Joe Bennett: Trump gave people permission to be their worst selves

Tuesday, 21 March 2023

Former President Donald Trump at a campaign event earlier this month, in Davenport, Iowa.

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright.

OPINION: The case of shiraz came with a half bottle of champagne. I rarely drink champagne and it has stood on a high shelf for months. But yesterday I took it down and put it in the fridge because it seems that Trump is about to be indicted. By the time you read this the bottle may be empty.

Trump paid hush money to a porn actress in order to influence an election. His former lawyer has already been to prison for the crime and will be the star witness for the prosecution. He has cheques with Trump's signature. He has recordings of conversations with Trump. The case is simple.

And that's only the first indictment. Some time soon Trump will be charged with stealing classified documents. He will be charged with trying to corrupt the electoral count in Georgia. He will be charged with seditious conspiracy over the events of January 6th. And he will be charged with crimes of which we haven't yet heard.

Trump supporters stormed Congress, with five people dying in the violence. He denies any wrongdoing.

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Trump is already playing the martyr on social media and begging his supporters to save him. They can't. They won't.

We are all partly egocentric, but Trump is entirely egocentric. He consists only of his appetites – greed, vanity, lust. He has all human vices and no human graces. He's a bloated bag of self, of want want want, of get get get. There is no worse personality imaginable.

01012022Mugshots. Staff photos. Headshots. Columnist Joe Bennett. Stuff staff mugshot Feb 2022.

And yet he inspired a cult of personality. Millions of Americans voted for him twice and would vote for him again. What did they see in him?

It wasn't ideas, or policies, or moral positions. The Jesus, guns and babies crowd, for example, were besotted with him and yet he's never opened a Bible, fired a gun or resisted the urge to be unfaithful to his several wives.

Trump's appeal was that he expressed people's inner bastard. He embodied their prejudices. He gave them permission to be their worst selves.

It's a quality that appealed to rich donors every bit as much as to poor voters. They saw a man as greedy as they were and with it a chance to get richer still. So money poured into his election campaigns.

By appealing to both donors and voters, Trump also appealed to the Republican Party. He could get them into power. Many Republicans saw through him and a few told the truth. In 2016 Senator Lindsey Graham called Trump a 'race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot' and said that if the Republican Party didn't reject him it would lose 'the moral authority to govern’. But then he discovered that people would vote for race-baiting xenophobic religious bigotry and he's been Trump's biggest supporter ever since. All it's cost him is his integrity.

The same is true of all Republicans who loudly embraced Trump or quietly went along with him. By doing either they made the worst bargain of their lives. Consider Rudy Giuliani. He's shrunk from an admired former mayor of New York to a stammering clown with hair dye running down his face. It's his reward for siding with sedition.

In the end perhaps we should be grateful for the reminder that the ice is thin. And the things we take for granted in the west, the things on which our peaceful easy lives are founded, such as democracy and the rule of law, are only one crappy demagogue away from being dismantled.

It will take a while but Trump will be tried and found guilty of a range of crimes. And then, devoid of suit, tie, hairspray and facial bronzer, he will be sent to prison. And I will have to buy some more champagne.