Trump and the Age of the Anti-Hero
When bad is the new good, is it any surprise who America wants as its king?
I was thinking about Donald Trump the other day. It happens a lot, and I don’t enjoy it, but what are you going to do? With our news coverage, it sometimes seems like the only two people on the planet are Trump and Taylor Swift.
I was thinking, more specifically, about why tens of millions of Americans say they’re likely to vote for Trump again — despite 91 criminal counts against him, an attempted coup, and a rate of lying that by now must be unmatched in human history.
But then I saw that debate starring GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, and something clicked.
You might have seen it, too. The moderator asked — as apparently one does now in Congressional debates? — who among the nine candidates on the stage had ever been arrested. Boebert quickly put her hand in the air, as did five (five!) of her opponents. The audience laughed at first, then started to applaud, then cheered. Boebert high-fived the dude next to her.
I had two reactions. On one level, I was dumbfounded. Jesus Christ, these people are running for Congress. But then I, too, found myself laughing, and I began thinking about how much Americans actually love an outlaw, a rebel, someone who willfully skirts the rules — particularly if said outlaw is kind of in your face about it. So rock’n’roll, right? So gangsta. (Lest we forget: one of our founding acts as a nation was the bad-ass dumping of a bunch of British tea into Boston Harbor.)
All of which brings me back to Trump. Those of us who oppose him see him as a villain — a man who literally represents the dark forces of the universe. But his supporters — and certainly those six Congressional candidates who proudly shared with the world that they’d been arrested — see him as something else: an anti-hero.
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What’s the difference? Well, not to go all 9th-grade English class on you, but here’s how it breaks down: While a hero is someone we admire for their courage and nobility, and a villain is someone we root against because they’re on the side of evil, an anti-hero falls somewhere in between. Yes, they frequently break society’s rules the same way that villains do, but we still tend to perceive something good about them.
Books and movies are filled with anti-heroes — Hamlet, Huck Finn, Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise, Tony Soprano — in large part because we find them attractive. On some level we admire the fact that anti-heroes don’t follow the rules, and in a strange way we see them as honest. We all have dark impulses. At least they acknowledge theirs.
Just as important, despite breaking the rules, anti-heroes often still live by a moral code — they still seem guided by something higher. Butch and Sundance are bank robbers, sure, but they’re charming and attractive and — this is important — they never physically harm anybody. Michael Corleone from The Godfather might be a killer, but he only whacks people (at least early on) to avenge the death of family members.
So, yeah, bad…but still somehow good.
This is how Trump’s people see him. They’re willing to tolerate — even enjoy — his repeated bad behavior because: a) it proves he’s “real” — it’s just Trump being Trump; b) they see him as fighting for something higher than just playing nice in the sandbox.
For some of those supporters, the higher cause is pushing back against the Establishment and the Elites they believe (perhaps legitimately) have been screwing them for decades. For others, Trump’s higher cause is simply stopping Democrats —with their “high taxes” and “open borders” and calls for “equity” — from ruining the country even more.
Now, let me be clear: This is nonsense. Trump has no higher cause. Donald J. Trump is a sociopath, and the next time he cares about another human being will be the first time.
But the genius of Trump’s hustle, the genius of him positioning himself as the ultimate anti-hero, is that trying to bring him down — by impeaching him or indicting him or calling him a sociopath — only seems to prove the narrative that Trump has laid out: See, they’re out to get me. And you. We need to fight harder.
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What’s a country to do about this, after nearly nine years of having Donald Trump on the political stage?
I’m not sure there’s much we can do, in large part because our culture has conditioned us, more than ever, to root for the rule breaker and be deeply skeptical of the rule follower. That was the subtext of Lauren Boebert et al. beating their chests about their arrests. That’s the subtext of every vile, ignorant, nasty thing Donald Trump says. Bad has become the new good.
Still, I do have two pieces of political advice for Joe Biden. One is to adopt, in this age of the anti-hero, a little more of the anti-hero schtick himself. I don’t mean we need more of Joe in his aviator glasses and Corvette (God, I definitely don’t mean that). I do mean that Biden needs to become more transparent about his own flaws. Yes, I’m an old man. I don’t have the energy I used to have. I sometimes forget things. I’m not anyone’s idea of a hero. But after 81 years on the planet, I know this —the guy running against me is evil, and he needs to be stopped.
The second option is to just give Trump as much rope as possible to hang himself. If Trump is encouraged to utter every dark thought in his head, perhaps at least some of his supporters will finally break under the weight of it. As someone — oh yeah, it’s Taylor Swift — likes to sing, “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”