And that’s saying a lot.
You can find it here. Please read the whole thing.
Excerpt:
The billionaire Trump was able to connect with red- and purple-state voters in a way past Republican candidates had not—and not just in terms of his signature and unorthodox focus on issues such as trade, globalization, and illegal immigration. Trump, the person, mattered just as much. Throughout Trump’s invectives a number of messages were implicit.
One, Trump, by his manner of speaking, his temperament, and his vulgarity, was not embedded in the existing establishment or Washington power structure, and thus in theory he was not beholden to it in either the way he spoke or acted.
In other words, what the Republican establishment saw as a bug, the Trump voter saw as both a feature and a signal of his likelihood of being a straight-talking, no-nonsense, Washington-outsider figure.
Hanson the classics professor continues:
Two, like Homer’s Achilles, or Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, he was a disruptive force who could end a common threat (in the mythological fashion of “man-slaughtering” Hector or General Mapache’s federales) by the use of skill sets unavailable to, or felt to be unattractive by, his benefactors. Whether concerning the missiles of Kim Jong-un or the overreach of the federal government, Trump supporters wanted someone to try something different.
For me, the comparison this immediately brings to mind is the mythological and popular figure of the trickster:
Tricksters are archetypal characters who appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a “boundary-crosser”. The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules. Tricksters “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.”
Often, the bending/breaking of rules takes the form of tricks or thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both. The trickster openly questions and mocks authority. They are usually male characters, and are fond of breaking rules, boasting, and playing tricks on both humans and gods.
All cultures have tales of the trickster, a crafty creature who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. In some Greek myths Hermes plays the trickster. He is the patron of thieves and the inventor of lying, a gift he passed on to Autolycus, who in turn passed it on to Odysseus. In Slavic folktales, the trickster and the culture hero are often combined…
In later folklore, the trickster/clown is incarnated as a clever, mischievous man or creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defense. He also is known for entertaining people as a clown does.
I will add something else. Long before Trump ever declared his candidacy, I had written one and only one post about him (one or two earlier ones had briefly mentioned his name, but they weren’t about him). Here’s an excerpt; it was written in April of 2011 (note the classical references here, too):
[“Gadfly” is] a word I’ve thought of often in connection with [Trump] and the Obama presidency, one that was originally used by Socrates to describe himself.
Here’s an explanation of what Socrates meant when he used the term [punctuation and spelling corrected]:
Socrates liken[ed] himself to a GADFLY (a horsefly). Just as a gadfly constantly agitates a horse, preventing it from becoming sluggish and going to sleep, so too Socrates, by moving through the city stirring up conversations in the marketplace, prevents the city from becoming sluggish and careless and intolerant.
It fits pretty well, although Trump’s most assuredly no Socrates. More and more, he also reminds me of a jester, although not one directly in the employ of the Obama court.
Why a jester? Well, he combs his hair funny. But mostly it’s because he fulfills this function of the traditional jester:
In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters, who sometimes dressed as other servants were dressed, but generally wore a motley (i.e. parti-coloured) coat, hood with ass’s (i.e. donkey) ears or a red-flannel coxcomb and bells. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests.
Jester/fools could say things no one else could say, ask questions no one else could ask, because they had little to lose and were given license to tweak. Trump has already voiced the unspeakable birther concerns, and now he gets into the very un-PC question of how Obama gained admittance to the two Ivies, Columbia and Harvard.
Interesting, no? That was Trump’s function then, as a popular and somewhat-outrageous outsider. Now he’s an insider of sorts—the president of the US, after all. But at least sometimes he still functions as an outsider to the usual norms of the presidency, as a gadfly, trickster, and jester. None of those terms are strictly pejorative, either; all have very positive aspects.
Back to Hanson:
Three, Trump’s own history and brand ensured he would not be able to partake fully of, or be accepted by, the restored society he sought to salvage, given his own distance from those he championed. Certainly, Trump’s own randy past, excessive appetites, and high-stakes financial dealings made him somewhat unappealing to those in York or Merced. But, ironically, his constituents thought he was nevertheless a champion who at a distance could be turned loose on their behalf against those they had grown to despise.
Very insightful, I think.
