I figured this might be my last chance to see Trump Live — or alive — before the November election. Maybe it’s because I’ve been missing the Americana of the Midwest or bummed for missing Dylan and Nelson up at Woodstock in July, eager to see a stadium show.
Parking was a nightmare, I mean you couldn’t even get close to the Coliseum and I was reminded of how my dad drove out to Nassau County from Detroit in 1981 to catch Pink Floyd I don’t think he ever got in and I almost turned around myself before refueling at the local Taco Bell and parking the car about a mile away on some suburban road. Nearing the Hempstead Turnpike on foot I see scores of Haitian protestors cordoned off into one of Long Island’s “Free Speech Zones” and plenty of “Jews for Trump” waving the Zionist flag. Walking past this scene felt like crossing the picket line and my heart began to race. I mean I’m no Hunter S. Thompson but there’s this sense you’re walking into enemy territory sober and unarmed and it’s all a bit weird walking into that sea of bright red hats — it’s the hats which unsettle me the most — still coded as some granola liberal on assignment from the nation’s largest urban public university. Feeling all alone I gravitate toward the vendors, mostly dudes in from the city looking to make a quick buck selling someone else’s gear. I asked my comrade wearing a blacked-out Trump 2024 hat what he’s got though I don’t have it in me to put red on and then there it is: Let’s Go Brandon emblazoned on the front of a dark blue cap. Now this I can live with since I, too, agree: Fuck Joe Biden. My costume was now infallible — big plastic rimmed tortoise shell glasses notwithstanding — you never would have guessed this kid voted for Barack Obama not once but twice.
Fredric Jameson, in the long introduction to The Political Unconscious, introduces an idea central to Marxist literary criticism that within the capitalist mode of production, cultural products provide imaginary solutions to real social contradictions. I quickly realize the truth of this insight while standing in a mile long line snaking around the Coliseum’s parking lot, starting with what I heard a father saying to his son behind me. “All these people here are proof that not everyone’s been brainwashed,” the man said to his son — yet isn’t it true liberals speak the same way about the half of the country that, as Barack Obama eloquently put it, clings to their guns and religion? I was with the deplorables now, and they were proud of their basket, too. “The Jews they’re waking up” the man said again to his son (the Jews for Trump faction now filing in line behind us). He went on: “All they care about are having men in the girl’s bathroom.” The text I sent out to half a dozen friends that night was simple: our elites are happy for us to hate each other, denigrate each other, shoot each other, even, as long as they are left out of the picture and free to accumulate even vaster sums of wealth for themselves and their reptilian cronies. Trump himself is at best an egotistical opportunist who seized on the historical moment to gain the validation of tens of millions of people, a validation never equal to the kind he lacked from his own father. I was here to read Trump as a “text” — as cultural phenomenon [1] — an aesthetic experience no amount of fact-checking or reasoned argument could penetrate. Trump as cipher for a system whose structural features produce mass inequality, immiseration [2] and indigence; Trump as “figure” through which coheres 500 years of genocide, enslavement, and empire that laid the bedrock of the “democracy” Democrats would like you to believe is now at stake. Trump as alibi for capital.
Furthermore, Jameson writes presciently concerning the question of nationalism, stating “a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism (any more than it can grasp that of religion or of fascism) can scarcely hope to reappropriate such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence” (Political Unconscious 298). Those on the liberal left today might scoff at such an assertion to take nationalism seriously, let alone a dialectical reading of nationalism as containing the seeds of a utopian reconfiguration, however they are woe to do so. The collective in front of me in Uniondale, New York — and it is for sure a collective, no matter how vitriolic or disagreeable — produces a sense of solidarity, understanding, and trust amongst its ranks, a feeling that we’re all in this together, up against the deep state and its pedophilic cabal — and the libtards sure won’t stop us.
The potential for Utopian transformation all around me, I lean into the vibes, which were part county fair part classic rock concert. The stadium having reached capacity, I join my brothers and sisters in overflow on the lawn, where elephant ears are for sale, “loaded” fries, and corn dogs (I had a Sprite, which somehow hit the spot). Over the PA Elton John (Trump’s personal favorite) was followed by Elvis Presley, ‘Suspicious Minds’ to be precise, fitting track for the occasion, the jam paired with signs that read “Kamala is Hamas” and “Fake News is the Virus.” I’m not gonna lie, the playlist was alright, and it wasn’t a bad scene out on the lawn. You have Jews for Trump, Blacks for Trump, and plenty of Latinos and Indians for Trump too, though not by name. This is fascism doing multiculturalism, and doing it well (I’ve seen college classrooms whiter than this). If I had the cash, I might have bought myself a Pet Lives Matter shirt (my personal favorite) or a White Privilege Card from the vendors, just to show off back home.
This all comes to a halt as Lee Greenwood is blasted through the PA signaling the Big Man’s entrance. The guy really knows how to work a crowd and I couldn’t help but smile a bit myself when he comes out. The speech itself was standard-fare Trump — attacks on New York as a “Third World” city, ranting ad infinitum about “migrant crime”, and a shoutout to special guest Rudy Giuliani — but one set of lines caught my attention, and I had to pull my head up from the shrimp teriyaki bowl I bought to listen in. “I’m the greatest of all time! Maybe greater than Elvis” — I burst out laughing — he goes on: “but Elvis had a guitar. I don’t have a guitar. I don’t have the privilege of a guitar,” implying I, Trump, is really, actually, greater than the King himself. This is kind of like Lennon saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus (he wasn’t wrong), but still, bigger than the King of Rock N Roll? How can you be greater than the “the greatest person that has ever walked the face of the earth”? After all, this isn’t Honolulu 1973, it’s fucking Long Island and the year is 2024, and man, you’re speaking to a crowd full of elephant ear eaters and Sprite drinkers. Eric Lott, in his reading of Elvis impersonators, writes that the “function” of Elvis impersonation is to provide “‘magical’ resolutions to social pressures confronting white working class masculinity”[3]. In other words, impersonators can be read as “figures” for the social and historical conditions that produce them — the shift from a high-wage Fordist industrial economy to a postindustrial one, for example — and tellingly, one of the states with the highest number of Elvis impersonators is Michigan, where the auto industry once reigned supreme, and which Trump won handily in 2016 and may do so again this November. Lott writes, “to reclaim and embody Elvis is to recall the moment in US history when auto workers drove an American prosperity and an empowered masculinity that they believed would shortly be their own” [4]. I mean if this doesn’t map on perfectly to describe working class attachment to Trump I don’t know what does. Trump as Elvis or Trump as Elvis impersonator? Maybe it’s not all so far off! Liberals may be dumbfounded by white working class attachment to maybe-billionaire Trump, yet fail to grasp how the Big Guy, much like Elvis impersonation, provides an “imaginary triumph over the working class circumstances” for which both are stand-ins [5]. I could feel this antiquated structure of feeling in Trump’s rhetoric — the promise to return to a bygone era, the return of industrial manufacturing to the heartland that is central to his economic messaging, and most grotesquely the promise to deport 20 million immigrants, to usher in a return to an “old school” White USA — but also in the artifacts around me, from ‘Proud To Be An American’ to the seas of red, white and blue, to my White Privilege Card.
After repeated claims about cannibalistic migrants in Springfield, Ohio (“I’ll be in Springfield next week, you may never hear from me again!”) and so-called “migrant crime” (which is entirely fake), I had enough. Driving home in the Long Island dark, I stop at Ralph’s Italian Ice for a peanut butter parfait, and the dream — the reversed utopian image of fascist collectivity — began to fade away, and History began to hurt again [6].
Notes
1 J.D. Vance (before he sold his soul to MAGA to win his Senate seat) once understood the power of Trump as a cultural object when he described Trumpism as “cultural heroin,” hence the title of this reflection.
2 “It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker […] must grow worse. […] The [general law] necessitates an accumulation of misery equivalent to the accumulation of capital” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, ch. 25).
3 Eric Lott. “All the King’s Men.” Black Mirror. 2017.
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their own intention.” (Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 102).