By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — According to one published report, a potential New Hampshire primary voter has stated: “We need the truth. We don’t have to like the truth. But we need it.”
Agreement on this comes from this spiritual corner. The truth is that Donald Trump has an endless supply of money and a lot of people are smitten. That is because a lot of people have very little money (because people like him have it) and wish we did so that we could do exactly what he’s doing: capitalize (literally) on the fact that so many Americans are stupid and crave simple solutions.
Except that Trump’s solutions are completely vacuous, patronizing, hideously elitist, and thus perfectly suited to a nation that is spiritually lost, internationally humiliated, and has trouble accepting the fact that a lot our swaggering notions are simply nostalgic hogwash. Less than 1% of Americans live without wrangling with a checkbook, struggling for health care, planning our children’s college costs, managing our fleeting retirement funds.
To live without worry is to live without responsibility.
Trump is the glittering hotel front in which most of us cannot register but still get a vicarious thrill imagining that we can. He is “the lifestyle of the rich and famous” that we incongruously believe is our entitlement—even if it is a virtual entitlement. He personifies the expensive media cartoons that we watch on the web instead of the judicious thinking we don’t do in the head.
He is the gilded existence of American chauvinism that tugs at our misplaced feelings of exceptionalism and prerogative and are eagerly nourished by the indulgent moguls who live better than us and get us to applaud them for it.
Trump is smart because he understands that the United States is a gossip culture. Of that culture, he has been president for a long time already. He knows that a lot of people would love to do what he is doing: say anything we want, shock everybody we can, operate with no moral parameters, and have no one to report to, monitor, edit, or correct us.
Mexicans are rapists. Sure! Easy and satisfying to declare. This one is an idiot; that one is a disaster; I don’t care what they say. Exclaiming this kind of stuff out loud to cheering crowds is incredibly gratifying and, dammit, makes us all feel good! And—just for a moment—wealthy and powerful.
In short, the smartest adult in the nation knows that a lot of us still wish we were just kids. America loves a good showman who does not require us to think. And in fairness, living in this grim, postmodern world of jihadists, domestic terrorists, drones, and digitalization, who really wants to think? Wish I could afford not to think and just blurt out whatever comes to mind!
Another voter has opined: “I think he means what he says. He loves America, and he wants it to be better. And that’s what I love about him.”
Trump does mean what he says—from his penthouse of political cynicism. But Trump doesn’t know what it means for America to be better. That’s because he doesn’t live in this country. He lives in the Trump Tower.
He knows this and he also knows we all wish for this. That’s because Trump is smart and rich and we are stupid and owe a lot of money. Fantasy sells. Thankfully, fantasy—like a thrown-over hairline—recedes.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas, California. You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
Trump’s comparative popularity at the moment stems from the fact that he is saying what most people already believe. The politicians will not say what Trump says because it is politically incorrect. It would offend Hispanics. One of the major problems this country faces today is political correctness. Political correctness is killing us. Why Hispanics would support illegal immigration is a puzzle to me. No other country allows illegal immigration, including Mexico. Why should ours? — Jerome Liner, Cincinnati, Ohio