Trump: Ten Years On

From the Escalator to the White House.

“We need somebody who can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.”

– Donald Trump, June 16, 2015.

Ten years ago to the day, multi-billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star Donald John Trump came down the escalator and announced his candidacy for the President of the United States to a crowded lobby at Trump Tower in New York, New York, USA. It was the end of the 2000s as we knew it. In his remarks, he called out then-President Barack Obama as the opposite of a cheerleader for America — negative force incarnate. If Barack Obama was the repudiation of George W. Bush and the establishment conservatism of the age, the Trump phenomenon of 2016 would be the outright rejection of Barack Obama as a whole. It’s hard to imagine sometimes that it’s been a decade of the distinctly coifed New York loudmouth, but one must also remember what politics looked like in the mid-2010s. Barack Obama was effectively a lame duck after the 2014 midterms led to Republican majorities in both the House and Senate; people like Ben Sasse of Nebraska were being praised by The Economist; the rollout of Obamacare was a remarkable disaster.

“And remember the $5 billion website? $5 billion we spent on a website, and to this day it doesn’t work. A $5 billion website.”

Not to mention ISIS was sweeping through the Middle East with terrifying brutality, we were complaining about social justice warriors, Gamergate was unfolding, and the crisis in Ukraine was only just beginning. Vine was still a thing, Snapchat was just getting popular, and Elon Musk was the hero to Redditors everywhere. I was still in college, and I was doing phone calls and volunteer work for a candidate who had already announced: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. (Don’t crucify me for that one; I too had a libertarian phase.) Trump was the 12th candidate to announce his bid for the presidency under the Republican ticket, with 17 major candidates vying to win the party’s nomination that year. Most if not all of the candidates, with the exception of Senators Cruz, Paul, and Rubio and former Governor Mike Huckabee, became all but irrelevant and have fallen into the dustbin of political has-beens. (Remember Rick Santorum, anyone?)

Politics, as we knew it, would never really be the same, for better and for worse. For Americans, and I do mean Americans, the brand of the United States certainly got a chauvinistic, fuck-you-I’m-going-to-tell-it-like-it-is avatar of the country, who could and did grab women by the pussy, describe how he would “bomb the shit out of them,” and assign nicknames to those who got under his skin, from “Little Marco” to “Crooked Hillary,” with Trump embodying vibe-based politics more than the well-manufactured and media-coordinated groundswell of Barack Obama. While Obama may have been the first president to take full advantage of the emerging social media environment through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (the song “Crush on Obama” won a YouTube award in 2007), Trump would be the embodiment of a fully digital noosphere arguing about the future of the country.

For millions, talk about fair trade deals, bringing back jobs, and deporting the immigrants felt like even if just for a moment, someone had heard the cries of those in the heartland who had been wailing out in the wilderness hoping for some sort of savior to come and rescue them from their atomizing captivity held hostage by the Babylonians of a feckless Republican Party, and coastal elites and cosmopolitans who did not care about the browning of America. Racialized identity politics, once a subject of great lament among classical liberal and conservative media pundits alike (from Carl Benjamin’s trolling of the alt-right to Steven Crowder claiming he wasn’t a bigot by hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos), would come to dominate and become the baseline for political organization and theory for many on all sides of the political spectrum as each American election became less about the ideas and more about the patronage and demographics. Say what you will about the alt-right and its leadership; many of its ideas have become mainstreamed, with cautious optimism and fearful worry that such issues have become co-opted.

Writing about Trump is difficult, because there’s Trump the Man, Trump the Administrations, and so on, but then there’s Trump the Avatar. While I’ve long held to the Psalmist’s words about not trusting in princes and in the sons of men in whom there is no salvation, Trump as Avatar and as President has bought Americans time. As I’ve written previously:

What I can say with any degree of certainty is that at best, we have bought ourselves time. Four more years to get your house in order, more money, land, networks, security, all of it. Whatever comes next, there is tons of work to be done to ensure further victories, and if there be losses then at least to move back into the bulwarks you have built and crafted with your fellow man.

While the first administration of Trump seems and feels like a wash, the issues were still front and center, even if he was woefully unprepared for every legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic hurdle that was thrown in his way as a stumbling block; it was of course an eye-opener to those who wanted to see how power really worked. Even writing now, while one could go through the archives, the C-SPAN recorded transcripts, and the timeline if you go far back enough, the memes and presence of Trump remain more in my consciousness than the desire to go through objectively, line by line, the good and the bad of his first term. From Sean Spicer having mismatched shoes, to Covfefe, to being the first American president to step foot on North Korean soil, Trump has embodied a Jacksonian aura and mantle to himself that has outshined the presence of any of his contemporary predecessors. Most Trump supporters online are more negative toward Ronald Reagan than any of them would have been during the 2016 primary, to say nothing of the 1 in 10 Bernie voters going for Trump in 2016.

Of course there’s the nostalgia bias. I can tell you exactly where I was when they called the election for him on the TV. I watched my debate coach cry into his beer and leave the area to call his boyfriend and cry about fascism in his “Bill for First Lady” t-shirt. I watched rioting happen in the City of Brotherly Love, and walking to Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center with a shit-eating grin on my face because the bull in the china shop beat that witch and pissed off all of the people I knew who hated me for being White and not willing to be a good liberal who would just lay down and die. I remember hooking up with a Bernie supporter who was more of a hate-fuck thing after she found out my politics (Chuddy-chasers are real), and I got to enjoy my final years of university with this orange middle finger in the White House.

Trump’s impact on American politics cannot be fully written, as his term in the White House does not end until January 2029. Of course his announcement would be followed by the international news of Britain voting Leave for Brexit, Nigel Farage was called the Trump of the UK, and every “far-right” politician on the continent had been given some kind of allegorical Trump comparison. Trump both in and out of office has been seen as a possible example to emulate, as well as a political figure to bemoan as the reaction from both the EU and various European Governments was to look at Trump and make sure it was impossible for any kind of right-wing populism ever to happen in their respective nations. The AfD always seems to be on the verge of being banned despite its growth and popularity, Farage has been a heel and a gatekeeper, the list goes on and on. My friends across the pond can give you a more detailed explanation, and I’m sure many of them have written quite publicly that Trump has been a net-negative for any concept of a Right-Wing Internationale. Perhaps that’s the tragedy in great power politics, not to mention difficulties when dealing with our own nationalistic tendencies when hegemonic power tends to get in the way of commiseration and coordination. That would take a whole other essay to break down and prosecute fully, but the force that Trump brought into Washington in 2017 and his four years out of office during Biden’s term certainly play a large role.

The first Trump administration does feel like a whirlwind of tweets and censorship, of pink pussy hats and a terrible understanding of how to wield political power, of monitoring the situation, with ridiculously high turnover rates for various cabinet positions (Rex Tillerson was once Secretary of State, you know).

I’m trying really hard not to relitigate and retell everything you’ve already seen and lived through. We were all here for the lockdowns, we were all radicalized in some way or another by censorship, the summer of the Floyd riots, the election, and the political persecutions that came after the electoral justice protests in early 2021. Trump has fundamentally changed the dynamic and dynamism of what’s left of America’s civic national identity; if anything, he destroyed it. The “sacred norms” of democracy stopped when Trump made a dick joke in response to Rubio’s comment about small hands on the debate stage. The idea of anti-White is now spoken of and warned against in official government policy, and the repudiation of Barack Obama has become the avatar of Americans everywhere who have been dispossessed, atomized, and left to die by drugs or violent immigrant gangs because anarcho-tyranny is the only law, who thought just maybe their political Prester John came over the hills from the East and would rescue them.

I remember vividly during the Biden administration driving to work where I live, a pretty rural area, how countless people still had their Trump flags flying as if they were defying Reconstruction for the second time. Things were obviously rough, the Emperor had no brain, and the accelerator was given a lead foot as countless millions flooded the country, only for a literal senior moment on the debate stage to lead to the glass ceiling remaining intact for the second time. Thank you, Mr. President, for keeping women out of the White House. Plenty of other writers and pundits have argued that Biden was the accelerationist candidate, and in retrospect, that was putting the cart before the horse. Trump was the accelerationist candidate. He has been and will continue to be a bull in the china shop of the American political order, perhaps even the end to our current party system. He has, directly or indirectly, awakened American identity politics for actual Americans, raised the issues of America’s existence, and while in a former age responsible for countering the American Cassandra, Patrick J. Buchanan, he has only gone on in his political career ultimately to vindicate him.

The President famously tweeted once, “I just want to stop the world from killing itself!”

While that remains to be seen, I think he probably stopped or delayed the country from killing itself, for however long we may have left. We’ve had ten years of Trump, both in and out of the White House, and we’re lucky to have him even if he’s not always the leader we want. But godspeed, Mr. President, because we’re rooting for you, even if it’s just to buy us time. Carl Benjamin, in a livestream with Dave Greene a few years ago, had said that the Trump story was not yet over in the midst of the 2020 election, and that there was a third act yet to come for him; his return was narratively set in stone somehow. Trump’s political comeback in 2024 is unprecedented, both for being the second president in U.S. history to serve two non-consecutive terms, but also to survive political persecution, arrests, and multiple assassination attempts. He has earned, by Providence, the White House once again. Morgoth eerily remarked that Trump’s comeback has that sense of the 1980s action film with the ferocious third-act return and happy ending. Trump being a figure and a sign of the older, 1980s wealth and excess makes him a living embodiment of an age we’ve only reinterpreted through vaporwave and Little Dark Age edits.

Ten years of Trump, and when we conclude in January of 2029 it will have been almost 14 years of Trump being the main character of America’s great political theater.

Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many tweets and foibles, who wandered full many ways after he had descended down that infamous tower in New York.

Trump’s story, and the American story, are very much far from over.

It’s been ten years, so let’s strap in and see what the final act of this play has to offer.

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