A dozen assorted National Security Officials issued a Stern Statement against Donald Trump this week. The text follows:
It’ll do nothing against him. What does work?
What works is people you, Gentle Respectable Reader, probably don’t approve of.
The first person to touch Trump as President and not come away soiled was national punching bag Kim Kardashian. She went in to negotiate the freedom of an unjustly imprisoned woman and won, and didn’t look like a fool or a thief afterwards.
The next person to touch Trump, and actually draw blood was porn star Stormy Daniels. She’s managed to make him look like the foolish old man he is. She’s also opened up a one of the few lines of criminal inquiry which is likely to score.
And now we have reality television figure Omarosa:
Reality-TV folks don’t build their brands on respectability—their freedom from conventional constraints like being predictable and well-liked is their power—but they can pull off One Big Pivot in their careers. Usually, it’s where they claim that, yes, they were part of the circus, but things have finally gone too far and gotten so bad that even they must shine a light on it! Only those who’ve been in the muck know what to fix.
This was the substance of Donald Trump’s own campaign message, and now Omarosa is using it against him.
That message isn’t available to Respectable People, and rightly so. The essence of being a Respectable Person is being a fake real person. That’s true of almost every major politician. The Hillary Clinton of political appearance is a fake pretending to be real. You could see that most clearly after the election, when this funny, slightly sarcastic, human being went on television to plug her book. It was a Hillary Clinton I could have voted for willingly instead of at Trumppoint. She was visibly human, real real, not fake real.
What the women who beat Trump have in common is that they are, like him, real fakes. They really are something very close to those images they project. When you see one of them, you don’t wonder, “Are they really like that?” You know, yes, they are.
Trump does poorly against women who don’t have much interest in pretending to be something they’re not.
This is why he’s able to steamroll Respectable People. He sees, as most of us who are Not Respectable see, the lying and faking and fronting and bullshitting that goes into being Respectable. And he makes it visible, which he can do, being Not Respectable.
Since hardly anyone can maintain both the sort of self-reflective ability that goes into seeing these things and the will to act effectively on them, very few Respectable People can see what those of us who are Not Respectable know by heart.
