Donald Trump

So much has been said about him yet he’s not the one to blame. 

For us baby boomers growing up in New Zealand during the sixties and seventies life was good, actually life was better than good – we didn’t have to worry about on which side our bread was buttered, it was buttered on both sides (thank you Breville). Ok you couldn’t buy adidas trainers or a car that worked, but we had no debt, as the British kept calm and tucked into our lamb with their war torn teeth. With pommy pounds rolling in like Red Cross parcels we basked in free schools and plentiful doctors, bought land that was so cheap could you have a piece all to yourself, and jobs were as plentiful as flies on a sheep’s bottom. Thanks to the labour shortage we invited in Pacific Islanders to sweep our factory floors and Yorkshire unionists to tell them when they were allowed to. Our suburbs grew all shiny and new and getting hit by a bus was just never going to happen as we trundled about in towns that had everything except people.

But wait, there was more. Not only did we have social equity, health wealth and sunshine – we had self esteem. Bucket loads of it. We gaily threw ourselves into the outdoors in the knowledge that Sir Ed had buggered Everest, and revelled as the All Blacks stomped repeatedly on pasty faced visitors. But the big one, the one that to this day enables us to hold our heads up high like cocksure peacocks in a parade is that we had won the war.

Yes, we had been part of the A team. Allies that showed Hitler, Mussolini and Tito that good guys always win.

And that’s how it has been for us in the West for 70 years. We have felt happiness and satisfaction as members of a new world order based on the moral virtue of having defeated facism and communism in a one-two sucker punch. We pat ourselves on our democratic backs as the way, the truth and the life, and the ‘will of the people’ is held aloft like a child who has been given an extra biscuit.

Even though governments in the West have ebbed between left and right, this has always been seen as ‘the people’ exercising intelligent nuance within a framework of virtue and fair play – subtle shifts that served to only reinforce our superior new world ethos.

And of course the leader of our merry band was, and still is, the US. Although late into the war (thank god Churchill’s mother was American) it was their New Deal that has guided western political aspiration and virtue. Simply put, we in the west are better than commies or nazis. We won all the wars and even won all the Olympics (well we would have if it hadn’t been for those cheating East Germans).

And herein lies the tragedy of Donald Trump. His popularity is based on an awful truth. As author Stephen King recently said “Donald Trump is a carnival man, an entertainer, a buffoon. His fans are white, scared and angry. He …has certainly exposed the ugly underbelly of conservatives in America today”. 

Scratch the surface of any culture and the evil serpent will wriggle free like a maggot from the dead. It turns out that the citizens of the US are just like everybody else (yes, including Germans). Who would have thought?

It’s not Mr Trump’s fault that he is popular. It’s all those who vote for him. His buffoonery just makes his popularity all the more tragic. If Mr Trump wins, the US will have lost its moral high ground. The moral might of winning WWII and its New Deal has been dented over the years by involvement from Vietnam to Irag, but electing Mr Trump will surely extinguish, like urinating onto a campfire, any right to feel superior.

The American media’s attempt to spin his popularity as some kind of protest against the establishment is ridiculous and delusional (if you want a laugh watch Fox News).There is no collective uplifting moral imperative here. He is popular because his sings the same song that fascist leaders throughout history have sung. “Its someones’ else fault, lets her rid of them all.”

The sad part for New Zealand as suckerfish that cling to the whale’s carcass, is that despite the obvious shortcomings of the US, we have always looked up to them to lead the world by example – proof after millennia of dictators, monarchists, and autocrats, that life could be actually be fair. Suddenly it all seems very fragile, as a groundswell of Americans are showing us that despite all that is good about the US, the underbelly of intolerance, fear and hate lives large. And, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us.

This is the tragedy of Donald Trump. If he wins, we in the West will have lost all bragging rights once and for all, and fallen spectacularly from our high horse.

Richard Alexander Bain

self confessed trumped upper