Donald Trump and the Fear of Death

To varying degrees everybody lives with a fear of death and, in one manner or another, attempts to deny death’s finality. In the case of Donald Trump, all those steel and granite edifices emblazoned with his name have long struck me as evidence of a terror of extinction. Their presumed endurance is intended to at least assure him of a symbolic immortality. And the achievement of symbolic immortality is also, I’d submit, the underlying motive behind his decision to run for the presidency, an office for which he has no discernible vocation but which guarantees him a place in history.

A pronounced extinction anxiety is what afflicts the majority of Trump’s supporters as well, and it’s precisely this anxiety that—coming from his personal angst?—he recognized and addressed. I’m speaking of the white population’s declining preeminence in America and of the existential dread it has stirred in much of that demographic.

The major consequence of the white American’s dread has been, of course, a heightening racism which, further energized by Trump’s blatant denigration of Muslims and Mexicans, played the decisive role in his election. Racism is born of the impulse to transcend a finite existence. We can talk about economics, about crime rates and about Islamic terrorism, and they are significant factors. But to dwell on them obfuscates the reality that racism is rooted in the wish to feel superior to other humans in the judgment of a higher power, in, most especially, the wish to own an exceptionalism that implicitly signals a fitness to survive one’s death in a rarefied afterworld. Presenting an effortless way to define, separate and elevate our identities, differences in color or culture afford those ill-equipped to otherwise distinguish themselves, an opportunity to claim that fitness.

For so many white Americans, the prospect of relinquishing their purchase on supremacy, and of surrendering the divine approbation that they’d like to believe attends it (a concern deeper than a loss of jobs per se), made Trump an ideal candidate.

Politically surfacing at a dire moment—during the first presidency of a black man!—Trump cast himself as a white savior and, in doing so, secured what amounts to a religious allegiance among his followers, an allegiance that blinds them to his monumental deficiencies.

But if globalization (manifested by mass migration and racial intermingling) is the phenomenon that’s produced our current circumstances, it’s been a done deal for awhile now. As difficult as the fact of death and the reactions that fact causes makes such a possibility, globalization needs to be embraced. The resistance to it that Trump embodies (along with comparable figures in Europe where Caucasian dominion is similarly threatened) can only be destructive to everyone. His strategies to reestablish white precedence are not merely empty of substance and futile they are dangerous. For one illustration: His pledge to reboot the all but obsolete coal industry, and revive the status of a remaining handful of white miners, by summarily rejecting measures to combat climate change is likely to have a catastrophic impact on the planet’s future inhabitants, including, ipso facto, the miner’s progeny.

I could, to be sure, enumerate countless more examples. But Trump’s dearth of virtues as a leader and the jeopardy in which, in so many respects, he is placing us are, at this point in time, well-known to anyone with the capacity to regard him objectively. It may have been innocuous when it was confined to real estate, but a President Trump’s immortality project is putting civilization itself in peril.

 

True true. I don't really like Trump much but I couldn't stand Hilary either. I don't know if globalisation is a good or bad thing. As you say it's kind of happened anyway, but not quite in the way planned. I mean we kind of have a three tier multi-polar world right now. How do we bring the world together without it being some nightmarish vision of the NWO. Maybe there are multiple visions of the NWO and we should abandon that term. It's hard at times to figure out who is the bad guy. Whose model of freedom do we want and choose. What is freedom.

What do you suggest?

 

I edited "multi" for "uni". Hope that makes more sense. My bad.

 

I could never relate to so many people's problem with Hillary. All politicians are by definition liars and deceitful. Hillary was at least sane, intelligent and experienced and her policies were, for the most part, the correct ones. If we deny climate change, and if we resist the inevitable browning of America (which I for one have no issues with), we are doomed to a dystopian reality.

 

None of it will matter much when the oceans are choked with plastic and the land is degraded beyond return. Trump and his ilk are hastening the destruction. They are either monumentally ignorant or truly evil. I pick the latter. I don't know if he's any more afraid of death than anyone else, but he's the guy that said that it was disgusting when he saw a mother breastfeeding.

 

Bullshit.

 

All politicians are not "by definition liars and deceitful". All humans are flawed, and yes I've told a lie or two in my lifetime, but in relative terms some still have a certain amount of integrity and concern about the public good, while others, like the one we have in office, are pond scum. By putting them all in the same boat, you blur this distinction and increase the likelihood that the scum will rise to the top. Jimmie Carter might qualify for sainthood, although he was a terrible president.In the 2008 election, the first one I voted in, I saw both candidates, Obama and McCain, as basically decent men. I still feel the same way, despite the efforts of Trump and the disinformation machine at Fox to demonize both. In the 2016 election, I saw the choice as between two evils, the one we got being much worse than the other. I agree that Hillary was sane, intelligent and experienced, and I prefer Democrat to Repubican policies. But I don't see how the Clintons could have made that much money after office honestly, and I don't think they had the public interest at heart. But Trump is a thoroughly dishonest, narcissistic demagogue in the mold of so many Third World dictators we've encountered in the past. He'll inflict incalculable damage on the country if he continues to stay in office--environmental destruction being only one of the casualties.

 

John McCain is an exceptional man and I honor him for his many virtues. I will, however, never forgive him for what amounted to a treasonous act by putting the likes of Sarah Palin on his ticket.

 

Yes, that was a lapse of judgment, which he's since admitted. McCain says he regrets picking Palin as running mate At least he admits mistakes; Trump never does that.

 

Hilary is so sane. She laughs and jokes about killing people. (Gaddafi.)

 

This reminds me of Shelley's poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.[

 

Hillary and Trump are both pieces of work, that's for sure. And it's terrible to laugh about people being killed, even monsters like Hitler, Nero, Caligula, Ivan the Terrible or Gaddafi. But next to the narcissistic sociopathic Pussygrabber in Chief who mocks the disabled, insults war heroes and gold star families, attacks our allies, publicly sides with a hostile foreign power against our intelligence officers, and exploits racial and other divisions as wedge issues in his daily tweets to divide and conquer the American people, she seems a picture of mental health.

 

Wow you really have a sting in your tail when people have different opinions to you. My conclusions are always open to modification, but I've yet to see much in Hilary to alter my opinion. I have an increasingly dim view of Trump, too, but I think the Clinton dynasty is as much motivated by the lure of money and power as the other phonies. I see Chelsea may be entering the fray soon. I'm sorry you're having a rough time of it there in the States but things have gone pretty cockomamy here as well.

 

I'm sure cops, EMTs, ambulance drivers and others that have to deal with death and dismemberment , ALL have to make nervous jokes and / or laugh at situations to cut the tension over the horror they encounter on a daily basis. What they say would NOT work in other settings and would seem quite cruel.

 

I think the response to the Trump presidency is the angst the establishment is feeling at their possible extinction.

 

I doubt that they're worried. BillionaireTrump and his family are part of the Establishment.

 

I agree for White America Donald Trump is their Great White Hope, their last gasp before fading away into obscurity. They see their institutions dissolving right before their eyes and there's nothing they can do about it.

Then along comes Donald trump in his shining armor with his mantra Make America Great Again, when in essence what he's really saying is Make America White Again -
and that resonates with them. It's almost like a sickness, and one we've seen before, it's the sickness of racism.

8 Years of Obama really put the whammy on their heads.