Trump & Savile

Ben Wildsmith 

Politics, these days, is dominated by two types of politicians. On one hand you have disruptive showmen. The capo di tutti capi here is, of course, Trump. Descending through his bloodline you’ll come across Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Zack Polanski, and outside the stage door, in the rain, with his autograph book and blanket, Andrew RT Davies.

These politicians are heavy on vibes and deliberately vague on detail.

Populism, of any political stripe, owes as much to showbiz traditions as it does to political history. The shocking novelty of Donald Trump’s presidency is as much presentational as it is substantive.

America’s self-image has always been as the moral antidote to corrupt European interests. Ranged against the royal gangsterism of Europe, America’s pure individualists wore the white hat for liberty and hard work.

After a century of projecting this hypocrisy around the world whilst shaking most of it down for the last biscuit, it seems that America no longer wants to play the good guy.

Trump’s innovation is to invite Americans over to the dark side. Where they can shuck off their burdensome act as puritan defenders of simple virtues and just revel in the trappings of raw power.

The Western movie Shane was made in 1953, at the height of America’s moral authority after WWII. It simplified the American experience into binary metaphors – white hat/black hat, good/evil, America/Russia.

As the nation’s economy grew exponentially, it was easy to suggest that the morality of American values was being rewarded by an interventionist god who wasn’t about to let the Commies prevail.

It's a long time since anyone dreamed of being Alan Ladd in that movie, however, and that is the fault of the other type of politician that besets our lives.

Populist demagogues don’t rise to power in a vacuum. For their act to work, they require genuine frustration amongst the electorate. The 2030s wouldn’t be shaping up to be as bad if not worse than the 1930s if non-populist politicians had met the needs of their voters.

We suffered a global burst pipe in 2008 and called for emergency assistance. By 2016, we were stood in three feet of rising water whilst David Cameron, Hillary Clinton, Ed Miliband, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and the rest of the world’s supposedly sensible ruling class assured us that because the banks had survived, there was nothing to worry about.

Economies that increasingly served only the financial elite continued to be measured by top line figures that ignored the hollowing out of lifestyles for everyone else.

So, voters got reckless. Brexit, Trump, and Johnson received majorities in spite of obvious risks because life outside of financial centres was becoming moribund and maybe a shock would at least make something move. ‘Charge the paddles, nurse, and stand back.’

When America gave traditional politics one last go with Joe Biden, even an attempted insurrection wasn’t enough to engender any urgency into his administration. Directionless and tepid, it inspired nobody and aimed for nothing grand.

We appear to be at that stage of the story in the UK as Keir Starmer was handed licence to prove that sanity might work after Johnson, Truss, and Sunak. The prevaricating mess that he has made of it seems certain to catapult Nigel Farage’s end-of-the-pier Enoch Powell act into Downing St just as Biden’s geriatric doddering did the same for Trump. At least he does SOMETHING….

Populism returning after an initial rejection creates a dangerous situation. To retain appeal populists must top their previous act, shock harder and more perversely than before.

Trump is now governing as a cartoon villain – nodding and winking to us that he has no ideological mission at all.

‘Ha! You thought we took Maduro because of drugs? Don’t be a child, we did it for the oil.’

This nihilistic appeal to the very basest of human instincts is, again, a showbiz staple. Alan Ladd might have been the hero of Shane, but it’s the black-hatted Jack Palance that we remember.

As state sanctioned murder was committed on the streets of Minneapolis yesterday, Trump invited the American people to imagine themselves as the grinning villain, unconcerned at the consequences of their political decisions.

The nation is acting in its president’s image, unaccountable, cruel and with impunity.

Our response to overt wrongdoing is often frozen paralysis. After Jimmy Savile died, we all reflected that we’d always known he was a wrong-un, he’d as good as told us outright.

By inhabiting the character of a fictional villain, however, he’d managed to create a hyperreal projection of himself that we consumed as entertainment instead of crime.

Trump’s public persona is mutating towards the same cartoonish degeneracy but with consequences that could engulf us all.