If Trump wades beyond the safe spaces of a Maga rally or the
sycophantic White House he deserves to be reminded how much he is
despised
On Saturday night, Donald Trump
made another rare public foray, attending a UFC match in New York City.
He was roundly booed, though not as aggressively or creatively as he
was at a World Series game in Washington last month. Pundits have
already speculated about what it all meant – an affluent DC crowd raging
against Trump, versus a slightly friendlier New York crowd where
everyone had gathered to watch a physical fight – though it’s all but
useless divining any serious implications about 2020.
Trump, unlike every other president in modern times, has never held a positive approval rating in a Gallup poll. This alone will make winning a second term inordinately difficult, though not impossible. The black swan victory of 2016 could always repeat itself, in newer and stranger ways.
What is notable about this recent spate of booing is how much Trump has come to dominate America’s psyche as not just its most famous and polarizing president ever but perhaps, at this very moment, the most well-known politician in world history. Not a single baseball fan at the Nationals game or fight fan at UFC would lack for an opinion on Trump. There is no middle ground anymore: to a significant minority of the country, he is a messiah figure, and to even more, he is the anti-Christ come on Earth.
For the millions who feel enraged and despondent over Trump’s ennobling of white supremacists or his insidious environmental and immigration policies, trying to remain an informed citizen can amount to an exercise in psychic torture. It’s not easy reading, every day, about the degradation of whatever democratic norms America has left. Even impeachment, at this point, amounts to little more than a sugar high: House Democrats have the votes, but marshaling 20 Republicans in the Senate to convict Trump, who has thoroughly remade the GOP in his image, will be absurdly hard to do.
What recourse, then, do citizens have against a deranged,
all-powerful executive who can lay waste to the planet many times over?
Election Day is still a full year away. In the absence of a vote, all
that is left is protest. If it all feels, at times, irrelevant to
Trump’s band of Republican nihilists, there is still a necessity to
taking action, to demonstrating mass resistance against such hate.Trump, unlike every other president in modern times, has never held a positive approval rating in a Gallup poll. This alone will make winning a second term inordinately difficult, though not impossible. The black swan victory of 2016 could always repeat itself, in newer and stranger ways.
What is notable about this recent spate of booing is how much Trump has come to dominate America’s psyche as not just its most famous and polarizing president ever but perhaps, at this very moment, the most well-known politician in world history. Not a single baseball fan at the Nationals game or fight fan at UFC would lack for an opinion on Trump. There is no middle ground anymore: to a significant minority of the country, he is a messiah figure, and to even more, he is the anti-Christ come on Earth.
For the millions who feel enraged and despondent over Trump’s ennobling of white supremacists or his insidious environmental and immigration policies, trying to remain an informed citizen can amount to an exercise in psychic torture. It’s not easy reading, every day, about the degradation of whatever democratic norms America has left. Even impeachment, at this point, amounts to little more than a sugar high: House Democrats have the votes, but marshaling 20 Republicans in the Senate to convict Trump, who has thoroughly remade the GOP in his image, will be absurdly hard to do.
Booing is its own form of necessary protest. That’s why any pearl-clutching from the pundit class is nonsensical. If Trump is going to wade beyond the safe spaces of a MAGA rally, a branded golf course or the sycophantic White House, he deserves to be reminded of how much he is actually despised. Since we can’t take away Trump’s nuclear warheads or his power to deploy troops to the border, we can only fight back with what we have.
For those that boo, there is catharsis. Trump has transformed so many people – the media, immigrants, progressives – into hate objects, and it’s only fair he undergo the same metamorphosis. There are so few opportunities. Trump isn’t going to venture to many more places that don’t have his name slapped across the façade. When he does, he should feel the wrath of a nation.
Trump’s worldview is childishly Manichean, consumed with TV ratings and crowd sizes. He deserves to be defeated on his own terms, to be jeered and mocked wherever he goes. He deserves to fester with self-doubt, if he is capable of it at all. This will be his punishment, as long as he clings to the presidency.
- Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist in New York City.
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