An important pivot point to Daisey’s narrative in The Trump Card is TRUMP The Game. He describes it as Monopoly for dogs, in that it steals its basic concept from the classic game while dumbing it down and adding aggression. For instance, the Trump Die is like any other die, but when you roll a T (which replaces the six), you can steal anything you want from anyone.
Daisey hosted a Trump-themed dinner party with this game as the focal point. By tethering the narrative in that party, he perfectly illustrates the curse of the white liberal. Who else would enjoy getting together strictly to ironically celebrate Donald Trump? For one year, we have been playing Trump’s game, and he is winning.
Daisey goes on to carefully describe why so many cannot get behind Clinton, while managing to avoid the pitfalls of discussing the Democratic candidate in detail. This was an important caveat to avoid. His primary critique of Clinton is “at best, she is just okay at running for President,” and Donald Trump is amazing at running for President.
He observed that Trump, the great performer, would have to meet Hillary, the uncharismatic just-okay campaigner, on the debate floor, coincidentally the very night before it happened. Setting aside the whole concept of winners and losers in debates (which doesn’t actually equate to correct and incorrect) then Trump, in the first debate, was more compelling to watch and listen to, even if you hated everything he said. He is why that was the most watched debate ever.
Daisey examples his mother among the white rural Americans whose economies have been wrecked, whose good times have been over for decades. She will listen politely, she will vote with prudence, but if you tell her that as a Democrat, yourself another city liberal, that you need her to vote for Clinton, she will respond,
Where were you fucking people? Where were you the whole time I have lived here, for decades? When things are good in the cities? They are bad here. And when they are bad in the cities, they are worse here. I have watched you people, all of you. You Republicans and you Democrats, there’s no fucking difference. You work together and you turned your fucking backs on us. There was welfare reform, there was NAFTA, and you fucked us. You fucked us, and you did it a long time ago, and you’re still doing it, and you have the audacity to walk in here? Go to hell.
It only takes someone just a little more pissed off and disillusioned than his mother to vote Trump. This is almost me, I won’t vote Trump, but I am not afraid of his presidency. I am willing, as he said, to say, “Fuck it, let it burn.” The illusion of democracy is thinly veiled. All I see coming down the pike is fascism, the neoliberal brand or the TRUMP brand. Both of them seem liable to start WWIII.
The curse of the white liberal is Trump. He has coopted the Republican Party as honestly as any politician ever could, by running the most deplorable campaign in American history (in the context of contemporary white liberal standards) because that is the immature, denied soul of America, and Trump knows how to feed on it.
Most of all, Trump is feeding on the truth vacuum produced by a political establishment that has never been forthright with us — not my generation or my parents. American politicians have only amplified deception — not just Republicans. In 2001, the PATRIOT Act was passed almost unanimously, and we were lied to about the scope of domestic surveillance through Obama’s second term. We were cheated into both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Hillary Clinton leading the Democrats into it. Americans are thoroughly disoriented and Trump’s bright orange glow is becoming our North Star.
I want to end this review with the same point that The Trump Card ends with. There is an important influence over Donald Trump: Roy Cohn. Daisey describes Trump as the apprentice to Cohn. Cohn is the full image of a shady lawyer, but he was a prodigious one. By age 25, Cohn was masterminding the legal battles of McCarthyism. Cohn was known to threaten anyone that stood in his way: judges, military officers, anyone.
In 1973, Cohn defended Trump against Justice Department allegations of racial discrimination relating to Trump-managed properties — he amazingly counter-sued for $100M and of course lost. This very suit was mentioned by Hillary in the first debate, and Cohn was right with him, saying, “We settled without admission of guilt.” Cohn will always be next to Trump.
And now, Trump will always be with us. He is beside millions of fired-up politicians, voters, and political pundits, and will be for years and years forthcoming.
In the final scene, after the game night and dinner party, sitting on his Brooklyn rooftop with the evening twilight, Cohn is beside Daisey. He asks if Trump is going to win. Cohn laughs and warns, “He’s won already.” He carries on, leaving a chilling revelation,
He’s laid the road, and now someone else can just walk down it.
That’s what you people never understand. This isn’t one person or another. We don’t disappear. This is one to another to another. This is a chain. This is the chain that’s wrapped around your neck.
You’ve lost already.
Featured image by Noel Nunez. Contributing editor is Kathleen Dolan. Links to further information and downloads below.
One reply on “We’ve Been Trumped”
I remember when those people interrupted and yelled out “Vote Trump”. It was when Daisey was describing how his Grandfather’s hateful words sounded, what hate speech actually feels like inside the mouth, as it leaves the mouth like “a liturgy”. People who hate speak, enjoy it, he said and you can hear that “in the oily quality” of the words. When he said “oily”, he imitated the hate speech and I could hear Daisey’s mouth in the mic, not just his words, but the sounds around the words. They were slippery and wet. Oily was the best way to convey it. Just then, those people interrupted. And I’ll admit, it was slightly hard to stomach Daisey’s imitation (just like it was hard for Daisey as a kid.) like watching someone drool lasciviously or something. I wonder what those words sounded like in those people’s mouths, the ones that interrupted the performance with their clear, clean declaration: Vote Tump.