-rich such as Woody Johnson, the New York Jets owner; Florida shopping magnate Mel Sembler; Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks; and casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, among others.
This has been an amazing metamorphosis of public opinion in favor of Donald Trump, who claims to be the only man who can save America.
For some Americans, “Make America Great Again” is a powerful call for nation rebuilding, as has been the Islamic militants’ cry of “Allahu Akbar,” for returning to the glory of the Prophet Muhammad.
From the very beginning, Trump barged onto the television screen like the creature in Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, sometimes categorized as from the “theater of the absurd.” Gradually, even conservative thinkers of the Reagan Republican tradition are backing Trump. Gov. Nikki Haley (of Indian origin), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. John McCain (whom Trump called a non-heroic Vietnam POW hero), and New York Rep. Peter King, who called Trump an ignoramus, have found enough rationale to support the nominee.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who belittled everything about Trump, is scampering like a mouse to be on the right side of Trump.
House Speaker Paul Ryan initially held back from his support of Trump. In the play Rhinoceros the protagonist Berenger is the sole person left who refuses to join the mass conversion to Rhinoceroses (the Nazis). But Ryan is no Berenger. He has bowed and succumbed to the power of Trump. Politics before principles!
The herding of the people into a mass following, as happened in Ionesco’s play, is almost complete. It is not something unprecedented. It happened during the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin ruled the Russian mind; the rise of Nazism in Europe; and not long ago, when we were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We wanted to believe in the case persuasively presented by Gen. Colin Powell, U.S. secretary of state under President George W. Bush.
Today some Americans want to believe that the Trump Wall, for which Mexico would be forced to pay if Trump becomes president, would save them from Mexican hordes, rapists and drug dealers; China would be rolled back and jobs would return to America; and Islamic militants would be obliterated.
Trump’s misogyny and treatment of women (Trump owned the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants, which he sold in 2015) have been no different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. The body builder, movie actor and former California governor, or “Governator,” in a legislative budget session in July 2004 derided his opponents: “If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers . . . if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie-men.” Married to a celebrity Kennedy woman, Maria Shriver, it took him years to have “the guts” to admit that he had fathered a child with Mildred Patricia Baena, his Mexican-American housekeeper. In 2005 he suggested that California seal its borders with Mexico. Trump’s Mexican Wall is the rebirth of Schwarzenegger’s bizarre idea.
Trump is a latter-day version of Schwarzenegger and is much more seductive and dangerous. Few politicians have used the English language as a weapon for the total destruction of enemies as Trump has done. Like a master propagandist, Trump uses language that is memorable and subversive. Like a negative adman, he keeps up the jingle of insults: crooked Hillary; little Marco Rubio; Cruz …”the worst liar, crazy or very dishonest. Perhaps all three.”
Trump addresses the audience in a conversational tone, and, then, suddenly bursts into a thunderclap, rebuking his opponents. His condemnation of Muslims has been so intense and effective that many Americans are rattled by the proposed resettlement of Syrian refugees in their towns.
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, despite his transgressions, is a charming public man. But Schwarzenegger’s shenanigans were limited to California. Trump will occupy the world stage if he becomes president.
Can Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, overcome Trump’s theater of the absurd that has become so meaningful to so many Americans? The world cannot afford a maniac in the White House.
Narain D. Batra is a professor of communications at Norwich University and author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation. He lives in Hartford.