"LOST IN TRUMPLANDIA

"The pattern-finding sense goes wild in such a place. The corner of the eye takes over the whole. Language as I knew it had either ceased to exist, or else reverted to an automatic form. A phrase lit in a mouth was spoken, went looking for another. A different kind of thinking was happening—the kind you find around racetracks, casinos, the floor of the stock market. I had not thought politics was a physical pleasure. Feeling the air crackle around me, I knew it must be...

I watched who the crowd parted for, who they blocked, the nearly ineffable thickenings and thinnings among people. It was not anger I felt, exactly. It was volatility, a sort of revved and ready tribalism that waited and even wished to be disproved. All it would take to disprove it was the sudden and unexpected sight of an other...

It’s us, was the undercurrent. It’s just us in here. A handshake moved through the air as the speech walloped on, and then something more than a handshake. The more he spoke, the more Trump sounded like a rich man at dinner with a young woman whose passport is her face and her freshness, explaining to her the terms of the arrangement: that he would wear her on his arm, turning her toward the lights, that she would defer to him in public, that he would give her just enough of what he has to sustain her. I wrote in my notebook, “Trump is offering to be our sugar daddy? He wants to make America his trophy wife?”...

Earlier, in the car, I had struggled to explain how America has always been willing to dare, and double-dog dare, and triple-dog dare itself. America has always offered to drink anything for five dollars, no matter how disgusting.

“It might be a cowboy thing,” I had said. A sort of, fuck you, and while I’m at it, fuck me!, kind of thing. I watched a million cowboy movies growing up, and in the ones where the cowboy doesn’t ride off into the sunset, he usually dies. Sometimes he dies while riding off into the sunset, slumped over on a horse. There has to be a better way...

As we walked past the parked vans, we were stopped by another news crew, and Rich repeated to the bright lights that Trump is saying what most of us are thinking, that people are tired of career politicians and want something different, something new. He strode ahead of me toward the car, with that barely perceptible hint of ancient injury somewhere in his bearing, and I thought of the boy inside dressed up as Uncle Sam and felt suddenly ashamed: Votes, even ones incomprehensible to us, rise out of real lives, out of the distance between what we have and what we hope for ourselves."

https://newrepublic.com/article/131936/lost-trumplandia

FB: The writing of this piece is so gorgeous, and evokes all those squishy-human-feelings that are really the motivations and reasons here

"“Do you think the American people like Trump?” Babiker asked me.

“It’s hard to know, always, with Americans . . . whether we think something’s funny,” I hesitated. “Are we doing this because we think it’s hilarious? Are we just seeing how far we can push it?”"

"“Do you think the American people like Trump?” Babiker asked me.

“It’s hard to know, always, with Americans . . . whether we think something’s funny,” I hesitated. “Are we doing this because we think it’s hilarious? Are we just seeing how far we can push it?”