RUTHFULLY YOURS

Liberal actress Susan Sarandon is an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter, but that doesn’t mean she’s wedded to the Democratic Party. In fact, she recently suggested that it would be better for Sanders’ cause of “revolution” if Donald Trump were to win the presidential election in November.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday night, Sarandon made an odd kind of endorsement for Trump. Hayes asked if Sarandon would “really” consider voting for Trump over Hillary.

“Really,” Sarandon said, adding that “some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode.” Asked if she thinks that’s “dangerous,” she replied, “It’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, threats to women’s rights and think you can’t do something huge to turn that around.”

“I think, in certain quarters, there’s growing concern that the folks that are into Bernie Sanders have come to despise Hillary Clinton or reject Hillary Clinton and that should she be the nominee, which is as yet undetermined, they will walk away,” Hayes noted.

“That’s a legitimate concern,” Sarandon replied, adding that Sanders supporters would be unwilling to back Clinton in November “because they’re very passionate and principled.”

She insisted that Clinton does not believe in the things Sanders stands for. “What would make you think that when she gets in, she’s going to suddenly go against the people that have given her millions and millions of dollars?” Clinton “accepted money for all of those people. She doesn’t even want to fight for a $15 minimum wage. So these are people that have not come out before. So why would we think they’re going to come out now for her, you know?”

Trumpery is an archaic word for fraud, taken from the French tromper, to deceive somebody. Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of his rogue Autolycus, who boasts of defrauding the gullible with his worthless trinkets: “Ha, ha! What a fool Honesty is! And Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery . . .” (A Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene IV.)

The dictionary definition of Trumpery is threefold:

1. Worthless thing: Often something showy that seems appealing at first glance.
2. Nonsense: Empty or ridiculous talk.
3. Deception: The deceiving of somebody, or schemes conceived for the purpose of deceiving.

In all three senses, “Trumpery” denotes the bill of goods that Donald Trump is seeking to sell to America. The subject of this essay, indeed, is not Trump the man, but the meaning of Trumpery. Millions of words have been devoted to the political, psychological and satirical dissection of the Donald, but far fewer to the cultural phenomenon of Trumpery. What we are witnessing is more than the rise of an individual, mesmerising though he may be, not only to Americans, but to the entire free world. Trumpery is the cult of a personality, certainly, but it is also the ascendancy of a cast of mind, a climate of opinion, a broadly-based sociological fact. Never before have we witnessed such a prodigious confidence trick perpetrated on the most powerful and prosperous people on the planet. The free world looks on in bewilderment at the prospective triumph of Trumpery in the land that gave us pragmatism.

Trumpery is the revenge of the rejected in more ways than one. Though Trump himself disclaims ideology, he is in fact one of the “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air” evoked by Keynes: they “are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. More by osmosis than by design, he has picked up the ideas of Reagan’s former communications director, Pat Buchanan, and his “paleoconservatives”. Buchanan ran three times for the presidency between 1992 and 2000, but he fell out with mainstream Republicans, while relishing the notoriety provoked by his thinly-disguised anti-Semitism. The paleocons’ ideology of “nativism, protectionism and isolationism” was dismissed in 1996 as “a philosophical corpse” by Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative Washington Post columnist. Now the paleocons are back with a vengeance, in the guise of Trumpery. Conspiracy theorists, kooks and crazies of all kinds flock to the Donald’s banners, from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. But so, too, do millions of decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Americans, oblivious of Trumpery’s dubious, even nefarious pedigree.

Long before Trumpery actually has a chance to take the White House by storm, however, the blame game has begun. In the dock, indicted by friend and foe alike, is the Establishment. It is revealing that 21st-century Americans, of all people, should have latched onto this word, popularised in the 1950s by Henry Fairlie as a catch-all phrase to characterise the English ruling class — the antithesis, supposedly, of democracy in the America he later embraced. Sometimes this term is qualified, as in “the Republican Establishment”, but often it is used in a more general sense to indicate the ruling elites — social, economic and cultural — whose arrogance, greed and incompetence are blamed for the rise of Trumpery. The Establishment, it seems, is everything that Trumpery is not. It is rich, educated and cosmopolitan; the followers of Trump are poor, ignorant and nativist. Establishment Americans mostly live on the East or West coasts in colonies of globalised urbanity such as New York, Washington, San Francisco or Seattle. Trumpery flourishes in the contemptuously nicknamed “flyover states”, the struggling, small-town communities that are looked down on by the elites from a great height.

Democrat billionaire, now a born-again “conservative” Republican, whose presidential campaign seems to have caught fire like no other. As he wends his way across the republic in a private jet, drawing record crowds, trampling on all the sacred pieties of American politics, he spreads fear and trembling among the political and chattering classes. From the Left, Village Voice columnist Lucien Truscott IV accuses Trump of practising a kind of “toy fascism” which, however, he claims, is bleeding into “one of the classic tactics of real fascism, com[ing] up with fake problems and then present[ing] fake solutions.” The Right has been no less categorical. Days before the first caucuses in Iowa, National Review, flagship journal of the respectable Right, summoned 22 of the most distinguished American conservatives to explain why Trump was not an appropriate person to be the Republican presidential candidate. Its ideological sister journal, The Weekly Standard, was even more emphatic. In a bitter article entitled “The Nominee We Deserve?”, Stephen F. Hayes asks the question, “Do Republicans deserve to lose? . . . The Republican frontrunner is a longtime liberal whose worldview might best be described as an amalgam of pop-culture progressivism and vulgar nationalism . . . He’s a narcissist and a huckster, an opportunist who . . . over the past several decades . . . was often funding the other side.” The fact that each of these accusations is correct seems not to matter at all to the voters in Republican primaries.

Although in the Iowa caucuses — the first in the nation — he was edged out by Senator Ted Cruz and followed at an uncomfortably close margin by Senator Marco Rubio, Trump subsequently went on to further victories in New Hampshire and then in states as diverse as Michigan, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Hawaii and Mississippi. In Nevada he even did well among Hispanic voters. He won North Carolina and Missouri, not to mention delegate-rich Illinois and Senator Marco Rubio’s Florida (causing the latter to end his candidacy). It is becoming increasing clear that no other candidate, not even Ted Cruz, the darling of Evangelicals, and Governor John Kasich, who won the key swing state of Ohio, can knock him out of the box. In the meantime, Trump has won endorsements from retiring candidates New Jersey governor Chris Christie and neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson.

It is true that in many of these contests Trump has not won a clear majority, but that may be due more than anything else to the fact that there were several other candidates on the ballot. He may indeed go to the Republican presidential convention with the largest number of delegates, but still fall short of the number needed to seize the prize. Theoretically this calls for a brokered convention, which is not an unusual event in the history of the Republican party. President Warren G. Harding was nominated in 1920 only after 102 ballots (no misprint). In the days when Americans were accustomed to politicians deciding on a candidate in the proverbial “smoke-filled room”, voters accepted their party’s choice. But in the age of the populist primary, involving scores of millions of voters across the country, the voice of the people will not easily be denied.