Can Trump ride the tiger even as the zoo collapses in on itself?

Well, I went down to see the wreck like all the rest,
The bloody seats, the broken glass, the crumpled mess,
But I found something no one else had even seen,
Behind the dash in Mary’s crumpled up machine,
In a tiny match box encircled by a rubber band,
Was the golden wedding ring from Walter Browning’s hand…

— Porter Wagoner, “Caroll County Accident” (1968)

God bless the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutors for releasing a collective array of the mugshots from the Donald Trump indictments, like some Kodachrome re-rendering of the James Gang. This appears to have been planned, after the first Rudy Giuliani shot, hangdog, vagrant, with a caught-pissing-into-a-wine-bottle-out-the-back-of-a-blues-bar look. From then on, everyone else is grinning like idiots, leaving Donald Trump to scowl masterfully from the centre.

The whole look reinforces the cultish aspect of the Trump push — which is exactly what his supporters want — and plays into Trump’s determination to transform his image into outright Jokerfication in his bid for a second term. It’s a long way from “Make America Great Again” but it’s all he’s got to work with. 

The Republican Party and the US is heading for a — well car crash doesn’t describe it. It’s more like the scene in Terminator 2 where the tanker of liquid nitrogen flips 90 degrees and continues flying down the freeway on its side towards the steel mill.

Trump will win the Republican primary unless he dies between now and its conclusion, and if he were to die mid-primary season he would win the next contests as a write-in. He could be on trial for any of the dozens of indictments he is facing in several states and federally and still be nominated and then elected. He could even be convicted, and still run and become president, something many people may not yet have realised. He may not be able to vote for himself as a Florida resident and convicted felon, but that is a matter of state laws. The constitution says nothing about disqualifying potential presidents for criminal convictions. Only impeachment in a Senate trial could remove him, once he became president.

With a convicted felon for president, it might be more possible than it was to get the 17 Republican Senate votes to provide the 67 required to secure the conviction. But it is by no means certain, or even likely. Trump would just win a popular vote, to the huge delight of the Republican rank and file. Anyone who did vote for him would be primaried straight after. Just about every Republican anti-Trumper from last time is now gone.

Trump would be able to sit in the White House with those Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) convictions hanging around his neck like rappers’ bling, king of the global cast of gangsters now running our multipolar world, like the league of bad guys from the Marvel Universe comics.

Various figures in the Republican Party are trying to find ways to head that off in the primaries. Simply piling in behind a preferred candidate in the current framework isn’t going to do it. The various hopes that elite rightwingers in the party put in Ron DeSantis, the one-time lead alternative now sitting at around 19%, shows how wilfully and perpetually they misunderstand the nature of Trump’s appeal.

His appeal has never been that of a programmatic culture warrior as per DeSantis, and his penny-ante filleting of school libraries etc. Aside from a few remarks about “not being able to say what you want”, Trump waged culture war simply by being Trump. Some liked his piggish attitudes as regards opponents, all women, Mexicans etc, and some supported him while loathing it, but they all liked the spirit beneath it, the comportment, the attitude to the world.

The frequent refrain that they liked him because he was “a businessman” wasn’t about business per se. Trump’s supporters wouldn’t have any time for Jeff Bezos. They like Trump’s lack of regard for command of detail, for making a coherent case etc. Not merely DeSantis, but Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, is equally disqualified by this. The other Republicans on the debate stage last week — retreads Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, plus two identikit governors on 1% — were there purely for the exposure, absent Trump’s demise. 

Such life as there was, with Trump absent the stage doing a parallel special on X with Tucker Carlson, was provided by Vivek Ramaswamy, and he’s a doozy. The 38-year-old Harvard grad, child of Hindu Brahmin immigrants, worth around $950 million on paper (the value of his pharma finance companies), Ramaswamy’s politics are Silicon Valley libertarianism meets cultural conservatism on untested steroids.

His proposed can-do aggressive executive government style goes miles beyond previous exponents such as Ted Cruz, who remained bound within existing conservative ideas of limited government. Cruz and others proposed the abolition of federal departments of matters that could be handed back to the states, such as education; Ramaswamy wants to abolish several of those, plus the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Food and Drug Administration, and sack 75% of federal public servants. Much of what he suggests is plain unconstitutional, but Ramaswamy is very much a vibe-of-the-thing sort of politician. 

Ramaswamy also managed to buck the happy, grateful child of immigrants cliché which was hitherto the only way for non-Black people of colour to project an identity within Republican politics, and which current and former Indian/Pakistani-Americans such as Haley and Bobby Jindal had down to a tee. In the debate, Ramaswamy went on the attack as to the US in its current state, channelling the same politics as friend-of-the-ABC Steve Bannon gave to Trump: harsh truth-telling about decline, softness, the corrosive effect of woke, the wokeness of corporate capitalism, etc.

His schtick is a lot more confronting to the base than Trump’s dreamy MAGA rhetoric. Ramaswamy has the liberty to do that because his campaign is almost entirely self-funded, buying his way into the debate by pumping himself up in a few state polls to get over the margin required to be on the stage. Were he to somehow get into contention, one suspects this forthrightness would undo him. It is not actual honesty, but “honesty” that the Republican base wants. Ramaswamy is nothing like the geeky Silicon Valley political types, the Peter Thiels etc, who sound like lizard men sweating under their latex skin masks as they imitate the humans. He’s an investor who stuck to pharma — his companies buy up unused patents for lifesaving medicines and resell them to put them into use, simultaneously the genius and abhorrence of private healthcare — rather than a coder who got rich. 

But were he to somehow prevail, he would never be able to project to the wider American public in the way that Trump did in 2016. It’s not just the non-whiteness, though that would be a factor; the presidency is an elected monarchy, constructed in the 18th century, and carrying a strain of the “holy family” side of European royalty. The voters the Republicans need tend to like their immigrant politicians in subaltern roles, usually that of governor.

But it’s also that Ramaswamy still projects the wrong sort of business nous, still too tied up with intellectuality and the smooth manipulation of vast mysterious, abstract forces. These are the people — the Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs — that many ordinary Americans fear for the world they represent, the final victory of incomprehensibility. Trump represents the industrial America that many in the working- and middle-class want, one where you get good wages for basic work, and where on the weekends you can put up the hood of your car and work on the engine.

For a whole class of people, the world they live in is now a set of “black box” technologies, impossible to transform or interact with, and their country has become the same. That’s why this particular form of populist politics has arisen; it mixes the “solutionism” of the present — put up the hood of the country and bang it with a spanner until it works — with notions of a founding virtuous order. If America is the product of a revolution unfolding God’s will on earth, then it must be fixable by a return to factory settings. 

There is within that a kernel of radical resistance to the present — one that progressivism cannot recognise because it is now enforced by the state and corporate sector, and is the ideology of the new ruling class. It is a rebellion against the total transformation of human life by technology, supercharged by capital.

A little bit of Heidegger in the mix, to quote a discarded verse from Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” — and if you’re wondering why the pop culture references perfuse this analysis it’s because the great event has happened and America’s separate civic culture has collapsed into its popular culture, and myth rather than ideas now utterly dominates the political process. But the urge within that to something… else, suggests there are sharp limits to Ramaswamy’s appeal — and that Trump remains the only contender capable of focusing that desire.

But whether the Donald can still ride the tiger remains to be seen. His Carlson interview competing with the debate was strong on resentment, self-pity and the stolen election, short on the gonzo exuberance that propelled him in 2016. The usual sequel to that sort of brooding resentment is a headshot in a bunker, not a return to the White House.

In the absence of Trump, people have begun to look elsewhere for their solace, which partly explains the outsize success of “Rich Men North of Richmond“, the protest song by hitherto unknown singer-songwriter and ginger Oliver Anthony, which has shot to No. 1 in the US (with a little help from organised mass downloading) as the Republican debates have wound on. The song is both forceful and incoherent, complaining of working poverty, but assailing the rich men for exercising mind control rather than taking all the money, and then swinging ’round to target the poor for being obese — which Anthony says is a reference to the rich leaving people on welfare.

Thus Anthony issued a statement excoriating the Republicans for all quoting from the song during the debate, saying they were part of the problem. The trouble is, when you need to issue a two-page statement explaining a three-verse protest song, you have perhaps not written it as effectively as was possible — the absurdity added to by Billy Bragg penning a fierce reply as, what else, an op-ed in The Guardian. That’ll show ’em.

But the incoherence is at least an honest expression of, as the song says, an “old soul in a new world”. It’s also white as hell, Richmond being Richmond, Virginia, south of Washington DC and the capital of the Confederacy. The latter serves, as it always has, as the ultimate lost cause, waiting for a new Robert E Lee (the general, not the steamboat).

Trump has faltered in fulfilling that role. Will his indictment and processing restore him to his position as sole representative of the nation’s id, with that collective mugshot hanging somewhere between a wanted poster and that cynosure of the old world, the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch? Or have we lost him in the “Fulton County Accident”? 

Can Trump outfox us all and be returned to the White House? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.