White House race is a vulgar reality TV show
MUD-SLINGING is inevitable in every US Presidential race. Tax returns are pored over, mistresses hunted down and candidates’ spouses become fair game. Sooner or later Melania Trump’s past as a glamour girl would be dredged up to embarrass or possibly inflame envy for the White House contender. Heidi Cruz, the patrician Goldman Sachs banker would emerge to either anoint her husband as a safe pair of hands or condemn him as the ultimate insider.
The only extraordinary aspect of this week’s set-to between Trump and Cruz, the sole Republican candidate with a chance of beating him, was the vicious and insulting style of Trump’s retaliation.
The billionaire mogul could have reacted with humour or pride or even beamed indulgently as was Nicolas Sarkozy’s habit whenever he was confronted with reminders of Carla Bruni’s racy past.
There was no need to turn the photograph of his wife from her modelling heyday, sprawled naked on a sheepskin rug and posing coquettishly for the camera into a crude and sexist face-off about the merits of two political wives.
Trump retweeted side-by-side pictures of both middle-aged ladies, Heidi grimacing and Melanie perfectly coiffed, over a banner braying about how The Images Are Worth A Thousand Words.
The implication was clear – that the thrice-married Donald had bagged the better bird.
SO WAS his first line of attack which was to threaten to ‘spill the beans’ on Heidi’s past. As a doyen of reality TV thanks to The Apprentice, Trump knows how to leave his audience wanting more.
He knows how even baseless threats, a tawdry confession, the thrill of competition, the straight-talking insensitivity pioneered by Simon Cowell leave viewers hooked and squirming in their seats.
He’s a consummate showman who uses his wife, his opponents’ wives, the disabled, immigrants and unemployment as material for the juggernaut enter- tainment show he has hawked around the US since he threw his top hat into the ring. Every time he says something racist, vulgar or brags about the size of his manhood, his ratings soar.
He calls women bimbos, dogs or fat pigs and the judges in his repulsive reality TV show – aka the American voters – fall even more in love with him.
He wins supporters because he ‘says it like it is’, because the prize he’s holding out is making America Great Again, winding back the clock to an idealised past when ‘folks’ had full employment and slept soundly in their beds.
He will smash Isis as surely as he will destroy the Washington elite with its lily-livered tolerance for minorities and links to Wall Street.
Big talk is his currency, not the specifics of policy or politics but in this week’s battle of the wives he gave us a glimpse into the world according to Trump.
It’s a chilling place where rivals are roundly humiliated and exploited. Where the pathetic politics of the Twitter rant and the internet trolls trumps the slow-moving wheels of democracy and civilised debate.
WHERE justice is decided in the parliament of social media, insults are traded on Twitter and strength is measured in loud mockery and boisterous one-upmanship. The US elite’s grip on political and economic power may make a joke of America’s claims to meritocracy. The blue collar workers who admire Trump yearn for opportunities and a release from the fear that grips them in the face of change.
But be careful what you wish for. The corridors of power may be a cold and unwelcoming place for an outsider in Washington. But being an insider in the court of King Donald, might be a far nastier and more unforgiving place.