Extract from The Guardian
By
far the biggest beast, the president has other leaders not only
fawning but mimicking him
‘Watching
Trump and those who seek to align themselves with him should remind
us that bullying is a highly successful evolutionary strategy.’
Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Contact
author
Saturday
28 January 2017 05.24 AEDT
It
never got quite the coverage of his own radioactively malicious
efforts, but Donald Trump was himself once the target of birther
claims. Back in 2013, talkshow host Bill
Maher challenged Trumpto prove that he was not “the spawn of
his mother having sex with an orangutan”. If there is a moment at
which literalism tips into psychological malady, Trump is believed to
have reached it at some point during the Reagan administration, so he
duly went and provided Maher with his birth certificate. There was
also a $5m lawsuit (from Trump, of all quirks, as opposed to the
orangutan species).
Some
years on, the orangutan birtherism serves two useful purposes. The
first is the point about literalism. We are always told by those in
thrall to him that much of what Trump says is metaphor. The wall is a
metaphor, Brexit financier Arron
Banks explained to me. “It’s like the ark in the Bible –
there wasn’t a literal ark! It’s an allegory.” The Muslim ban
is a metaphor, suggested anti-democracy
billionaire Peter Thiel shortly before he joined Trump’s
transition team, praising
voters who “take him seriously but not literally”.
Their
compulsion to make excuses for Trump says much about how they
handle misgivings, but others would do better to understand that
pretty much everything the president does indicates that he
represents the triumph of the literal. This is the guy who turned the
traditional dick-measuring contest that is the Republican primary
into an actual dick-measuring contest. “You know what they say
about men with small hands,” said Marco Rubio, prompting Trump to
pledge: “I guarantee
you there’s no problem [with the size of my penis].” Do
let’s ditch the idea that Trump is a poetically complex man who
will govern in conceits. He is just conceited.
The
second effect of the orangutan business is accidental – a reminder
that Trumpology is primatology. During the presidential campaign, the
Atlantic magazine asked eminent primatologist Jane Goodall to assess
Trump, and the reply was clear. “In
many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male
chimpanzees and their dominance rituals. In order to impress
rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform
spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging
branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the
display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the
hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that
position.”
Watching
Trump and those who seek to align themselves with him should remind
us that bullying is a highly successful evolutionary strategy.
Chimpanzees copy the dominant male in behaviours that are seen to
work, which is perhaps why – again, with apologies to chimpanzees –
the White House press corps spent Trump’s first
press conference the other week jostling needily for
attention, adopting a noticeably brasher tone as they called out
their questions, and allowing the weaker of their number to be
bullied by the dominant male.
Theresa
May addresses US Republican leaders in Philadelphia
Or
observe Theresa May instead. You’d think her hardwiring rendered
her incapable of any serious Trump mimicry. Yet before she’d
even landed for her US visit, she felt so forced out of her
comfort zone for survival that she found herself saying
embarrassingly Trumpish things such as, “Haven’t
you ever noticed – sometimes opposites attract?” This is
not a challenge; it is a form of appeasement behaviour. As is Michael
Gove copying Trump’s thumbs-up gesture for the photo to
accompany his fawning interview with the then president-elect, which
left Gove looking like he’d just won a competition to become
gamma-male.
Even
more poignant is the much-used photo of Nigel Farage appearing
to bow his head in grateful deference during his joint
appearance with Trump in Mississippi during the campaign. Farage now
describes his Brexit victory almost entirely in terms of what it
meant for Trump. He has laid it at the president’s feet, like a
particularly special banana that he regards himself as unworthy of
eating. Given Farage spent 25 years of his life on his passionate
quest to take Britain out of Europe, frequently alone and scorned and
against what many thought were impossible odds, I can barely think of
a more pathetic submission gesture. So too with those who spent the
entire George W Bush years calling Tony Blair Dubya’s poodle, and
have now rolled over with excruciating gratitude to become Trump’s.
Look, ma! He’s letting me pull off his fleas!
These
henchmonkeys, of course, judge their own survival or advancement to
require effectively submissive behaviour. Other groups have no
choice. Rhesus macaques pick on the weakest members of their
hierarchy with relentless viciousness, a behaviour some
primatologists refer to as “scapegoating”. (If you watch Trump
talk, this might feel faintly familiar.) The hierarchy needs an enemy
to bond over, to define itself against, and to therapeutically absorb
its aggressions. “It seems to release tensions among the
higher-ups,” as
one macaque expert puts it.
Speaking
of which, what a surprise to find a Trump administration on 36%
approval ratings without a functioning Democrat in sight turning on
the media. White House senior strategist Steve Bannon phoned the New
York Times to explain how it was going to be, and to read it is to
hear a version of that scene in a drama when the new prison inmate
has the whole hideous pecking order explained to him. “The
media should keep its mouth shut … I want you to quote
this: the media is the opposition party.” Incidentally, given they
did quote this, I’m baffled by the Times’s decision to censor
what they reported as a Bannon call “peppered with profanity”.
Why? We are going to hear much more troubling things than a few swear
words as time goes on, and journalistic attempts to administer the
smelling salts feel ominously misplaced.
Still,
thanks to the paper we have fascinating multi-sourced accounts of the
atmosphere inside the White House during the days after the
inauguration. One
line from reporter Maggie Haberman stood out in the above
context: “The more time people spend with Trump, the more they tend
to adopt his mindset about how he is treated.” Yes. Like yawning or
syphilis, Trump’s self-dramatisation is catching. But to ape him is
to defer to him – something to bear in mind for those who don’t
wish to be owned by him.
No comments:
Post a Comment