T-Rex (Trump) erupts with fury as the meteor approaches

(Note from the writer: Sixty-six million years ago a huge meteorite struck Mexico and ended the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth. This essay is dedicated to the hope that Donald S. Trump will be the errant meteorite that will crash and end the reign of the dinosaurs in our own time.) 

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With media proliferation, instant fact checking, endless chatter by professional pundits and by advocates of all stripes, is there anything new to be said 48 hours later about the first presidential debate of the 2020 campaign?

The only way, I decided, was to spend minimal time on describing the train wreck, since the mainstream media’s version of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has been doing that nonstop from the moment Fox’s Chris Wallace, the moderator, declared the event over.

I respect the new profession of fact checker. But documenting the dozens of lies Trump added in one night to his thousands over four years is the definition of diminishing returns.

Instead of reporting the obvious, Trump lies and lies, he interrupts over an over, he respects nothing, not rules, not adversaries, not moderators, I would go where mainstream journalist don’t venture: to the earthly satire of the Bronx cheer, to earlier thinkers, to profanity as illuminated by philosophy. Above all, I would eschew all the lame mainstream conventions—the fallacy of balance and the obligation to take seriously and analyze thoroughly what is transparently preposterous. I will speak plainly, strike with a scalpel and not a butter knife, and call an ass an ass.

Years back when I read and taught academic stuff for a living, I encountered the concept of ressentiment, a French word with a late nineteenth and early twentieth century lineage out of German philosophy. I never thought I would experience such a convergence between the abstract concept and the reality of a concrete person who embodies and exudes it as the debate provided.

Ressentiment, Max Scheler writes, “is a self-poisoning of the mind… that produces …“certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments…primarily vengefulness, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.”

When I heard and looked at President Donald Trump in at the debate Tuesday night, I saw ressentiment in an almost chemically pure form, a sincere and spontaneous expression of a monstrous personality. I could write a paragraph or two on how Trump displayed each of these flaws—value delusions, delusions in value judgment, vengefulness, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

But I doubt that even my understanding editor has that much patience, and I don’t have, at this age, that much time. One example only then, in this case of delusions of value and value judgment of reality and the self.

This is a man with microscopic political wisdom who compared himself favorably with the greats, who dares to say that there were good people on both sides at a Nazi-era Nuremberg style rally, replete with all the varieties of racists and complete with the torches and the surreal anti-Semitic chant, the Jews will not replace us, where a young woman, Heather Heyer, beautiful inside and out, and brimming with hope promise, was murdered by a fascist.

There was delusional hate at the university Thomas Jefferson founded. Jews are worried only in replacing themselves, given the challenge of marriage outside the faith and maintaining an ancient religious tradition in a modern secular society. In his later years, Albert Einstein wrote an astonishing essay: “Why do they hate the Jews?” His brilliant answer is somewhat complex, but I will simplify to apply to the Charlottesville context. They hate the Jews because their core values and their being, such as learning, compassion, and justice are antithetical to the ideology of superior and inferior human beings and the notion that might makes right.

And the most deluded of all is the chief apologist for the fascists, who says he has done more for African Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln! Lincoln? Add to the delusions of value and judgment delusions of grandeur.

But wait, there is a way to convert this into a valid assertion by turning to geometry. If we place the contributions of the two men to African American well-being and racial justice on a line with a full complement of positive and negative numbers, it may be true that Trump is as far out into negative territory as Lincoln is into positive numbers. So, if we think in terms of absolute value, where we delete the sign, there may be a small, damning truth in what Trump claims. But don’t worry, this won’t be fodder for the sycophants. Elementary math is not something Trump and his crowd understands or appreciates.

The behavior of Trump made me wander once again how it is he has any supporters. Obnoxiousness is an almost universally and reflexively disliked character trait. Trump is always obnoxious. In the debate he displayed a level obnoxious extraordinary even for him, a master class in obnoxiousness. So how can forty or forty-five percent of the people suffer him to the point of voting for him and saying he is a doing job?

The masses are asses, a friend of mine would say. Facile, generic. There is a natural, reflexive adverse reaction to obnoxiousness as to a bad odor. How do Trump’s mask-less supporters manage to withstand the stench, or ignore it, and even to revel in it?

The only forces strong enough to counter the toxicity of Trump are a desire to preserve white privilege; a selfish, monomaniacal interest in one’s own economic advantages like high stock values, including the measly amounts in context of total Wall Street assets accounted for by 401Ks; big corporate profits; and a vanishingly small tax rate on the rich like Donald Trump, who pays $750 in income tax, less than a worker at Burger King.

Now, my favorite part, the part I could never get away with in the “serious” media.

In the debate, Trump showed himself to be a flaming asshole.

I am not basing this solely on my opinion. The British philosopher Aaron James, the kind of philosopher who doesn’t focus only on words like gravitas and aporias, writes: the asshole is the guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

That’s the story of Trump’s life. Trump behaved like an asshole toward Biden, but how he proved most clearly what an asshole he is was by breaking every rule of the debate that he had agreed to and walking all over moderator Chris Wallace in the process, wearing golf shoes.

The last analogy in this piece comes from the world of boxing, specifically from Muhammad Ali’s 1974 heavyweight championship fight against George Foreman, known as the “the rumble in the jungle” (the bout took place in Zaire).

For most of the fight, Foreman aimed heavy but mostly ineffective blows at Ali, who danced, ducked but mostly sat back against the ropes and blocked the punches. By the later rounds, Foreman’s arms weighed a ton. He had punched himself, rather than his opponent, out and ended up losing. Ali called this tactic “rope a dope.”

Biden, wearing a look of exasperation and amused astonishment, kept his cool except for an occasional well-placed jab, such as when he called Trump a clown, and a furious flurry when he defended his son against Trump’s vile attacks. As a result, he roped the biggest dope of all. Ali, who intensely disliked racists and fools, would have been pleased.

At the end, Trump looked like a tired, old, crestfallen, defeated boxer. I hope to see him looking exactly that way on November 4.