ALL ABOUT THE LOVE AGAIN [279]

A Donald Trump cake delivered to Trump Tower, New York,
ahead of 2016 election festivities.

When Joe Biden finally took over as the 46^thPresident of the United States, it was at 5pm GMT, meaning I listened to his speech on the way home from work. That evening, and through the following day, I felt very distracted, almost like I felt anxious about having much less to feel anxious about.

Hearing a politician sincerely recognise the problems besetting the nation they must now guide, promise to address them, and pledge to lead on behalf of all their people, and not just those that voted for them, reminds you these actions are meant to be fundamental to being a leader - it is just nice hearing from someone that actually wants to do the job.

I can now understand what Barack Obama meant about the “audacity of hope”: democracy standing defiant, and in splendid progress, despite the events of two weeks before, and of the previous four years.

The attempted coup on the US Capitol building was the Kmart Blue Light Special of insurrections. (For UK audiences, read as the Debenhams Blue Cross Sale – two dead department store chains for the price of one.) It was like there was a cheap 4K television in every room. People were so excited to be there, they made sure others knew they were, helping the CIA and FBI most efficiently. Most shocking was the level of entitlement, both to storm their own seat of government, and to base their indignation out of something conducted from nothing but unsupported prejudice.

I didn’t think Donald Trump had it in him to incite sedition and insurrection, but when his businesses have declared bankruptcy as often as they have - six, between 1991 and 2009 - perhaps it was worth a go. I sincerely thought that the election of Joe Biden, a man now declared President more often than Franklin D Roosevelt, would be the end of the matter, and Trump would slowly realise his game was lost, and he would allow us all to get on with our lives. But too many people were wreaking havoc in his name for his ego to back down. If a second impeachment trial in the US Senate doesn’t convict him, something else will – there must be a lesson for him to learn.

Often repeated are the lessons taught to Trump by his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, formerly chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy, of the witch trials, and defender of mob bosses: “Dominate in every interaction, never admit wrongdoing or defeat, never pay your bills, and sue anyone who objects to your behaviour into financial submission.” Cohn, who denied he had AIDS up to when he died of it – he said it was liver cancer – was given a square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt: “Bully. Coward. Victim.” 

Trump achieved all three before being exiled, a pariah from American life. Trump bullied so much on Twitter that it had to be taken away from him, the benefits for American democracy and discourse in the short-term everyone outweighing the later questions over free speech and the nature of social media – that Trump effectively disappeared until the end of his Presidential term confirms how much he relied on it. Meanwhile, the domestic terrorists now arrested for storming the Capitol wonder why their leader has deserted them, leaving other extremist politicians in the Republican party to continue a pyrrhic crusade against the truth, at the expense of their party’s unity. For anyone still interested in ever thinking of Trump as a “victim,” his niece Mary L Trump, the best-placed psychologist in history released, in May 2020, the timeliest book with the clearest title: “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.”

With “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” having begun during the 2016 US Presidential race, Donald Trump became the de facto “Gatekeepers” bogeyman: a man whose choppy utterances and half-formed, half-stolen slogans enraptured millions, and radicalised thousands more. Words were often beyond him, left to those in his administration to make sound reasonable, but the longer the noise, the threats against the media, and the pronouncements on Twitter went on, the more it became the stifling daily rhythm to everyday life.

Fewer articles will be written, and fewer minutes on television will be aired, about Joe Biden’s presidency because it will simply be less eventful, and conducted more conventionally, than Trump’s presidency, which is entirely to be expected. Good – the time freed up to all of us, as consumers of media, can be put to greater use. Therefore, outside of any impending arrest, conviction and imprisonment, this will be the last time I feel the need to write about Donald John Trump. He really was the worst of us.

GON BE A FREE MAN IN THE MORNING [172]

Towards the end of the film “A Face in the Crowd,” Marcia Jeffries realises she must take action to stop the star of the TV show she produces, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes. She discovered Rhodes as a drunken drifter in a jail, when trying to find a voice for a radio item back home in Arkansas. His homespun humour and opinions, and his gravelly singing voice, made him a hit with his audience, but as soon as he saw how they responded to him, and how they could be mobilised, his career took off, to Memphis and New York, from radio to television to politics. He had his audience in his hand, he saw himself in them, and he saw how they could be controlled - ultimately, he thought they were his own flock of sheep. At the end of one show, Marcia fades up Rhodes’ microphone as the credits roll, letting his true opinions be heard by all. Switchboards at the TV station are immediately jammed with the fury of those whose trust he betrayed. His career was over before he left the studio.

For everyone that believes that “cancel culture” began with Twitter, seeing the same thing happen in a film made in 1957, and happen at the same speed, is strangely reassuring: replace telephones with social media, and the scene would have played out in exactly the same way. Indeed, the speed at which the BBC dismissed Danny Baker from his Radio 5 Live show last week, over his placement of an ill-judged picture on Twitter, is comparable to “A Face in the Crowd.”

The writer and director of the film, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, had already been on the receiving end of the power of television, before making a film that warned of that power. They were both witnesses to the House Un-American Activities Committee, under Senator Joseph McCarthy, hearings of which had been carried live on TV, and both had named names – they had been members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, and sought to use their testimony to highlight the totalitarianism rooted in the ideology. Despite giving names already known to the Committee, Kazan would place an advertisement in “The New York Times” to declare that he was glad he appeared, and recommended that others do the same, earning the enmity of many within his industry. It did not ultimately stop Kazan and Schulberg’s careers – they would make “On the Waterfront” in 1954, before “A Face in the Crowd” – but those of many more were curtailed. McCarthy would also be ultimately undone by television, by the journalist Edward R. Murrow on the series "See It Now."

I had intended to write here about how prescient “A Face in the Crowd” would become, as it had initially done poorly upon its release, as the monstrous and infectious performance of Andy Griffith was considered to be overkill, and the plot being seen as preposterous. Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in 2015-16, let alone his actual Presidency, has Lonesome Rhodes written all over it, but we all now know that what real life can throw up can defy fiction altogether. In the film, Mel Miller, a writer on Rhodes’ show, is later writing a book that he hopes will expose the real Lonesome Rhodes – how many more can be released about Trump, and how much of him is left to expose?

Before writing this, I had seen “A Face in the Crowd” only once, about sixteen years ago, on my film degree course. The copy I saw was recorded off the television, and its first home video release in the UK came last week. Twitter did not exist when I last saw it, and “cancel culture” was not yet defined, but all the elements were there. What will it say next?