POLITICS
High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink
Don Watson
Quarterly Essay, $27.99

Renowned America-watcher Don Watson last checked the pulse of the indispensable nation in 2016, as it plunged toward a Trump presidency. Eight years on and Watson has again travelled America, talking with local folk to gauge the State of the Union. That union, he suggests, faces a crucial test of strength, as its meaning, foundations and promise are contested by a restless, fearful and enraged citizenry.

Watson’s last missive from America was hardly sanguine; “the whole country,” he then wrote, resembled “a battleground … like the Somme”. The situation now is, if possible, worse. In the red corner stands the grotesque Orange Man. The Donald, Watson argues, is best understood as an amalgam of stereotypical “bad actors” projected in Hollywood noir and described by Chandler and Hammett. You could, he states, “take a rough half-dozen” of these “chancers, confidence men … corrupt politicians … sleaze merchants … hucksters, grifters [and] thieves … and massage them into a decent suit” to fashion “something like” Trump.

Just as Trump the man is drawn from the depths of American culture, his political method is traditional theatre. Fifteen years ago, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote that presidential elections have become dramas that “Americans have learned to wholly consume as entertainment, divorced completely from any expectations about concrete changes in our own lives”. Watson seems to agree, noting that the world is now “full of entertainments, many of them senseless and alarming, and it is folly to believe that politics must not — or will not — imitate the public riot”.

He likens a Trump performance to ’80s-style TV wrestling, tabloid journalism and cartoons, involving “a lot of boasting, posturing and abusing”. Trump’s followers enter this world “as they enter any other fiction, knowing it’s make-believe but open to its seduction”; you dare not insist that it’s fake.

Do not think, however, that his act is as harmless as the wrestling, or that American society is no sicker than it was in Hulk Hogan’s heyday. Watson’s description of Trump’s attendance at the Ultimate Fighting Championship sounds like nothing so much as a trip to the Colosseum. Emperor Trump enters the venue to rabid applause, the crowd chanting “F--- Biden!” and “We love Trump”. After one fighter dislocates his opponent’s arm, the Donald takes his leave, pumping his fist to the crowd, which roars “USA! USA!” - were the Roman plebs so banal?

Trump is a symptom, more than a cause, of decay; he is “not the enchanter of the masses, but … the embodiment of their neuroses”. And why are the masses neurotic? For this the Democrats have as much as the Republicans to answer for. The “alienation and despair” of legions of Americans “leave them open to his predations”.

They have been brutalised, Watson writes, “in the name of free trade and globalisation”, their jobs “sold out” and “their communities [left] in ruin”, while the smug set at MSNBC tell them “how to think and what they [can] … say, as if they were some kind of inferior race”. Their racism, sexism, resentment of immigrants, and faith in firearms can be read as “existential dismay … [taking] hold of people who feel they’ve been … abandoned by the main pack and are at least subliminally living with intimations of death”.