In 1991 Saturday Night Live had a set of skits that were absolutely interminable to my taste. There were three or four of them with a recurring character played by Mike Myers. I just didn't get it. Just didn't. I didn't know anyone who was so delusional, so full of his own looks, his own glorious personality. I kept trying to figure out what was remotely attractive about the guy. His name was Lank Thompson. It took me a while to realize that it really was a joke, and eventually I thought it was kind of funny, if only kind of.
Certainly this is not my favourite character created by Myers. But it is okay, when locked up in the wayback machine, caught under the dust of 25 years.
It is, however, not okay when I am hearing it over and over again on the news every evening, even (as delver rootnose vented just two days ago) when the man voicing his whatever-it-is-he-wants-to-say has nothing to say.
For those of you who don't remember Lank Thompson or who don't "get" it when you watch it (you probably will -- I didn't get very much that year as I was in my first year of teaching full time and my last year of writing my doctoral thesis all at the same time), the Myers-played Thompson said over and over again that he was a handsome man, and smiled with a broad needy smile, fake crinkly eyes, and a hunched-over manner that had echoes of the "Wild and Crazy Guys" from Dan Ackroyd and Steve Martin. Instead of wiggling his shoulders he did a play gun move that was anything but cool. The whole point was that he was selling a course so you too could be a handsome man. And the testimonials were so sincere. "I took your course, and now I am a handsome man, too."
This is Donald Trump in a nutshell, without the slightly-inoffensive "like me and tell me I am handsome so I will believe in myself" aura. With his braggadocio and simplistic view of the world, his claim that, for example:
We’re going to be building up our military. We’re going to be making our military so big and so strong and so great... It will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it. Nobody’s going to mess with us.
Because that has worked so well before.
Trump is not made of Polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon). But he acts as if he thinks he is. He probably does think it. He is the infomercial Lank Thompson who actually believes that he is the most handsome man in the world. And he says it over and over and over again -- "When I am president, we will win so much you'll get tired of it." He believes that the Hispanics will choose him more than any other candidate. Either he is making this up in his own mind, or he has been surrounded by people telling him how wonderful he is that he has come to believe what they say about him. Perhaps that second option is what has happened. This bullying guy, ultimately horribly insecure, has come to believe what others have to say about him, needing that reassurance constantly.
Or maybe he isn't the insecure guy but really is a clueless awful delusional bully. Maybe he isn't acting.
I didn't really think Lank Thompson was that funny. He was playing a guy who wanted to be handsome and convince others that he was. I wanted to think that Trump was wanting to be liked. And that insistence that people loved him reminded me of the Myers character. But Trump is apparently not playing a character. He seems to believe it is the real situation -- that people do love him. That people trust him.
It can't be the truth, can it? I would like to have Donald Trump relegated to late night infomercials. But I doubt he would be even as charming as the uncomfortable Lank Thompson.