CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph Source: Photo by Rene Bernal

Donald Trump has always struck me as a repulsive figure. Not only because he is a political symptom of the terminal stage of cancer in American society, but also because for years he served as its television billboard. A man who managed to turn banality and arrogance into a full-fledged ideology.

Long before he would transform himself into a messianic figure for the American right, Trump was the creator of one of the most grotesque pedagogies of modern capitalism: the reality show The Apprentice. It was, in essence, a kind of prototype for the Balkan reality spectacles—only with golden elevators and Manhattan skylines in the background. In this spectacle, a group of hapless contestants competed to sell whatever could be sold—from bananas and plastic trinkets to real estate—simply to avoid the moment when His All-Successful Majesty Trump, seated at an enormous table like a corporate sultan, would cut them down with the famous verdict: “You’re fired!”

One of them has remained particularly vivid in my memory—a man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying that dull, sorrowful look of someone who already suspects he is merely a prop in someone else’s performance. With something close to religious devotion, he explained to Trump that he had never read a single book in his life except Trump’s own—How to Get Rich. Or How to Become Rich. Or perhaps How to Become Trump If You Are Not Trump. Something along those lines. The scene was so perfectly grotesque that it could have served as a textbook illustration of the entire cultural model Trump was selling to America—and to the world.

And that, in truth, was the main reason for my disgust. Not because he is rich—capitalism, after all, is full of wealthy people, and some of them even manage to go through life without turning into caricatures of their own offshore accounts—but because for years he preached one of the most morally grotesque pseudo-philosophies the modern world has managed to produce: the idea that the ordinary person need not think too much, nor ask too many questions about the nature of the order in which he lives. It is enough, according to this doctrine, to learn how to step over one’s fellow human beings more efficiently, more quickly, and more ruthlessly; perhaps then, one day, he too might approach the blessed state of living a life resembling that of Mr.........

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