Donald Trump: a man so obnoxious that karma may see him reincarnated as himself

Extract from The Guardian

Frankie Boyle

All presidents come into office with something to prove, it’s just rarely their sanity. Comedian Frankie Boyle asks if the answer to stopping him rests in our hands

Donald Trump: a super-villain for a world without heroes. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Thursday 9 February 2017 05.49 AEDT 

America has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from the West Wing to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba. I actually think Donald Trump is going to prove a lot of people wrong, but sadly not George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, or whoever wrote the Book of Revelation. It says a lot about the man that building a giant wall isn’t even in the top five most Game of Thrones things about him. Of course, presidents always enter office with something to prove, it’s just rarely their sanity.
You look into Trump’s eyes and you see the fear and confusion of a man who has just been told he’s got stage-four cervical cancer. He is a super-villain in a world without heroes, a man so obnoxious and unhappy that karma may see him reincarnated as himself. You kind of wish he’d get therapy, but at this stage it’s like hiring a window cleaner for a burning building. It’s still difficult to classify him exactly: he’s not a classic Nazi, but would burn books if his supporters knew how to read. Hillary Clinton was obviously the preferred establishment candidate, and whoever was on the rota for this election cycle at the Illuminati really dropped the ball, but Trump is still very much someone that the permanent powers have assessed they can work with.
One of his first acts as president was an executive order to ban federal money going to international groups that perform or provide information on abortions. Making it clear that he’ll only provide billion-dollar funding to terminate young lives overseas if some kind of US-made drone is involved. This bill stops funding for birth control in countries where religion and culture mean women have no access to alcohol. Think it through – have you any idea how hard it is inducing a miscarriage just by drinking tonic? Call me a cynic, but when male politicians defund reproductive health centres, I always wonder how many abortions they’ve funded themselves. Is this just revenge for some clinic in the 1980s rejecting their idea for a loyalty card scheme? There’s probably business pressure behind this bill, too. Maybe American corporations are worried that fewer kids in the developing world means no one to do the detailed stitching on their clothing lines. I suppose everybody’s politics are shaped by the particular bubble they live in. Trump sees anti-choice arguments all the time; the only time he sees an argument for abortion is in a mirror.
Trump cares about the same things a member of noughties rap outfit G Unit cares about: women, money and vengeance. Yet, random though it seems, his fight with the judiciary could well be tactical. He will blame them for the next act of terrorism that occurs then declare a state of emergency where everybody has to stay indoors while his tweets are read out over a Tannoy. I’m in an unusual position in that I don’t support Trump being invited to Britain, but I do hope he comes. Britain is divided at the moment and nothing unites us like hating Americans. Britain is good at mockery, and it will hopefully be a bit like when David Blaine came and sat in that plastic box. Of course, Farage has gone full Lord Haw-Haw, correctly gauging that history wasn’t going to judge him very kindly anyway, and that there might not be any. If the Queen ever has to shake Trump’s hand, she will put on so many gloves she’ll look like Mickey Mouse. I find it amusing that the same people who think it’s ridiculous for Mexico to be asked to pay for America’s wall think it’s fine for us to pay for Trident. To be fair, I managed to get my neighbour to build a wall and pay for it, and all it cost me was the price of a thong to sunbathe in.

Melania Trump: waiting for Stockholm syndrome to set in. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

My best guess at the great man’s next move is the hoisting of an enormous burning eye above Trump Tower. It’s a building for which the words tacky and gaudy somehow seem too jolly and frivolous. Close up, it looks like the memory stick where some giant alien sex-killer stores his worst atrocities, or a version of the black slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey, sent to restore our consciousness to the level of chimpanzees. Trapped inside, Melania Trump has a look that I’ve never seen before, the eyes of someone waiting with increasing impatience for Stockholm syndrome to set in. The look of a woman frantically trying to unlearn English, appalled to find that this only makes her understand her husband more clearly. Perhaps women trapped in marriages with monsters resort to plastic surgery so that it becomes easier to leave a wax head in their bed while they work on their tunnel at night. Perhaps the manicures are to hide the endless digging. Perhaps it’s the secret of their figures. They’re not dieting, they’re eating those peanut butter and fried egg sandwiches Michael Phelps used to train on and spending their nights burrowing like a fucking gopher.

You have to say it’s surprising that, with so much to work with, the response from the Democratic establishment has been to suggest that Trump is a Russian spy. How could he possibly keep a secret? He almost never stops talking, seemingly delivering a live feed of his internal monologue, using national television appearances to ramble about murdering terrorists’ families and blurt out fantasies about torture. Admittedly, any expert psychologist will tell you that torture does work, but only if you first threaten them with bare electrical wires. I’m equally baffled that so much Democratic criticism focuses on his incompetence and instability. Competent, focused Nazis are absolutely the worst kind.
Equally, I don’t really understand commentators who say it’s vital not to normalise any of Trump’s actions. They have been normalised for eight years by Barack Obama while many of the same people looked the other way. Banks and corporations writing their own legislation; war by executive order; mass deportations; kill lists: it’s all now as normal and American as earthquakes caused by fracked gases being ignited by burning abortion clinics. Of course, there is a moral difference in whether such actions are performed by a Harvard-educated constitutional law professor or a gibbering moron, and the distinction goes in Trump’s favour. That’s not to say Trump won’t plumb profound new depths of awfulness, like the disbanding of the environmental protection agency set up by hippy, libtard snowflake Richard Nixon.
Obviously, the most important issue here is why America hasn’t done as well as in the past at capitalising on these horrors to create good music about the political turmoil. I mean, where is their Bob Dylan? Where are their anthems about drone warfare killing innocent civilians? Instead we’ve got Drake begging women via song to text him back after a fight at the Cheesecake Factory. Britain seems to be in an even deeper cultural torpor. Everything from Teen Vogue to young adult fiction has a more radical take than our press, and the Trump administration is satirised by American television with a venom that the British television industry, for its own government, does its best to avoid.
Trump is at war with Saturday Night Live. He thinks it’s horrible and yet he can’t stop watching. Pretty much the same as how the world feels about him. How can he expect to escape ridicule? Being on reality TV is the closest he ever got to reality. His children look like a teen movie about Wall Street vampires directed by Uday Hussein. He has cultivated a square face that’s the shade of a banned food colouring and the muscle tone of a coma patient. He looks like aliens came to Earth and made a human costume after seeing one commercial for a car dealership. Really, he seems like the sort of person that a competent leftwinger with a humane alternative offer should be able to beat at the next election. Sad, really, that the only way Bernie Sanders could return in 2020 is as a glass sliding about a ouija board.

Trump and family: like a teen movie about Wall Street vampires directed by Uday Hussein. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

During the campaign, Trump said he wanted to stop America from making foreign military interventions, possibly because he realised he would need the army for suppressing the domestic population. Yet someone so media-obsessed can’t help but realise that among all the gaffes and flak, his insane aggression towards China and Iran has escaped censure. The media and political establishment largely approve. They only fret that he doesn’t take the same planet-threatening posture with Russia. War sells papers, television advertising and arms. It makes politicians feel important. It provides nationalism with clear enemies to define itself against. Despite all the other failures this administration promises, the US might finally be on time for a world war.
So what do we do? I think, first of all, it’s worth noting that, under an authoritarian government, all protest will be vilified anyway. Even before Trump, people got very upset that quarterback Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand during the national anthem. You’d think that would fall under the list of White People Approved Forms of Protest, along with leaving a voicemail for your senator kindly asking them to stop shooting black people in the street. Personally, I think there’s limited value in moralising with, or fact-checking, regimes that don’t care about morals or facts. In Britain we also have an increasingly authoritarian government. We send them petitions telling them that we don’t want them reading our emails, which they presumably already know from reading our emails. We face a brief political period that, unchecked, will bring at least irreversible climate change and, at worst, nuclear war.
Morally, I think you have to look at what you can do to change your own country first, as that’s the bit you have most influence on. This is complicated in Britain as we have a government that has undergone what is known in the business world as “regulatory capture” by corporate and financial interests, and is, broadly speaking, a vassal state of the US. What can we do practically to influence our own government that would truly affect the Trump administration? Well, in a country supposedly filled with restored national pride, we could not renew Trident and refuse to be his missile base. That kind of strategic loss would damage him deeply. No amount of likes or memes or petitions can achieve this. Really, if we want to survive as a species, it’s time for organised civil disobedience. It’s time to stop writing to your MP.