Southpaw #6: This is all that's left
Donald Trump and the endless present.
Dear Readers,
It’s unlikely that Southpaw is the first outlet to inform you that we are two days away from a presidential election. So, this week, we are not really writing about sports, although we couldn’t resist some choice metaphors. But rest assured, regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we’ll soon be back to writing about the stupid hypocrisy of the never-Kaepnernickers and the even stupider decision by a COVID infectee to risk it all so he could take a team photo with the fellas.
As always, please feel free to contact us with feedback—we love hearing from everyone.
The bleachers on race day at Scarborough Downs in early Spring.
Horse races are not about the hats. The horse that crosses the finish line first wins, no matter what color helmet the jockey is wearing or how intricate the flower patterns on the heads of the supporters. The hats matter only insofar as they subsidize the race: the people we see on TV during the Kentucky Derby with the most elaborate headpieces are the ones who are paying to keep the sport alive.
When the Scarborough Downs harness-racing track opened in Maine in 1950, it catered to both local mill workers and the moneyed WASPs who claimed the Maine Coast as their second home. Since the mid-80s, the track’s revenue has been on a precipitous decline, and it has struggled to survive under successive regimes of mismanagement.
So when it was announced last year that the land around the track was being developed into a mixed use suburb, no one was surprised. It’s probably a good idea to build more housing close to Maine’s largest city—Scarborough is about a 15-minute drive from Portland—and Scarborough Downs, as I heard a man tell his eight-year-old son the last time I was there, is a “fucking dump.” The development will change the Downs into the kind of place that, according to polls and pundits, is essential to winning elections in America: middle-class, white, and suburban.
Though we don’t bet on the ponies as much as we used to, Americans still love a horse race. Every four years, cable news’ ratings spike as they bring on pundits who say things like “Hillary Clinton has a 100% chance of winning the 2016 election” and use lingo like “first around the post” and “tipping points” and “ground game” to talk about elections. We cover and consume elections like we do sporting events. When the dust settles, every loser made a series of catastrophic mistakes that led them to defeat, and every winner was a brilliant tactician who outsmarted everyone else in the room on the path to victory.
Which brings us, as everything does these days, to Donald John Trump: the current President of the United States and the only man who, as far as I can tell, has fired Meat Loaf on national television. At this point, it’s pretty clear that Trump was better at his last job than he is at his current one. As his tax returns show, Trump’s greatest success as a businessman was pretending to be one on television. And even Trump himself sometimes wistfully remembers the good ol’ days.
The enduring problem of the Trump White House is that the Commander-in-Chief does not seem to believe that being president is all that different from pretending to be a businessman on television. He revels in the pomp of the presidency—the balconies, the South Lawn, the presidential seal, Air Force One—like he used to adore his made-for-TV “boardroom,” and he watches television all day to see what the TV people are saying about him. That’s it. He governs mostly like a Republican because he has been told that doing so will play well on Fox News, and when that impulse fails him, it is because he is remarkably capricious and stupid and always has been. Trump is different from everyone who came before him not because he possesses all of these qualities but because he’s made them all so obvious. He yells the quiet part every chance he gets.
His presidency is in some respects different from his predecessors’ thanks to advisers like Stephen Miller, but mostly, it’s different in terms of scale. Trump is everywhere. He is, of course, the topic of the endless segments on MSNBC and CNN in which people like world-class grifter Steve Schmidt, former chief advocate for the VP selection of Sarah Palin, bloviates for three uninterrupted minutes about the unique evils of the Trump administration. But Trump features just as prominently in cringey Eminem freestyles as he does in Lincoln Project videos. The Penrose steps of the president misbehaving and rich people “resisting” is exhausting, gross, and profitable for those involved. It has led to huge swathes of our culture being entirely subsumed under the specter of the Donald.
Consider Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” (spoilers ahead). It seems like a surprise that Sorkin would write the character of Abbie Hoffman, who had no love for the U.S. government, as a hero, especially considering what Sorkin's had to say about Hoffman in the past. But, after hewing at least vaguely to Hoffman’s words and ideals for most of the film, Sorkin has Hoffman say in his final speech, without a hint of irony, that “Americans overthrow their government every four years.” Sorkin can’t resist turning 1968 into the present and converting Abbie Hoffman into the kind of guy who puts a “VOTE!” bumper sticker on his Prius.
This is all that this rotten husk of a country has left. Everything that we create is, in one way or another, a reflection of the president and the #Resistance that comes with him. The future is gone, so is the past, and the Trump universe is our only remaining cultural export. When we do choose to look past our endless present, it’s clear that we’re living through history. The post-Cold War consensus is crumbling and political opinions outside the so-called mainstream are now garnering serious attention. Most of the time, though, we’re too busy staring at a large man teetering headfirst down a ramp to notice.
There is an election on Tuesday, and I hope that Joe Biden wins. If implemented, his policies will make many Americans’ lives materially better. Yet Biden is still a political atavism, a septuagenarian who believes in the Cold-War myths that bipartisanship is an end in itself and that, if we only stopped all the partisan bickering, we’d see that our real interests as Americans magically align. He has not yet indicated any desire to preside over a transformed political world.
And yet, that world is here, and history continues apace. Ironically, this fact will be a lot harder to ignore when the unhinged ramblings of a man who’s only ever wanted to be on television are no longer coming from behind the Resolute Desk.
Donald Trump thinks the horse race is only about the hats. The one part of the presidency that he understands is its aesthetics. When he finally leaves the grandstand, the races will still be run. We’ll still pee in the bathrooms that had their last ill-conceived makeover in 1980, and we’ll still eat soggy hotdogs that get more expensive and less edible every year. The difference is, after Trump waddles slowly off, we might have a better shot at tearing the whole dump down.
—Calder McHugh