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What makes Trump tick? Many pundits see him as out for himself alone. Of course he is. His
own sister said so.
But does that explain how he rose to be president? He’s
broken almost every promise he made and reduced us to a national state of quivering indecision in a deadly pandemic. Yet polls say a huge minority would still follow his seductive red MAGA hat into Hell. Why? Is self-evident self-obsession his political “secret”?
An old student and friend of mine from Ohio voted for Trump and has since repented. He recently texted me that “Most middle-class folks here in Ohio just want to see and listen to one liners that say Trump is going to take care of them, and that is all they need to hear.” Later he texted his own repentence:
“The only reason I voted for him was because I wanted to ‘stir things up’ in Washington a bit. Never thought he would be a good president. But man oh man, [I] never ever dreamed [of] getting this amount of incompetency and destruction.”
Why haven’t others seen the light like my friend? Why is Trump’s support still rock solid, never falling much below 40%? Why isn’t it plummeting as the pandemic’s death toll rises toward 200,000 and as a gridlocked Congress, under Mitch’s “leadership,” refuses to plug the drain in our economic bathtub as middle-class jobs pour out? Why can’t the common-sense workers who are the backbone of this nation see Trump’s total lack of human virtue, intelligence, discipline and human concern for the people he’s supposed to govern?
Something much deeper and more sinister than the most successful con job in human history appears to be afoot. Sometimes it almost seems as if Trump enjoys other people’s pain. I got that feeling
when he mocked a disabled reporter. The feeling became stronger as he urged his followers and police to hurt
criminal suspects and
protestors.
The same feeling has become even more prominent lately. Slowly but surely, the word “dominate” has drifted into Trump’s all-too-public stream of consciousness. It
popped up after he cleared Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors for his Bible-flaunting photo-op. It’s popped up
again and again, seemingly whenever Trump promotes his lie that our cities are going up in flames of racial protest. We must, he says, “dominate” the streets of our cities to prevent protests from turning violent.
It almost seems as if Trump—perhaps the least introspective leader ever—is getting to know himself. So let’s review the record.
Trump won’t tell us details of his business career or his early academic record. He’s gone to great length to keep his tax returns and his college grades and test scores secret. But his business career is pretty much an open book.
That book is not pretty. It shows a vast field of human wreckage: defrauded students, unpaid employees, stiffed contractors, and six corporate bankruptcies. (Bankruptcy is, after all, just a perfectly legal way of stiffing those you owe.)
They say that Trump is “transactional.” Of course he is. Isn’t every businessman?
The whole point of business is to make transactions in which you gain. Jeff Bezos became the richest man in human history by offering a great bargain. He let people shop for everything from their homes, and he
broke a dismal rule of salesmanship from time immemorial: “
caveat emptor”, or “let the buyer beware.” In a masterful use of the Internet’s unique “many-to-many” communication capability, Bezos let past customers review and even pan his products for prospective customers’ edification. He gave much for what he got, and the rest is history.
But Trump didn’t just gain a little more than he gave. Instead, he
crushed people he dealt with: customers, employees, contractors and (for his so-called “university”) students. He didn’t just strike a good bargain; he dominated. He did so in part by stonewalling, and in part by massive litigation. He earned his reputation as one of the most litigious businessmen today.
So what led this prince of domination to become our president? I think he was and is in precise synergy with what the “Grand Old Party” had become. His quest for domination was, and is, a perfect fit for the party’s recent history and direction. Again, let’s review the record.
Why has the GOP sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) ever since it passed into law? Why has it never—to this day—proposed any real alternative, let alone in any detail?
The answer, I think, is simple. The current scheme of employer-provided,
private health insurance is just one more way for employers to dominate workers. If your family’s financial ability to see a doctor when a loved one is sick or injured depends on your job, that’s a big reason to stick with that job and knuckle under to your bosses.
In normal times, workers didn’t think much about this control. But the pandemic has brought it right up to top of mind. Millions who’ve now lost their jobs in the pandemic-caused recession understand a painful truth. They’ve also lost their access to health care just when they need it most.
Why does the GOP relentlessly support this cruel system, even after the pandemic has made its human and public-health dysfunction self-evident? The question answers itself: a system that puts health insurance under employers’ control is just another means of dominating workers. That’s what the oligarchs and bosses want, or don’t want to give up, and they now control the Republican Party.
As in doctors’ offices and hospitals, so in our fields, hospitality industry and slaughterhouses. Even Ronald Reagan once advocated “amnesty”—
using that very word—for the millions of undocumented immigrants long living and working hard among us. But Trump and the
modern GOP have made demonizing undocumented workers a key part of their messaging.
The key word here is “workers.” As I’ve
noted at greater length elsewhere, a single, simple law could freeze undocumented immigration cold in its tracks. Just penalize
employers—with a fine several times their wage savings—for every undocumented immigrant they hire. Put the burden
on the bosses to check and reject the undocumented. Then jobs for undocumented immigrants would evaporate, destroying the magnet that draws them to cross our borders in a steady stream.
The GOP has never proposed doing that. Why? Because the GOP is the party of bosses. Nothing promotes bosses’ domination like workers who fear being deported with a single phone call.
So our eleven million undocumented workers (mostly from Mexico and Central America) have become a class of serfs. They cannot unionize or protest their pay or working conditions for fear of deportation. Their unlawful presence in America gives the oligarchs and bosses an entire class of helpless people to dominate. They work for low wages and often under appalling conditions to increase the bosses’ profits. Their dismal labor conditions led to their taking a huge hit in the pandemic.
Despite all the noise and bravado about slowing illegal immigration, the last thing the GOP bosses want—in jobs now done by the powerless undocumented—is lawful residents or American citizens in those jobs asserting their legal and constitutional rights, let alone forming unions. Bosses’ biggest nightmare is César Chávez’ United Farm Workers union writ large, in our slaughterhouses, restaurants, hotels
and fields. But the GOP has learned from
that mistake: it no longer supports anything like the old
bracero program, which once gave undocumented farm workers
temporary legal status, which they leveraged into some semblance of workers’ rights.
The GOP’s and Trump’s resort to domination as a governing strategy goes far beyond controlling workers’ health care and maintaining eleven million undocumented workers as a huge class of serfs. It’s even a tactic for winning elections.
What does the slogan “own the libs” really mean? The word “own” is just good shorthand for “dominate”—one syllable for three.
More than that, the slogan is a slice of demagogic genius. Hidden deep within our lizard brains, especially in the male of the species, is an urge to dominate and control others. That urge grows stronger when we are unhappy or dissatisfied or feel aggrieved. The more helpless we feel, the more we dream of dominating others.
Over the past two generations, our oligarchs have made tens of millions of our own skilled workers helpless. They’ve done so by selling their jobs and factories to China, Mexico and other developing countries, inexchange for reductions in wages. If our workers acted as they had done during the early part of the last century, they would have formed a movement, organized unions and made themselves less helpless through collective bargaining.
But in this case they couldn’t do that. They would have had to organize along with workers in China, Mexico, Vietnam and Bangladesh. That was a step too far for American labor to take.
Enter the GOP propaganda organs: Fox, Sinclair, and useful idiots like Rush. Helpless workers have no chance of dominating the bosses who sold their jobs and factories offshore and who have taken over much of the Republican Party through campaign contributions and corporate lobbying. So what did these organs of propaganda do? They displaced helpless workers’ urge to dominate others onto the Democrats and progressives—the “libs.”
The brilliance of this propaganda ploy is its psychological ju-jitsu. It allows workers made helpless and redundant by globalization to feel like winners. If they ride with Trump, they can “dominate” as voters even as they themselves are dominated and rendered helpless as workers. The GOP and Trump have gotten workers to participate enthusiastically in their own domination, by letting them make believe they are dominating others.
The smarter ones may understand that it will take some time for even the best of international trade policy to bring their old jobs back. In the meantime, they can see themselves as dominators, not dominated. And by glorifying their Second-Amendment rights, energizing so many personal fantasies of pistol power, the GOP doubles down on the very same psychological strategy. Nothing so attracts loyalty like giving the powerless reasons to feel powerful, even if their supposed power works against their own economic interests.
Never mind that the “libs” had wanted to
empower workers by letting them form unions and strengthening their safety net. Never mind that the “libs” had fought the bosses alongside workers in labor movements from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries to the present day. Today’s GOP propaganda organs recognized and exploited a hard and damning truth: many so-called “libs” had
drunk the Kool-Aid of “globalization.”
Among those who drunk deeply was Bill Clinton. He had beaten both GHW Bush, the Republican, and Ross Perot, the third-party candidate who had foreseen the dangers of globalization. Perot even warned of a “sucking sound” of jobs going south to Mexico. But rather than heed that warning and work with it, Bill tacked and triangulated to maintain his popularity, leaving the forces of globalization to do their worst. Bill even signed,
with great fanfare, the deregulatory bill that paved the way for the Crash of 2008.
As a result, the GOP’s propaganda apparatus has had over twenty years—and plenty of good material—to convince workers that Democrats and the “libs” were their enemies. The Dems and the “libs,” said the bosses, were the same people who had sold workers’ jobs overseas and who had helped rogue bankers kill a perfectly good economy with their greed and stupidity.
The result was skilled workers’ desire to “own the libs.” Donald Trump’s presidency followed logically as night the day.
When Trump granted Rush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he was not just sticking a thumb in the eyes of Democrats, progressives and every journalist with an ounce of professional integrity. He was making a sincere gesture of gratitude, for a duping job well done, on behalf of the entire oligarchy. He was also granting an award by proxy to Fox and Sinclair, which had done most of the heavy lifting.
Domination of course lies at the heart of the GOP’s strategy for entrenching its control of our Supreme Court by any and all means. The GOP stonewalled President Obama’s attempt to replace the late Justice Scalia with eight
months to go before the next presidential election. Now it chafes at the bit to replace the irreplaceable Justice Ginsburg with less than seven
weeks to go. The hyprocrisy of Mitch and his colleagues
is self-evident and shameless, but that doesn’t matter. The whole affair was and is an exercise in domination—exploiting the tragedy of Justice Ginsburg’s death to dominate the process of making and validating law.
So there you have it. Trump won’t let his college grades or test scores be known. He doesn’t read his briefing papers. He contradicts himself regularly, sometimes daily. His own hand-picked Secretary of State
reportedly called him “a fucking moron.” But Trump has a secret nuclear weapon of demagoguery: he’s tapped into the atavistic human urge to dominate others, especially when things go wrong. He and his GOP play that urge like a cheap fiddle.
All this explains the durability of Trump’s support. It also explains much of the gender gap. Unlike males’, females’ evolutionary roles depend on their cooperating with and nurturing others, not dominating them. So women’s urge to dominate is generally weaker than men’s. The same analysis explains even the smaller gender gap in the South, where
bossism and domination have been so engrained in the culture for centuries as to infect both genders.
Domination is not just a large part of the secret of Trump’s success. It’s now an unwritten rule of the Republican Party’s internal operation. It explains why former enemies like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham have knuckled under to Trump’s “leadership,” acting like cowards and converting their party into a cult of personality. It explains why only one Republican, presented with evidence of Trump’s treason and obstruction of justice, voted to remove him from office.
Domination even explains why Trump would cozy up to leaders like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians. He seems to admire them and dream of emulating them.
Those dreams are dangerous. If we want to defeat Trump soundly, and not just narrowly, we’ve got to address this urge to dominate among our voters. It may be the linchpin of Trump’s durable support, compensating for his meanness, many lies and blunders. (It may even
benefit from his meanness.)
So we’ve got to re-displace skilled workers’ many legitimate grievances in more productive directions. We’ve got to help them see that dominating the Democratic Party and its leaders, who want to help them and traditionally have, is self-defeating.
More generally, we’ve got to get
all voters to understand that the urge to dominate others is democracy’s hemlock. It led to Germany’s Nazi psychosis, the Holocaust, and the most horrible war in human history. While
we’re not far down that road
yet (we hope), a second Trump term could drag us much farther. Every step toward domination as a dream, let alone a way of life, brings us closer to the abyss.
Foonote: “Donald is out for Donald, period,”
said his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.
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