First: a small, but indulgent note. I’ve been writing this thing for 18 months now, usually on a weekly basis, and while there’s the option of paid subscription, every piece has been offered for free — and will continue to be offered for free. I’m not asking for money, God forbid, but I am asking that if you enjoy a certain piece, then please share it. I write this thing principally for the love of it, and the freedom, and not for an audience or money — but even slightly expanding a very modest readership will make it more sustainable than it is. Everything’s free, so your sharing is without risk of your recipient hitting paywalls or attracting annoying pleading. And, yes, I’ll return to music, film, whatever, very soon — but lately it’s been hard removing my eyes from that big, noisy place that resides between the sea and shining sea. Thanks for reading, folks.
I can’t have been alone in wondering if the assassination attempt might’ve somehow changed Trump psychologically. If proximity to his own grisly death might re-wire him slightly; if the fact that a stranger was killed that day by a bullet meant for him might open certain reflective vistas.
Might his attempted murder make him more tender, more grateful for the gift of life and those who give it meaning? Or might it simply haunt him? Might it compound his capacity for vengeance? And for a man of such vast ego, might the fact that his survival hinged upon the most extreme fluke invite doubt and vulnerability – or merely serve as proof of his divine blessing?
My biggest question, before watching Trump’s long speech at the Republican convention yesterday, was whether the calcification of his pathologies – the almost-magical implacability of his narcissism – made them invulnerable even to an assassin’s bullet?
On the floor of this week’s convention, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy told a reporter: “I think you see a different Trump… Talking to him after [the shooting] he’s actually a changed man and a better man.” But on the evidence of Trump’s speech, he didn’t seem changed at all: the themes that were fed to the press beforehand, of unity and healing, were quickly replaced by a rambling, vituperative and self-absorbed speech. And a shockingly undisciplined one: of the 92 minutes, the longest speech in modern convention history, I suspect a good two-thirds were improvised.
“President Trump is not only looking to unify the Party, but the nation,” a campaign advisor said in the days before the convention’s climactic speech, but instead here was the old Trump: defiant, self-congratulatory and menacingly hyperbolic. He referred to “crazy” Nancy Pelosi, a “weaponised” Department of Justice, and his variously cheating, inept, and vexatious political opponents. He spoke effusively of his friend Kid Rock, said we were on the edge of World War Three, and joked about Kim Jong Un missing him. And he shared the stage with the uniform of a voluntary firefighter, a tribute to Corey Comperatore, the man shot dead at the rally last weekend, and one which misspelt his name.
Trump’s speech was busy with repetition and non sequiturs – a bloated performance which actively undermined the themes his own party told us were so important. In sum, the speech was closer to the “American carnage” of his 2017 inaugural address than the softer, kinder one promised by Republicans.
But it may have been a spur for Democrats, who saw a man apparently unchanged and thus beatable. If Democrats were grimly resigned to Biden leading them to a spectacular defeat in November, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein saw Trump’s speech as their “antidote to fatalism”.
*
Strange times, but don’t expect the political commentators to capture it. Both American correspondents and our own, write with a dull, self-consciously solemn dependence upon conventional wisdom – the common signature for senior journalists who’ve graduated to Analysis of Major Issues.
It’s a particular type of solemnity, with its own scent. It’s the solemnity that’s practiced intuitively by the mid-wit secure in their position but oblivious to their witlessness, and who depends unthinkingly upon a standard industry tone with which to express their cliches. Nick Bryant is an exemplar of this – a travelling hack who’s managed a career from spewing insipid orthodoxies.
Solemnity is important to the hack. It suggests authority. It’s an affectation necessary for obscuring the fact that what you’ve written is unimaginative and platitudinous – and that variations of it can be read in a hundred other places. But if one can only trade in conventional wisdom, possesses a dim wit and rarely reads, then solemnity is the cloak that allows you to successfully pretend that you’re not a jukebox of cliches – but a wise man taking the pulse of History.
Reading about the US election, it’s hard to avoid the Roving Blob of Conventional Wisdom – and writers unfit to describe the hot and crazy winds that blow around them. We live in strange times, and their description by mid-wits whose sharpest talent is self-conscious solemnity won’t cut it. Most correspondents are unfit to write about this moment because their imaginations won’t allow it. Our Aussie correspondents write about America as they’ve previously written about Australian budgets: Who was the big winner tonight?
You can read plenty of fretful columns warning against AI taking journalist’s jobs. Well, I say that if you write in such a way that a machine might replicate it, then is the prospective loss of your job such a tragedy?
*
I suspect Trump won the election when he slightly turned his head, and the world found confirmation of his divine fortune. He won the election when, instead of his skull exploding on live television as his geek assassin intended, he escaped as a near-martyr and made another iconic image.
He won the election when he asked the Secret Service agents for his shoes. He won the election when he stood, bleeding but energetic, and pumped his fist and screamed “Fight!” He won the election when millions wondered how Biden might have responded – presumably with a fatal heart attack, or perhaps by turning towards the sloped roof, raising his arms in submission, and praying that the assassin’s aim be true so that it might end his melancholy twilight.
He won the election when he confirmed that he’s possessed of an aura, a luck, a dark wizard’s self-possession – the strange, defiant electricity of a billionaire magus.
Trump’s lucky – so lucky, that we might not wonder if it’s something more than luck. If his vulgarity and mobster swagger – his undisguised moral and intellectual indifference – isn’t a powerfully seductive energy. If shamelessness isn’t his ultimate persuasiveness, and if his luck is not correlated with the exhaustion of middle America – the ones long ignored and patronised and who’ve developed a kink for chaotic energies.
We’re well beyond rational, folks. Didn’t you notice? Americans will choose a blessed crook, a hollow man enlarged by the bright glow of his narcissism – and it is not for his opponents to list his sins, but for them to creatively show their own vitality.
But as it is, the man who stood up after a sniper clipped him will – at time of writing – contest a man who’s aggressively brain damaged. That’s how it is. And the fact that a man was shot dead by that sniper’s bullet, and that Biden tried calling the family and that they haven’t yet heard from Trump, won’t matter (Update: Trump eventually spoke with the widow.)
Personally? I think it should matter. But it doesn’t, and what I think is meaningless. Here’s the widow of the man shot dead by Thomas Crooks:
The heartbroken widow of Corey Comperatore, the hero firefighter shot dead by a sniper at a Donald Trump rally, wanted nothing to do with President Biden when he called after the tragedy, she told The Post. “I didn’t talk to Biden,” Helen Comperatore said from her Pennsylvania home Monday. “I didn’t want to talk to him. My husband was a devout Republican and he would not have wanted me to talk to him.” … She said the former president has not reached out.
Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you want. But there it is. And I don’t think we have the imagination, the wit, the familiarity with the weird gusts of America to describe this moment. Instead, we’ll have solemn correspondents depend upon cliches for their colour and Wikipedia for their history. The raw, wild, often surreal spectacle of American politics will be rendered in lifeless Hack Speak and made indistinguishable from a review of a Taylor Swift concert:
“But as the campaign heats up, downtown Milwaukee has been turned into a Trump love fest for the week, with more than 50,000 people expected to descend on the city over the next four days,” wrote The Age’s Farrah Tomazin from the convention.
Strange times. But don’t expect the writing to capture it.