THE SHADOW KNOWS

Donald Trump And The Love Of A**holes

In roughly 36 hours—give or take—from this post, the major news networks and organs of the press will probably have projected a winner in the U.S. presidential contests in the states of North Carolina, Georgia, and possibly Pennsylvania, and thus, the likely winner of the election. I have no prediction to make beyond what a sense of creeping dread augurs. I’ll watch the returns come in from a place in time and space an ocean away and seven hours later than the east coast of the United States, buffered by my Balkan exile from the chaos in the streets and in the halls of government that may ensue—whatever the outcome—if not from the sickening “here we go again” feeling. 2016 was a shock, a shattering wake-up call to the “educated classes” from a parallel universe in which things were not just upside-down but inside-out. It wasn’t shocking that America had voted for a “platform” of corporate coddling, immigrant-bashing, environmental catastrophe-courting and isolationism. This had happened before: the ineluctable swing from advance to retreat, from universalism to provincialism, from the commons to “my back yard.” This is how history works, not by steady movement toward some agreed upon future, but in fits and starts, one step forward, two steps back. It’s a dance, not a march. The progress v. regress question is always on the ballot. This alternating political current is generally an okay thing: too much of the first and we get Robespierre; too much of the second and we get Mussolini. No, the dark mystery of 2016 wasn’t about ideology. It was that a winning portion of Americans had pulled the lever for a man they knew to be without a doubt our most prominent and unrepentant public asshole. And it may happen again.

It’s foolish to ask: how did they not know this about him? They knew, and voted for him in spite of it. For Trump, being a jerk is a feature, not a bug. And if anything, Trump’s asshole advantage is even greater in 2024. I am deeply interested in why this is. You would not like Donald Trump if he were your uncle, your father, your boss, or God forbid, your husband. You might knuckle under to his bullying, but only with the greatest resentment and with a determination to trip him up at the first opportunity. I strongly suspect that this is equally true of social justice warriors and Pentecostal Christians. Nobody but a nihilistic misanthrope could possibly “like” Donald Trump. He doesn’t even try to be liked. He exhibits every one of the traits in the so-called “dark triad” of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy, and then some. And this is where we enter the funhouse run by Pennywise the Clown and Arthur Fleck and I lose my bearings. How do we account for the adoration lavished on Trump by his base? The talk of miracles and wonders..and the latent thirst for righteous blood that may underlie these things? What sort of schism in the human psyche does this suggest? What if the deeper truth is that although we would not like ourselves if we were like Donald Trump, 50% of us like the fact that he is like himself. Someone has to be, right? “He says the things I feel but can’t say.”  That’s the tagline, right? He is who I am in the parts of me I can’t and won’t reveal for fear of opprobrium and exile. Donald Trump is the embodiment, projected by satellite lasers onto a continent-spanning holographic plate, of Carl Jung’s Shadow. And as Jung taught, the Shadow dominates us until we are able to acknowledge, integrate and disempower it.

It’s become a tiresome bromide, whenever some public figure says or does something conventional manners deem beyond the pale, for other public figures to step forward and say, “This is not who we are.” This is not who we are as Democrats/Republicans/ Americans/Europeans/Human Beings. But what if it is who we are—at least on the shadow side of our nature? What if the polarization in the body politic is really a polarization in the body human? Could the divide between red and blue, man and woman, college educated and non-college educated, reflect the divide in our own nature? Our enmity for the alien other within? Many of us not-so-secretly can’t stand ourselves, but Donald Trump says, “That’s okay. I’ll bear your shame! I’ll put myself on the cross for you.” At the moment, I can’t think of any explanation that accounts so precisely for uncannily persistent 50/50 split in the American electorate, a split that not even the most scientific polling can make sense of. Might that split be an externalization of our internal drama? Look, there are days when the reactionary in me rears up and I find myself thinking the sorts of things that Donald Trump says. The difference between me and a diehard Trumpist is that I know that’s the asshole in me coming out. I know that neither Jesus nor the Buddha nor my mother, God rest her soul, would approve, and that matters to me. Why doesn’t it matter to them?

Lately, I’ve become fascinated by the belief systems subscribed to by Dark Age and Medieval heretics like the Paulicians, the Bogomils, and the Cathars, not to mention their present-day descendants in fantasy fandom and trans-humanism. These belief systems are all grouped generally under the umbrella of dualism, the radical forms of which asserts the existence of two co-equal principles in the world, good and evil, represented by a Good God and a Bad God, and manifesting in us as immaterial spirit (good) and material body (bad). In all forms of dualism, radical and moderate, the God of this earthly realm is the Bad God, or at least a very imperfect one. Satanael. Ialdabaoth. He’s a rebel angel, a reprobate, a liar, a fraud, and a cheat, and he shaped us in his image. Nothing he says can be trusted, because his sole desire is to hold on to his turf and keep it—along with our souls—from being returned to the sphere of the Good God from whence they originally came. He is the captor and we are the captives. But here’s the thing: here, in his domain, is where we live our lives, and as long as we are down here, he owns our asses. By all evidence, fewer and fewer of us think we’re going anywhere better, and if we do, it will be through some act of grace that isn’t mitigated by the bad things we’ve done in this world. On the contrary, badness is just a humble acceptance of our flawed nature, stamped with Cain’s mark from time immemorial. Maybe this explains in part Trump’s appeal to End-Timers: they’ve always believed that this world was hell and prayed for the next one. Trump affirms this and says, “Leave it to me, my beautiful Christians. You’re all going to heaven, but meanwhile…I am your Cyrus. I will lead you through this wicked world (a world that I know so very well) and ensure that you come to no harm. I will scatter the Neo-Marxists and wokesters to the four winds and send the immigrant invaders back to the shitholes they came from. And all I ask in return is that we make a little deal.” Trump Will Fix It so that we are safe in our prison block and so privileges flow to those best placed to take advantage, and they will be the ones who embrace his hellish vision of life on earth (they’ll also have discounted tickets for Elon Musks’s Mars Express). One by one, these poor suckers are roped in by the dark Prince of this world. People will do anything for protection, especially if it comes with privilege.

I submit that all of us, to varying degrees, carry within our psyches a shard of this dualistic worldview, to wit: If the world is mostly evil, then we need protection, and who better to protect us than those who best know evil’s ways?” It makes a certain sense from that dark funhouse perspective, but the thinking is tragically flawed. True Christians should be the first to know this. Every soul is salvageable.

I had a close friend in college, a tall, athletic, enormously attractive Jewish guy from a wealthy and politically very conservative Long Island family, who was a bit like the Jacob Elrodi character from SALTBURN. I idolized him. His long hair fell around his face in dark ringlets, and he wore a Jesus beard. The knees of his blue jeans were always artfully ripped. Nothing about him said “rich,” and that’s how he wanted it. We were all hippies then and had to keep up the act. His humor could be mildly acerbic, but he was gentle and unfailingly humble: a “chill dude” before there was such a term. Just one thing gave away the fact that one day he would join his parents on the hard political right. His watchwords were: “Always expect the worst of people,” to which he sometimes added, “and you’ll never be disappointed.” That, in a nutshell, is Donald Trump’s political platform. We’re all beyond redemption. I’m an asshole, but so are you. Own it. This can almost be seen as a corollary of the evangelical “Love the sinner, hate the sin” maxim. MAGA World’s adoration for Trump is, in a strange way, testimony to its capacity for loving the beast within. The problem is that it also condemns us morally to a downward spiral. It’s one thing to say that human nature is not perfectable, but if Trump’s sins—his lies, his frauds, his pettiness, hatefulness and vindictiveness—can be forgiven, what sin cannot be? What if he really did start locking up reporters? Could he really shoot someone on Park Avenue and get away with it? It’s beginning to look that way. Expecting the worst of people tends to encourage the worst from them. Failing to hold Trump to account gives his followers and everyone else permission to be assholes, too. Not a pretty picture.

Trump is the avatar of the cosmic id. He’s Loki. And yeah, I know that for some people this makes him kind of cool and 100% relatable. But it’s not cool. No matter how angry and resentful you are, no matter how sick you are about the high price of eggs, no matter how fed up you are with wokeism, if you go into the voting booth with zero tolerance for assholes, you will not, you cannot vote for this man.