Two Flawed, Tragic Characters: One of them will be the 47th President
Donald Trump
Trump is a flawed man — vain, undisciplined, and unable to comport himself with the dignity that is demanded of the Office of the President of the United States. So much of him has already been written about, almost all of them unfailingly criticizing him for his deficiencies, that it seems gratuitous to go over the same list of his foibles again. But there he is, running for office the third time, and out of a messy primary, where he deigned not to debate anyone, he emerged as the Republican candidate none of the others could match. He is either a masochist to run again for office or just a thick-skinned man who does not care anymore about what epithets are flung at him. He has heard them before, or not bothered to hear them, or is incapable of hearing because vain people are so arrogant and narcissistic that they don’t care what others think of them. But vanity might have protected him too, for otherwise with so much mud thrown at him, he could have been buried under a mountain of muck. Still, there he is, campaigning in his usual style, with that rather unbecoming red MAGA cap; or there he is, addressing the media that do not bother to report anything substantial and concrete from his hours-long efforts at convincing them.
His life has been laid bare, and helping in that effort has been his own family — brothers, sisters, cousins — and members of his staff who have had very many unkind things to say about him, his childhood, and everything else. More than two dozen psychiatrists and mental health experts have “measured him at a distance” and said that he presented “a clear and present danger to our nation and individual well-being”. They said, way back in 2017, that he was “both mad and bad” and diagnosed him as a hedonist, a pathological narcissist, paranoid, and a sociopath who has “created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond”. The book runs to 384 pages, according to the Amazon website, and one can assume that these 27 practitioners of modern-day voodoo have some more horrible things to say about him.
Yet, he is still here, having survived an assassination attempt two months ago! We do not know how much of the demonization of him by the media, by the opposition politicians, by academics, and by the ordinary social media hordes led to the assassination attempt, where he escaped by a hair’s breadth. But if we recall, how, even before he took office, between the day the election results were announced and his taking the oath of office, there were hundreds if not thousands of unverifiable claims about how Trump’s words and behaviors (he has been accused by 16 women of various types of sexual assault) had led others to imitate him, including, as alleged by a teacher, one little boy in one little town grabbing a young little girl by her genitals! Surely a part of the world had gone berserk by January 20, 2017, having made so much space in their heads for him.
Trump has had a contagion effect, and again, while there is no precise way of measuring it, we know it is present, rampant, and raging. “I don’t want to Trump because he is dangerous,” a friend posted on Facebook, and when asked “why he is dangerous,” there was only silence or over the next few days a set of juvenile memes. “Did he take us to war,” I ask, and again there is silence. “Did he wage unnecessary wars that led to the death of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of countries like during Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Obama’s presidencies,” I ask, and that too is met with silence. So, surely, our response to this deeply flawed man is also flawed. We cannot see or will not see beyond his flawed personal life. We refuse to look at and weigh his economic and social policies, or twist and lie about them so much that we begin to believe that lying about them is perfect.
There is the tragedy of this man, who could have otherwise spent the past decade of his life in his gaudy New York mansions, flamboyant Miami golf resorts, or anywhere else in the world, but instead pursued the high office of the President of the United States, spent four years in that office, and never was able to be the “most powerful man on Earth”. He has spent the past four years fighting all kinds of cases lodged against him, most of them nothing but political hit jobs, “lawfare” justified in the pursuit of a man that they hate and who they have labeled “a dangerous man”.
He was/has been/and continues to be mocked, derided, shamed, and stymied, many times by his own chosen men and women. We can therefore wonder what it is that drives this man in this mad pursuit of office for which he had no experience or training. No historian will write well of him, at least in the next couple of decades, and much of what others say about him, including his present running mate, is not said with much conviction and comfort. Those who have joined him on his campaign and put their lives and reputations in harm’s way have had to hold their tongues — good, smart, thoughtful women and men who walk on eggshells waiting for the next rambling, off-the-cuff remark from the “accordion” man. They are not with him because they like the man let alone love him, but because Trump is in many ways the only man who might be able to challenge the complex, expensive, and corrupt establishment that the United States is now managed by.
Maybe, the tragedy is that this man does not know himself, and therefore no one else can. Immediately after the assassination attempt, for a very brief moment, when he raised his fist and mouthed “fight” we saw something of the energy and spirit that sustains this big, flawed man. Whatever goodwill and support he gained that day was lost the following week when he accepted the Republican nomination and wasted two good hours telling the world a tale without a beginning, a middle, or an end.
We are told, today, September 15, 2024, that there has been another assassination attempt on him. There is no doubt that there are many, many who want him dead or wish that the July assassin and the September assassin had succeeded. That sentiment is not new. It has been so since when Kathy Griffin, in 2017, posted a photo of herself holding up a “severed head” of Trump. The media have expressed outrage that anyone who has joked about the assassination attempt on Trump has been “targeted”. They don’t even bother to say that such jokes are not just tasteless but are a form of hate speech.
Yes, most probably, Trump is going to pass into history as a contemptible man… unless he wins office on November 5, 2024, and sets the world spinning again in the repeat gyrations of 2016. If he does win the election, the contempt and the hate could lead to deadly, devastating riots across the country, and what could it then lead to? Will he be able to take the oath of office? If he does take the oath of office, will he be able to put together a functioning administration? What will he be able to accomplish, if anything at all, and what will the country look like in 2028?
After his passing away, will there be a novelist, a musician, a film director, or an opera singer who would write a book, make a film, and sing of him as they have done of some of those flawed Greek gods — Narcissus, Zeus, Poseidon, Ares — or would they merely let him drown in the bile that accumulated since 2016…?
Kamala Harris
And there is Harris, Kamala Harris, of whom I have written here, here, and here before. All of the so-called mainstream media’s profiles of her have been puff pieces if not hagiographic hallelujahs presenting her as the brave “colored” girl brought up by a single mother to be the “leader of the free world,” and the “first female president of these United States”. They have written about how she made her way across the US and Canada earning her academic chops and leadership skills, helped and mentored by “experienced” and “powerful” political leaders.
Unlike the lurid details we are offered of Donald Trump’s sex life, we are merely offered air-brushed accounts of her relationships with men in her life — from the powerful Mayor of San Francisco and the Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, a man older than her father, to Montel Williams, a talk-show host, to a brief mention of her first boyfriend in college. We are simply told, “Harris had a series of relationships that provided context to her life before politics. Some of these relationships were significant, while others were brief encounters that shaped her personal outlook”. Then there is nothing. Well, there are some things, like Willie Brown who gave her a BMW, trips to Paris, and lucrative and powerful official positions. The New York Post quotes: “Yes, we dated,” said Brown, who was also a two-term mayor of San Francisco, in a 2019 opinion piece. “Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”
While Willie Brown celebrated the anointing of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party presidential candidate last month, back in 2003, Kamala Harris had something different to say: San Francisco Weekly wrote an article about the Brown-Harris relationship when she was running for District Attorney. That article called Brown “Harris’ spurned ex-lover and unsolicited political backer.” She called their relationship an “albatross” around her neck. Interestingly, according to the San Francisco Weekly, “She was 29, he was 60. Their May/December affair was the talk of the town during the year before Brown’s successful 1995 bid to become mayor. But shortly after he was inaugurated, Harris dumped Brown, a notorious womanizer.” But then, in politics, anything is possible, and for politicians, sociopaths by nature, ethics and values are nothing more than platitudes to mouth during election time and to lull gullible voters into becoming cult members.
Even more interestingly, in that San Francisco Weekly article, we get a peek into Kamala Harris’ worldview through her mother’s words: “We are not born to a higher purpose,” she (Shyamala Gopalan) reflects. “Karma simply means … we schlep. We do what we must, and the less we dwell on it the better.”
More telling is this paragraph in the otherwise very positive picture of Kamala Harris painted in the article: “Shyamala says the ‘malevolence’ of the personal attack on her daughter makes her angry. ‘What has Willie Brown done for her? Introduce her to society people when they dated? If they did not like Kamala on her own right, they would have dropped her after she dropped Willie. Kamala is comfortable in all kinds of social scenes. She can pull it off in high society, too. She has the manners, the eating habits. Why shouldn’t she have gone out with Willie Brown? He was a player. And what could Willie Brown expect from her in the future? He has not much life left’.”
What exactly does this say about Shyamala Gopalan and her daughters’ philosophy of life? Are they merely being pragmatic, practical, and worldly-wise, or were they willing “to do whatever was necessary to go wherever they want/ed to go”? Shyamala Gopalan has been dubbed the “warrior mother” by the Associated Press. All of the articles and commentaries about Shyamala Gopalan’s influence on her daughters celebrate the strength, courage, and conviction of Shyamalan Gopalan, but there seems to be a cold-blooded, calculating aspect to their lives that is quietly airbrushed away by willing media collaborators.
And then there is the short video clip of Kamala Harris at a party in 1995 where an onlooker asks if Willie Brown is her father: https://twitter.com/i/status/1833543794064502950. Only when you watch this will you understand why we may dub Kamala Harris a “tragic” figure. What was she doing with this man, not her age, not attractive, and older than her father? What did she get in return, and what did she ask in return? From this observation in the Mother Jones’ profile we may learn a little bit about the tragedy of Kamala’s life. The reporter notes: “Harris was also maddeningly elusive, friendly and open even as she firmly latched the door and pulled down the shades on anything remotely private. All of which left me wondering: Who was this person? How could I distinguish the appealing packaging from the authentic self?”
What is it that Kamala Harris and her “elusive” father not telling us about the short marriage and rancorous divorce? What made Shyamala and Donald fall in love and then distance themselves with such bitterness? Kamala Harris gets her looks from her father, a very handsome man, and not her mother, a pouty, small-built, undistinguished personality. Why is she not talking about her father, and why did he and his family distance themselves from this successful politician who may be our next president? What does Donald Harris know about the wiles and guiles of the Gopalan family that we are not privy to, and why did so much rancor develop between the two? How distressed must Prof. Harris have been to see his handsome, beautiful daughter hanging on to Willie Brown’s hands? What did Prof. Harris want of his daughters? How have they disappointed him? He writes poignantly of being influenced by his grandmothers as well as his mother and father. So, why is this sole focus on Shyamala Gopalan and what did she do to distance her daughters from their father?
Privacy is important, but when it comes to presidents and presidential candidates, we only let their young children out of our inquiries, not their immediate family members. Prof. Harris has firmly said no to interviews, we are told, but when was it that anyone asked him to speak to them? Will the family secrets die with him? What does he think about his daughters and how they have lived their lives? That we are so lacking in curiosity about these matters goes to show how the “mainstream” media have become shills for one political party and one set of political candidates, and how the American voters have been turned into gullible cult members.
Thus, behind the loud and sometimes disturbing laughter of Kamala Harris, if we listen closely, we might be able to hear the desperate cry of a young girl for her father.
Neither of these candidates can speak about or articulate matters of policy with any depth, intelligence, or clarity. They are not Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama who could study policy matters, guide their staff, and articulate and elaborate on a variety of domestic and international issues. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are policy featherweights — the former rambling and going off on tangents, and the latter repeating talking points without seeming to understand what she is being asked to say. That is what makes both of them flawed and weak candidates. But it is their personal lives that make both of them tragic characters.