In a topsy-turvy world where we now have to take Donald Trump seriously and contemplate why, at minimum, roughly 4 in 10 of our fellow citizens seem prepared to vote for him as president in November—and whether those numbers will shift to such an extent that a year from now you and I could be locked up in re-education camps—it is fitting that a cartoonist has succeeded at explicating the Trump phenomenon better than most.
Ted Rall isn’t just your average cartoonist, however. He is also an essayist, an occasional reporter and broadcaster, a serial provocateur, and, in the late 1980s, a loan officer in the Industrial Bank of Japan’s New York office. There, he claims he persuaded his boss to deny a loan for the Trump Taj Mahal hotel and casino, which the developer was then building in Atlantic City. According to Rall, the numbers didn’t “come close to making sense.” He was proved correct when the Taj, along with other Trump casinos, subsequently went into bankruptcy.
That autobiographical factoid crops up near the end of Rall’s excellent Trump: A Graphic Biography, which will be published this week by Seven Stories Press—a sequel of sorts to Rall’s previous graphic biographies (Edward) Snowden and Bernie (Sanders). In the new book, Rall sketches in Trump’s life story; it’s an able if familiar telling. Rall’s cartooning style is appealingly crude—Matt Groening is an obvious influence—and aside from adding wild hair, he doesn’t draw Trump much differently from his other people. That primitivism adds a silly charm to an otherwise serious endeavor: a spoonful of sugar, perhaps. But Trump is also an attempt to grapple with Trumpism, a noun that seems certain to endure even if the candidacy ultimately goes down in flames.
Thus Rall begins not at the hallowed birthplace in Jamaica Estates, Queens, but with an honest, respectful attempt to understand Trump’s supporters, whom he refuses to dismiss as mere dupes or bigots. He charts the decline of the American middle class over the last 40 years, moves on to the housing bubble, the subprime-mortgage crisis, the wider financial meltdown of 2008, and the subsequent bipartisan decision to bail out banks rather than underwater home owners, which led to the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements and left millions of voters of all persuasions open to populist economic appeals. Throw in fears about terrorism and frustration with the political status quo and you have a combustible electorate.
Enter Trump with his blend of nativism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. “Like any good businessman,” Rall writes, “Trump exploited an inefficiency in the marketplace, in this case, of ideas.” Rall’s point, which has been made by others but perhaps not as succinctly, is that Republicans have for decades been playing “the populist card” in appeals to voters without actually doing much about low wages and illegal immigration (aside from frustrating reform) out of deference to corporate backers. By promising to build a border wall with Mexico and deport the 11 million undocumented people already living here, Trump has called his own party’s bluff and gave the market the product it had been craving—a cannier, better-selling version of Trump Steaks or Trump Vodka.
“It took a while for the punditocracy to catch on that everything about the new presidential candidate—his belligerent style, his bizarre hair, his take on Republicanism—was popular precisely because it was so unorthodox,” Rall writes, adding a bit later: “[Trump] wasn’t merely willing to break some rules. He knew he couldn’t win unless he completely shattered the basic assumptions of what Americans wanted in a leader.”
Well, yes, what kind of leader do we want? A Vladimir Putin–style strongman, even an out-and-out fascist? That will be the fall’s million-dollar question. In Rall’s view, while Trump speaks to some legitimate concerns among his supporters, the catch—well, one of many—is that “it’s hard to separate the economic nativists and people understandably concerned about terrorist attacks from the crazies on the far right: racist skinheads, militia types, neo-Nazis, and others who are usually, and rightly, marginalized from the political process.” Of course, such distinctions are only further blurred when the candidate himself retweets anti-Semitic imagery and appears reluctant to disavow support from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Regarding the F-word, Rall tries to be scrupulous, noting that there are “parallels between Trumpism and fascism and differences.” As to the latter, he quotes the historian Robert Paxton, a professor of Rall’s at Columbia and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism as well as several studies of Vichy France. Paxton, however, offers only small comfort: “This thing about the strong state, and everybody regimented, and wearing uniforms, the shirts the same color, arms out the same way—this is not the style of Americans.” True, though on the other hand, Eva Braun never advertised that you could “shop her look.”
Rall is even less sanguine: “Trump can seem likable. Funny. Hilarious, even. Mussolini had remarkable charisma too. Hitler could be funny, even droll. Point is, dealmakers and master salesmen like Trump all have that persuasive power. He appeals on a visceral level because he seems real. Is Trump fascist? Protofascist? Let’s hope we never have to find out. What we do know is he is employing fascist tactics. He fits the mold.”
Trump ends with this quote, “attributed” to Benito Mussolini: “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.” Night-table reading? Maybe if you lay in a good supply of Ambien.
