America's Reality Principle

Who would have thought that Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—the man who specializes in orange hair, mail-order brides and tacky casinos—would be destined to be America’s greatest truth teller, the man who made Eric Snowden seem like a priest guarding your confession and Chelsea Manning seem like the avatar of confidentiality? Now, I should back down from the hyperbole just a bit. After all, I’m only WRITING about Trump. I’m not pretending to be the man and I’m only incidentally channeling his blustering energies. But incident and accident are precisely what make Donald Trump our avatar of honesty, the fashion police telling it like it is about the Emperor’s clothes. He is our great national mirror, the looking glass we have all stepped through but never acknowledged. Donald Trump may not aspire towards honesty. I have no doubt that he is prepared to utter any sentence, mouth any word that may result in a vote in the primaries. But due to his unhinged elocution, the power of his blunt persona, Donald Trump has become America’s Reality Principle. Like the great citrus-hued mane upon his furrowed brow, he has forced us to look under the rug and see what we have been sweeping under its tattered fabric for decades.

Just last weekend, during the Republican debate in South Carolina, Trump dared to utter a fact that had been beyond the reach of our greatest historians: that George W. Bush was president of the United States onSeptember 11th, 2001. This staggering revelation, a leak of staggering proportions, rocked the Republican establishment, which had been divided on whether Bill Clinton had been the president on that fateful day or whether Barack Obama had in fact been retroactively inaugurated earlier that month. Trump further added to the scandalous atmosphere by insisting that not only was George W. Bush president during the 9/11 attacks but that his subsequent decision to launch a war in Iraq was justified by only the flimsiest of pretexts and in fact made the country less safe, creating a chaos-zone where a group like ISIS could rise and come into power. These painfully obvious facts could have been pointed out by anyone from Colin Powell to Hilary Clinton but it took Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—in a fit of pique at the younger Bush brother to force Republicans to come face to face with a reality they had been ignoring for a decade.

Trump has forced the Republican Party—yes the Republican Party!—into a bona fide identity crisis, a moment of rueful introspection. The party has for years toyed with the most racist and xenophobic currents in American society. St. Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake, launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town mostly famous for the abduction and murder of three civil rights workers. George H.W. Bush earned his presidency with an ad showing the big black murderer that Michael Dukakis let out of prison. Republicans had mastered the art of massaging our darkest fears while insisting that they were really the party of hope and dreams. It took the sheer guts of Donald Trump to bring those fears front and center—Mexican rapists and border walls as things of beauty. Members of the party elite are cringing at this exposure of their party’s dirty little secret, their ability to rile up working-class white Americans to vote for candidates who vented blue-collar outrage but implemented policies to help the rich and powerful. For the first time in two generations, party leaders are forced to take a good hard look at the dynamics they set in motion. All because of the genius of Donald Trump.

But Trump’s colossal powers are by no means limited to the right-wing of American’s political spectrum. The Trump aura has made its presence felt on the left as well. Just last week, there was an incident at Rutgers University. The controversial conservative gay twitter celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos was delivering a speech on the failures of liberalism at American universities. He was interrupted with several students who voiced their disapproval and then smeared themselves with blood-red paint. When these students would not stop their protest, the other students in the audience began to shout “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until the protesters left. Who would have thought that of all the people in America, of all the people in the world, living or dead, it was the name of the Republican front-runner that would come to stand for free-speech on campus—those five letters serving as both a club and a shield, weapons to be wielded against the increasingly censorious denizens of the far left on campus, a warning about which direction even our university students will turn if they feel themselves too constrained by the ever-tightening strictures of PC.

No less than Anakin Skywalker, Donald Trump has been a virgin birth, born of America itself, a man created to force us to see what it is not expedient to look at and to hear what we could rather not listen to. Donald Trump has been brought to the world by the very midichlorians of America itself to show us who we are and what we are in danger of becoming. Let us listen to him with both glee and gratitude, let us glean what we can from his words of incidental wisdom and then let us send him back that that hall of mirrors that is reality TV, where we can embrace him without fear for the rest of his days.