Selling the fantasy
“If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” is a familiar conversation-starter. Flying? Invisibility? Super strength?
Marvel built a media empire around that fantasy. DC Comics too. Before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, If I Had a Million (1932) considered what Average Joes would do if they came into a sudden financial windfall.
Donald J. Trump, heir to daddy Fred’s fortune, has been selling a fantasy his entire life. When he came to prominence in New York City in the 1970s, he conned New York Times reporters into believing he owned properties his father actually owned. Even the chauffeured Cadillac he ferried them around in during the interview was leased by Fred.
In If I Had a Million , several recipients of million-dollar checks use the money to get even with those who’ve done them wrong. W.C. Fields buys eight cars to crash into “road hogs” he encounters. Others find out great wealth does not make them invulnerable.
In addition to living a gilded fantasy, Trump has used his money for the former his whole life. He has so far evaded the latter “through sheer shameless and sociopathic behavior,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed Wednesday night.
“Immunity, complete immunity, total supremacy over everyone and everything, even the law,” Hayes suggests, is the fantasy Trump is selling even now. “Even the law itself cannot hold him and cannot restrain him, that he is sovereign over it.” If you could have one superpower? That’s the fantasy that by the millions Trump’s MAGA followers have bought like a limited-offer household product sold on late-night TV.
What would they do with their superpower? Like Fields, get even and get away with it.
Hayes says:
Getting away with it? That’s the fantasy he is selling to so many people that a lot of people really want to buy into. Plenty of people daydream about what they might do without restraints, what they would say or do to their boss or their coworker or their sister-in-law. They want to imagine a world in which they, like Trump, can transgress in any way they want to, in which they can say whatever they want to whoever they want and not face consequences. In which they could lie, cheat, and steal — maybe even use force. A sort of seductive mythos, particularly to a certain kind of man, as the polling bears out. A seductive mythos that he is selling and selling openly when he tells people, “I am your retribution.”
To be supreme, unchallenged, beyond the law, a law unto themselves is the MAGA myth. Tied up, yes, with white Christian nationalism, a people chosen by God (and their leader, too) to rule a land founded by and for white Europeans where all others exist to serve them.
If I had a rocket launcher…I’d make somebody pay, sings Bruce Cockburn.
“Even the law itself cannot hold him and cannot restrain him, that he is sovereign over it,” is Trump’s pitch. Follow me and live like the rich and powerful. That’s the freedom he’s selling.
For Trump’s entire life he has gotten away with it. He has flouted the law and bought his way out of trouble more times than we can count. One of the biggest reasons to hold Trump accountable now, finally, says Hayes, is to puncture the myth.
But one reason it is such an easy sell for Trump is that everyone knows the rich live by a different set of rules. Equal justice under law is itself a myth that has eaten away at the Constitution and the American ideal of equality since our founding by wealthy, white men. The second Gilded Age has driven that truth home with Trump as an icon, rendering the law a joke and our other institutions as well. Bringing him to justice is an imperative. Torches and pitchforks are the alternative.