How to Vote
The Music Man, the 1962 movie based on the 1957 Broadway musical, begins with con-man Harold Hill on the run from people he has cheated. He arrives in River City, Iowa and proceeds to swindle the fearful and gullible townsfolk of real America. He charms the librarian—the only reasonably intelligent person in town—by seducing her with a pick-up-artist's rape-y-ness, and the arrogance that he can set to rights whatever is wrong with anyone she cares about. He does this so that she won't expose his con, because she is the only person in town smart enough to figure him out.
"Donald Trump is bad."
Four-and-a-half years after I last used that sentence to start an(other) essay about human defeat, it remains largely undisputed, and among the least controversial statements about our current reality that a person can utter. His supporters know that he is bad, and most readily admit the plain fact—his badness a source of (claimed, anyway) moderate chagrin to some, a delightful cudgel to others. His most ardent supporters delight in his awfulness. "He's a piece of shit," you say. "Look around," they say, "at this toilet! It has always been a toilet."
I have thought about The Trumppening so much, these last five years. It has dominated me. It is so many different sorts of my least favorite things, a cascading pileup of human failure and dismay and shame—on both sides, on many sides. It's hard to imagine a culture-wide phenomenon like it that isn't also of biblical or world war or natural disaster proportion. I haven't been able to look away. Not from the person at the center of it, not from the people reacting to him, performing their aggrievement, or reflecting his. It has mostly been a waste. I have learned nothing, because there was never anything to learn. There is only so much to learn from reflex, beyond the fact of its existence.
Practically all that remains of politics is disgust. Trump is the most disgusted American, still—four years after he rose to (what was once considered) the apex of individual human power, all that he can muster is disgust. We put the least imaginative, incurious person at the center of our collective attention and he didn't know what to do besides what he had always done—perform his disgust, in service of his need. It would be easily recognized as a cruelty against him if he weren't already so broken as to have relished every moment of it, or if it were not, primarily, a sin against ourselves.
And so much of what remains of the rest of us, who aren't him, is just disgust, too. If you have a side, there is little doubt that you have recently expressed your disgust. It is imperative, in times like these, to express disgust as a signifier of personal and group identity. If you're not disgusted, you're not paying attention. If you don't have a side, you're no doubt disgusted with the whole charade. The circus. The shitshow. All of it extracting, from you, a visceral reaction. Like a baby, sucking on a lemon.
Trump flatters you with his awfulness. He says, you're so smart, you can do the work of justifying how bad I am. He says, you're so smart, you can tell how awful I am by the feeling in your stomach. By the pulsing in your neck. By the words you can’t even muster.
In The Music Man, when Harold Hill's fraud is exposed, he can't bring himself to run away. He realizes that the love he has cultivated for himself in the librarian, this instrument he has manipulated—he loves her back. This sucker. This reflection of his awful genius. She is a living, breathing testament to his accomplishment. How could he abandon such a thing.
In the end, when he ought rightfully be strung up by the people he has conned, at the moment of something resembling justice, Harold Hill is saved. At the end of The Music Man, Harold Hill is saved when the locals are transformed—from a bad but enthusiastic rabble—into a brilliant and spectacular marching band. The source of this metamorphosis is not their practice or their hard work, because Harold Hill has convinced them that they need not even pick up their instruments to get better—they need only imagine that they can do it. Imagine it they do, and they are transformed, resplendent and accomplished and marching in perfect time. Harold Hill is redeemed. He gets the girl. The townspeople get what they paid for. Because The Music Man is a story, because it is, first and foremost, unreal, they get what they deserve. In their own minds, anyway, in this little town in heartland America, the fantasy all-encompassing. The fantasy is all that matters.
It is easier for us to see through Trump. We know he's bad. He lacks the imagination and wit, and really even the desire, to convince you otherwise. You don't even have to think about it, really—he has made it very easy for you. He's not asking you to judge him otherwise. He's just asking you to imagine that no one else is any better. To imagine that everyone besides you is just like he is. Hucksters and frauds. Disgusting. Small. Broken. He's asking you what you paid for. He's asking you what you deserve.
This is not politics, the fact of it happening in a political context notwithstanding. This is humans, telling a very old story. The easiest story. A story of reflex and despair. The story of how we are disgusted.
I won't pretend to be exempt. I am not above it. Donald Trump was everything I hated about this country long before 2015. He still is, of course, and more so than ever. A clown and a fraud who was constantly rewarded for a lifetime of repeated failures because he insisted that his failures were actually great successes. The worst American, the most American.
Donald Trump, a man who walked naked down the middle of the street, insisting not that we see and admire his clothes, because we all know he's naked. We can all see it, none of us are really that deluded. What he wants us to see is his shamelessness. What he's counting on is not that you'll see the absurdity of his naked delusion, but the sham of everyone else's clothes.
We made him the actual president, once.
What have we paid for, indulging this reflex? What do we deserve, for letting the bile rise, unbidden, and being consumed by it? A story of reflex and despair. Of how we are disgusted.
