Tall tales and gas guzzlers
by Tom Sullivan
A random shooting here. A natural disaster there. A toddler running the White House. Another shot in the face. Rays of hope appearing like the calm in the eye of a Category 5 hurricane. Sometimes it feels the clock is ticking on America and time is running out.
Don’t go looking to Matt Taibbi for hope this Labor Day. Taibbi’s jaundiced eye is particularly yellow in his examination of the cult surrounding the acting president. “The average American likes meat, sports, money, porn, cars, cartoons, and shopping,” he writes at Rolling Stone. Democrats need to worry their 2020 pitch is relentlessly negative about all that.
What makes MAGA cultists love their hero is not his absent appeals to their better selves. Rather, Trumpism means never having to say you’re sorry for being like him:
Ronald Reagan once took working-class voters away from Democrats by offering permission to be proud of the flag. Trump offers permission to occupy the statistical American mean: out of shape, suffering from gas, poorly read, anti-intellectual, treasuring things above meaning, and hiding an awful credit history.
Trump in this way is more all-American than Mark Spitz, Liberace, Oprah, Audie Murphy, and Marilyn Monroe. He’s a monument to the consumption economy. He represents fake boobs, the short con, the tall tale, gas guzzlers, and a hundred other American traditions.
He glided down a golden escalator into Calaveras County in 2015 and bet Jim Smiley Democrats his frog could outdistance their prized jumper. The MAGAs lined up to watch him get the better of smartypants Democrats with the help of a little Russian-made quail shot. They’re already lining up again for 2020.
Taibbi continues:
This is why the endless chronicling of Trump’s lies does little to dent his popularity. Trump’s voters don’t need to read PolitiFact to see what Trump’s about. They see it in his waistline. Few politicians in history have revealed what they are to voters more than Trump. Christ, we even know what the man’s penis looks like.
“The cool thing about Trump,” says 38-year-old Cincinnati native Jeremy Holtkamp, “is that it’s just about being an American.”
So is selling snake oil and running a shell game. Trump assures MAGAs they are not the ones being conned. Democrats will get nowhere trying to convince them they are.
Meanwhile, 94-year-old Jimmy Carter is back to building homes for Habitat for Humanity after hip surgery in the spring. The former president and his wife Rosalynn Carter head to Nashville, Tennessee in October to help build 21 new homes.
In MAGA America, because people are not selling merchandise emblazoned with his face or rude taunts, that makes Carter a loser. But in Jackson Mississippi, Habitat and $1,000 a month, no strings attached from a local guaranteed-income pilot project — Springboard to Opportunities — are transforming Cheryl Gray’s life:
Gray’s relationship with money changed dramatically. She used to want to put her children in the hottest clothes to prove that she was providing for them, but now saw the value of visiting the clearance racks. She paid off $4,000 in credit card debt. She found an $11-an-hour teaching job at a preschool and another part-time job, so she could save more money. As her new bank account grew from zero to $1,000 to $2,000, she began looking to leave the projects.
And she’s sending $60 a week for her children’s tutoring.
You won’t hear that celebrated at a Trump rally.