When the president of the world’s most powerful country posts a video of himself as a jet-flying, Dr. Strangelove-like “King Trump” defecating all over his protesting critics, it is a call not just for Americans, but for humanity also, to ask itself how we got to this place.
Recall that Trump today is the most powerful man on Earth, supported by the most powerful army and backed by the most powerful set of technological oligarchs ever assembled. And that yesterday’s protests, estimated at 5 to 7 million, were the second largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. (Earth Day 1970 still holds the record for the first, while the George Floyd protests topped yesterday’s over multiple days.)
Interpreting the video is not so difficult. By imagining himself as King Trump flying over protesters and dumping poop on their heads, the president of the United States is presenting a juvenile-delinquent’s regressive-infantile fantasy of white-male rebellion against the social order that, in normal times, would be able to contain it. It’s a naughty little boy’s poop fantasy, one that suggests that a pooping toddler, Donnie, along with his enabler friends — Jimmy D, Stevie, Russie, Lonnie & the silicon poopers, et al — just don’t wanna grow up.
But they also want it both ways: they want the transgressive jouissance of the boy-rebel AND to inherit the kingdom of the patriarch. They want their poopy-colored chocolate cake and the poopy-farty joy of spreading it all over the nursery walls. They want to break the rules and to force others to follow their rules.
The questions this raises are questions for all of us: How did we allow a political-economic system to emerge that would enable such a person to become the most powerful person in the most powerful nation on Earth? And, equally importantly, what in his fantasy appeals to so many people who support his rule?
If Trump were an isolated aberration in U.S. history, we could limit these questions to the U.S. itself, but he isn’t. We’ve had premonitions of it in Reagan, G. W. Bush, and others. Worldwide, Putin represents something similar, a patriarch-rebel’s middle-finger to the social order of the (imagined) “liberal West.” (We needn’t go back to Hitler and Mussolini, though the parallels aren’t lost on the Americans who protested yesterday.) Farage, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Orbán, and countless others, not to mention Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley man-boys, all represent variations of the same fantasy.
I actually think watching the video is helpful for the rest of us to see, so that we can let the message sink in:
https://1a-1791.com/video/fwe2/89/s8/2/u/u/X/r/uuXrz.caa.mp4?b=1&u=ummtf
This is because the questions it raises are significant psycho-spiritual questions that humanity needs to answer if we are to progress beyond the current stalemate of climate helplessness, authoritarian defensiveness, and looming ecological disaster. If we can help these man-boys grow up — first, by reining them in and, second, by demonstrating that a more dignified kind of humanity can be both more satisfying and more constructive — then we might have a fighting chance. If we cannot, then our time on this Earth may be nearing its gloomy end.
There are reasons not to want to grow up, but the trumpniks’ reasons aren’t them. Perhaps Tom Waits should have the last word on them: