He really can MAGA! And he will–if only we’ll just believe!/Licensed Adobe Editorial stock, Yuri Gripas, Reuters.
In an article in Scientific American (SciAm) almost a year ago, psychologists Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam identified three characteristics of the Donald Trump political movement to explain his appeal to his voters–us–and ascension to power. And we summarize them below as a way to say, “Hell, yeah!” Those characteristics are: his entrepreneurship of identity, his exemplary Americaness, and his fusing of “America the country” and “every American.”
Say whatever you want, liberals, but Don Don did a pretty good job at establishing and then making work in powerful concert these three aspects of his appeal to us–or at least his handlers did–and then he laid on the “charm” thick as his hair isn’t. Right, dear Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) readers?
Cult of Personality
Much was made of this term, the Cult of Personality, in the 20th century. With the advent and development of the mass media came the ability to craft and use for a purpose powerful identities marketed to the media’s consumers. This ability was taken advantage of particularly by the Hollywood studios of the 1940s and 50s, whose stars often developed cult-like followings. What else could explain reports of women killing themselves in the streets upon hearing of Rudolph Valentino’s death in 1916? This deification of the individual, even the use of a single person to represent a whole or a reality, found its political weaponization in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
And we on the right love our weapons, don’t we? Normally we favor a 10-pound or thereabouts black gun. In this case, it’s a 200-pound orange human!
Related: Is a service dog right for you, like Pence is for Trump?
Stormy Daniels, i.e., who we hope our daughters become because she did the nasty with The Donald, noted in an interview in InTouch Weekly that Trumpy McTrumperson said if he ever changed his iconic, slightly weird, hair, he’d lose all his power and fame. However, he meant that, it shows he has an intuitive knowledge of the integral role his personality plays in his brand.
An Exemplary American
The left-wing coastal, cosmopolitan, elitist media has twisted itself into all kinds of shapes trying to understand why we–ordinary, working-class just folks–support an out-of-touch, silver-spoon billionaire as our leader. Hello–it’s called aspirational politics! The American experience is defined partly by a never-ending belief in the ability of every American to realize the American dream of wealth. Even when it’s painfully, factory-closed-jobs-not-coming-back-obvious that it’s never going to happen, we still believe that if we just work hard enough, we can be Donald Trump one day.
And Don Don knows this too, as Reicher and Haslam note in their SciAm article. He said in his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, they note: “We didn’t learn from M.B.A.s. We learned from people who had doctorates in common sense. It’s why we’re the only children of billionaires, as comfortable in a D10 Caterpillar as we are in our own cars. My father knew that those were the guys and gals who would teach us the dignity of hard work from a very young age. He knows that at the heart of the American dream is the idea that whoever we are, wherever we’re from, we can get ahead, where everyone can prosper together.” Talk about laying it on thick!
And: Don McGahn sent his regrets when invited to Trump’s Downfall of Democracy party.
“I Am Because We Are”: So Madonna titled her 2008 documentary about orphans left parentless by the AIDS crisis in Malawi. But it’s a perfect summation of how we see Don Jon and he sees us. We feed off each other, to put it in crude, Trumpian terms, like intestinal bacteria.
I’m Proud to Be an American
“Where at least I know I’m free”–we never really figured out who the “we,” in that song is, but its crass jingoism is literally music to our ears.
Anyway, not only are we Trump supporters proud to be Americans, we see America as a big, 50-state initiation of us and our life experiences. When President Trump says he’s going to “Make America Great Again,” what we hear is that he’s going to make us great again, each one of us. He’s going to return us–all of us–to the glory days of little blue-eyed, blond-haired Skippy skipping down Main Street on his way home from school, where there were two, preferably fewer, non-white people. Now, we feel culturally isolated, economically disenfranchised, and frankly, enraged, as we which little Aisha with her head covered race down the street home to study math so she can one day breakthrough to unimaginable wealth with the next big innovation in tech.
Well, we’re simply not going to have that, Aisha, you little camel jockey!
As Reicher and Haslam point out, a standard Trump speech made masterful rhetorical use of three “key elements”: “America, once great, is now weak and repeatedly humiliated by others [us, writ large]…America’s decline was framed as resulting from the actions of its enemies [us–duh!]…these external enemies thrive only because of the actions of many enemies within [e.g., little Aisha].”
Also: See the 3 products that will make it unnecessary for you to ever stop watching Fox News.
How Do Ya Like Them Apples?
Those juicy, red, American apples? Hm, coastal elites? Unless you can give us a leader like this, Democrats, we’re just going to once again vote Donnie Darko into office in 2020. Who do ya’ got for us?
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
