I'm tired of hearing about Donald Trump.
I'm tired of the fact that every time I open my news app, every time I am in a public space and there’s a television on, every time I meet a stranger, the word Trump will inevitably plop into my consciousness like a used paper towel onto a pile of mashed potatoes. I am tired of seeing the saggy mass of creamsicle-colored skin and doll’s hair spewing hatred from every screen I pass. I'm tired of reading about what xenophobic, misogynist vitriol has burbled up from his and his associates’ crow-holes today, and what all of the Very Serious People who are paid to have Very Serious Opinions think about it. And more than anything else, I'm tired of everyone pretending that the overgrown toddler whose very existence seems to be predicated upon his need to validate himself by stamping his name on things like a dog marking a telephone pole is an actual option for the presidency, rather than what it actually is: the death knell of one of our two main political parties.
The very fact that the Republicans have presented a rabid gorilla with hair plugs as their nominee should be ample evidence to any sane person that they’re done for as a political force. Finished. Gone-zo. Reagan, at least, had been in politics before (fun fact: he got his start in politics as president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he successfully negotiated for the payment of residuals to union actors), and Schwarzenegger doesn’t count because California. Trump, meanwhile, has no experience whatsoever in governance and, as evidenced by the four separate occasions on which his companies have filed for bankruptcy, he's not a terribly good businessman either. He’s not good at running things, except his mouth. Even his campaign is a joke, as anyone who’s familiar with either political campaigns or massive railway disasters can attest. And yet, in the midst of the GOP’s continuing insistence that it should be taken seriously as a political party despite having sent luminaries like Michele Bachmann, Steve King and everyone’s favorite Mad Magazine character, Louie Gohmert, to help run the country into the ground, they somehow allowed a washed-up reality star with the charm of a deer tick and the rhetoric of a schoolyard bully to become the face of their party. Way to go, guys.
Look, the Republican brand has been in a state of slow decline ever since 92, when Newton Leroy Gingrich and Frank Luntz decided that the way to America’s heart was through its bile duct. By systematically convincing more and more of the lunatic fringe of the country that the GOP represented them, they won huge gains in Congress, got our nation’s second dumbest president elected (Harding was the dumbest, hands down - in a rare moment of profundity, he once said “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here”) and pushed through some spectacularly regressive pieces of legislation. With their power consolidated, they passed laws aimed at restricting access to the polls and drastically redrew the electoral map in order to further stymie both the Democratic party and the will of the American people, making it so that no matter how heavy turnout was among Democrats, a majority in the House and a good shot at the Senate were all but guaranteed for the GOP.
But their power came at a cost. By consistently appealing to the most base emotions and prejudices of the American people, they helped stoke a culture of fear, xenophobia and demagoguery that effectively empowered the most deplorable elements in our society, albeit not at a real policy level. They preached a message of hate for the mysterious other, whether that other be Arab, Muslim, Communist, Black, Gay, Woman, Scientist, Anyone Who Doesn't Want To Be Shot, or just Democrat. Their base ate it up, and swelled to proportions that propelled them to a string of electoral victories. Trouble is, while this served the mainstream Republican agenda of deregulation, privatization, empire building and profiteering, it didn’t do diddly for the average working bigot that they had spent the pre-election months buttering up. Their failure to repeal Obamacare is just the latest in a string of broken campaign promises to the average rightwing voter, and the average rightwing voter, being nowhere near as dumb as the average rightwing legislator would like to believe, began to notice.
Because at the same time that the GOP was propping itself up on the backs of the undereducated, underemployed and undermedicated, the ability to control message - Luntz and Gingrich’s big innovation back in 92 - was slipping out of their fingers like so much wet dogshit. They had spent years coaching Republicans on the appropriate words to use when talking about themselves and their policies, which worked great back when the press was CNN and some newspapers. But then the internet came along, with its Drudge Reports and Huffington Posts and Daily Koses (Kosses?) and suddenly people had access to information that hadn't been filtered through the “the subject says something and the press writes it down” paradigm that was so in vogue at the turn of the millennium. Suddenly, the powers that be couldn’t rely on the public to just believe whatever the hell they were told anymore. The media, which had been nicely slimmed down to a handful of well-controlled corporate outlets, suddenly counted among its ranks any jackass with a computer and a cousin in a congressional office, and the public was getting access to information that they definitely should not have been. And so, simply holding ceremonial votes once a week on repealing a healthcare law while refusing to do their actual job was no longer just a point of mockery for the Beltway insiders. It was a subject of genuine frustration for average folks on both sides of the political spectrum.
Concurrently, the rest of the established media decided that hey, scripted content is all very well and good, but that costs a lot and we have to pay people to do things like write and act and so forth, and maybe we can just find some idiots that will let us point a camera at them for a couple bucks while we sell ad time for millions. And so unscripted and semi-scripted or “reality” television quickly became the dominant presence on television, convincing the public that everyone looks like they’ve been in hair and makeup for an hour when they wake up in the morning and that the best way to solve a disagreement is weave-snatching. And in amongst the invented drama masquerading as everyday life, reality TV gave rise to a new form of celebrity that had been heretofore looked at with barely masked contempt: those who were famous simply for being famous. Suddenly, people like the Kardashians and Paris Hilton became household names not because they did anything interesting (besides have sex tapes leaked), but because they were famous. The cult of celebrity had hit critical mass. And there was one man who had the jump on all of them. That man was famous already because he erected his name in huge letters across anything he could. That man was Donald Trump.
Trump was a second rate celebrity until about ten years ago, when the rest of the world suddenly caught on to something that he had apparently known all along: through simple name repetition, you can eventually get people to take you seriously. And so NBC gave him a TV show where he was able to pretend that he was a succesful businessman and lord it over other second-rate celebrities with all the subtlety of a gold-plated peacock. Suddenly, Trump wasn’t just a word you saw on ugly buildings and books in the dollar pile at Goodwill. It came to be associated with success and wealth and bad hair. Sure, he was still an object of mockery, but the things he said started to be treated as actual news, and not just on the Republican Pravda double-team of Fox and Limbaugh. And then Obama came along, and the birther movement, and Trump’s bounty on the President’s Real Birth Certificate, and suddenly people were treating the shame of Atlantic City as though he had some real political clout. And this is when it all started to crumble for real for the GOP.
Because Trump liked the attention he was getting. Sure, he had always been famous, but suddenly he was respected as well. And there’s only one thing that a narcissist likes more than attention, and that’s the feeling that people are actually listening to him. And listen to him they did. He had all the major news programs on speed dial, and they took his calls like it was the voice of God. He spoke at political rallies, where he shouted nonsense at throngs of true believers who cheered and clapped and hung on his every hate-filled word. And so the GOP, recognizing a great marketing opportunity when it showed up in a gaudy limo, gave Trump the opportunity to try his hand at boosting ratings for the Republican race for the White House, never thinking for a moment that he had a shot in hell of beating all the other Very Serious White Men in their ranks.
It did not go well for them.
Trump resonated with the lunatics that the GOP had spent the last two decades courting in a way that Low-Energy Jeb!, little marco, Lyin’ Ted and the rest of the clown show did not. His policy points had nothing to do with this, largely because he didn’t have any. What he did have was the bombast of a carnival barker and a tendency to buck the authority of the establishment GOP. They couldn’t control him, and the lunatics loved that. He spoke his mind, and the lunatics said amen. Most of all, he quite accurately pointed out that for all of their rhetoric and grandstanding, the Republican establishment hadn't really made good on any of the promises they had made to the lunatics over the past twenty-odd years. This was a sentiment that had been whispered among the lunatics until Obama’s election, and then made flesh by the lunatics that swept into congress during the Tea Party fad of 2010, but it had never found a single face as orange and ready as Trump’s to stand for what they believed. And the problem for the GOP establishment was that unlike the rest of the charlatans they paraded out in public, who also said terrible things in order to gin up fear and hatred and votes from the lunatics, Trump actually meant what he said, insofar as he means anything he says. None of the Very Serious White Men really believe they’ll actually be able to end legal abortion, or cut ties with the UN, or force Mexico to build a wall to keep immigrants at bay, but they know that yelling “Abortion! Agenda 21! Immigrants!” will get the lunatics out on election day. Trump, however, didn’t read that part of the memo, and so when he tells audiences that he plans to “bomb the shit ” out of ISIS, he’s not making empty promises. He really does want to bomb the shit out of ISIS. And guess what? So do the lunatics. They also want to repeal Obamacare, and break off from the UN, and build a wall, and make people sign loyalty oaths, and all of the other things that the GOP has promised but not delivered on. In Trump, they see sincerity in his lies, because there’s clearly no real thought process behind them. This, coupled with the Trump brand’s association with wealth and success, has resonated with the lunatic contingent of the Republican party in a way that no other candidate has since people wanted to have a beer with a recovering alcoholic Texas governor. This, it should be noted, took the Very Serious White Men that lead the party by surprise, mostly because they had underestimated just how large a percentage of their base was now on temporary release from the asylum.
And so the end of the Grand Old Party has come, in the form of a walking stack of used band-aids with a square of dead hay on top. Because there’s no coming back from this. Trump’s poll numbers are sagging, dragging the expectations of the rest of the party with him, and many prominent voices in the GOP are seriously searching for ways to cut off the gangrenous limb to save the rest of the body. He’s managed to alienate not only the Others that have been the target of his calls to war for the duration of his campaign (that even the National Review says the GOP desperately needs to win elections), but is driving reliable Republican voters into the arms of the most hated woman on daytime talk radio for twenty four years running. And meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that Trump doesn’t care whether he wins or loses (although we all know that even if he loses, he doesn’t lose) and cares even less about the effect that has on all the other Republicans running for office this year. And this, somehow, also came as a surprise to the GOP. It’s as though they’ve never read Frankenstein (or even seen Young Frankenstein) and were totally caught off guard when the monster they’d spent years sewing together out of racism, misogyny, conspiracy theories, imperialism and a desire to return things back to the way they were on TV in the fifties suddenly came to life and said “I'm in charge now, Doc.” And even if, going into this election, they’d had the numbers to elect another president within a generation (which they don’t, thanks to their unwillingness to consider immigrants and their children as “people”), the nomination of the animated id of the Republican Party has driven that final nail into the coffin. They don't matter anymore, at least as far as the Presidency is concerned, and I'm willing to bet that within my lifetime, they won't matter at all.
Which is why I don't want to hear anything else about the tanning bed accident that’s currently heading the Republican ticket. Ever. I don't care what he thinks about anything, I don't care what he said to this person or that person. I don't care whether he understands what sarcasm is. I don't care if he turns purple and flies to the moon on a rocket he built from recycled plastic bottles and tears. Because he’s not a serious candidate. Which makes sense, because the GOP is not a serious political party. And so, for the same reason that I don't really care what the energy drink vending machine at the gym thinks about anything, I don't care what Trump, or Reince Priebus, or any of the various clowns that are clenching their sphincters and getting in line with the party think about anything. The vending machine doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the political world, and neither does the GOP, not anymore. And neither does Trump.