But even “Make America great again” has embedded within it a vague general critique of the current political climate. It is essentially the same one as was proffered by the Tea Party some years ago, which is strange in that Trump was a prominent supporter of the proximate cause of the tea-party uprising – the bailouts – who assured his friends that he “didn’t march with the Tea Party,” though he could understand their anger. Of course he could understand their anger: Understanding and exploiting the baser emotions is what con artists do, and Donald Trump is a con artist par excellence. If you want to surf, you care about how big the wave is, whichever way it is breaking. In political rhetoric as in tacky ties, Trump’s is a volume-based business. The Tea Party’s fundamental complaint, which was the same complaint put forward by Occupy Wall Street minus the Maoist daydreaming, is that there exists a corrosive and distasteful relationship between certain politically connected businesses and the politicians who are both their patrons and their clients.
Donald Trump is the face of that insalubrious relationship, a lifelong crony capitalist who brags about buying political favors. But his enthusiasts, devoid as they are of a literate politics capable of thinking about all three sides of a triangle at the same time, take a kind of homeopathic view of Trump, believing that they can dispatch a crony capitalist to undo crony capitalism in the same way that New Age healers believe that a little bit of diluted poison chases away similar toxins.
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