Encouraging scenes from the Republican national convention (RNC), where US politicians and the wider world are being told to dial down their rhetoric by a crowd of people rhythmically raising their right fists and screaming “Fight, fight!” It’s just a hunch, but when historians come to assess the period we seem to be marching into, they’re not going to say that “metaphors” did it.
By way of an unnecessary recap, Donald Trump has survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, and your jaw just had to drop at his extraordinary instincts. He was back on his feet within seconds, while Joe Biden’s campaign is suffering the PTSD.
And so to the convention in Milwaukee. One lesson of the past few years is that things can always get worse, so in many ways it feels inevitable that in terms of Trump’s familial support, we are very much in the “Bring back Ivanka!” era. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt compared with the large adult sons. Like me, you probably relish being led in a chant of “Drain the swamp” by someone who can’t even drain his gene pool. Stuff that should have been caught in the filter is now clearly in the ascendancy, with chinless blunder Don Jr reportedly the big advocate for his father picking Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate. I’d assumed that fellow beardie Don Jr had alighted on Vance after Googling “Me if I was housebroken”, but he told reporters he’d done it because “I’d seen him on TV”. A sort of extreme-right version of managers buying players because they’ve seen them on Fifa.
Anyway: Vance. Who is he? Well, he once wrote a book that I think was called The Legend of Bagger Vance, and was about how a shitty golfer meets a guy who obsequiously offers to caddie for him. So yes: dreams can come true. The Vance opus did a huge amount of business on the New York Times bestseller list, along with all those self-help books called things like Make Your Bed, Fix Your Car, and Master Your Inner Master. He grew up without a dad, but I hope his future canon will contain a title like The Fathers We Choose.
Notably, that first book of Vance’s did cast a few aspersions on Donald Trump, as did his public pronouncement of being “a never Trump guy” – and, indeed, some text messages to his former Yale law school roommate in which he mused that Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Why didn’t Vance carry on analogising the American reich? I want to know if he would have tagged himself “America’s Martin Bormann”, although instinctively I’m getting strong Rudolf Hess vibes. Could very much see JD pulling another ideological U and crash-landing on the Duke of Hamilton’s formal lawns in a couple of years’ time. We’ll have the kettle on.
To be clear, in politics, there’s certainly nothing wrong with changing your mind in response to new information. But if that new information is “hides stolen classified documents in his bathroom/incited an insurrection” and your opinion changes to “wait, seems like a great guy”, then … there is actually something wrong. But it’ll be very watchable to see Trump eventually turning on Vance, as he surely will do in due course. John F Kennedy’s court was famously nicknamed Camelot, but Trump’s is very much more in the Westeros mode. Somehow with even worse food.
Listen, though, at least it’s not an Islamist society with the bomb – like the UK! In case you missed this, Vance did a joke at some conservative conference where he talked about him and his friends wondering “what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kinda counted, and then we decided: maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over”.
Incidentally, Vance said this last week so it’s possible that he believes something diametrically different now. But if not, I’d hate for him to be a low information joker, so by way of a heads-up: Islamists really hate the Labour party. They will literally slash its tyres – especially if it’s a lady driver.
But of course, we can all take a joke, which in any case means so much more coming from the caddie for a guy who wore a pantyliner on the side of his head to the RNC. Did you clock this? Earlier photos showed Trump’s ear sporting a much smaller plaster, but for his convention appearance he boldly went with something his imperial tailors had told him was the medical equivalent of a suit spun from pure gold, and an object of ridicule only to the stupid or unintelligent. Seriously, this is history’s most iconic ear injury and it can do whatever it wants. Try imagining the artist Van Gogh could have been if only he’d spokesmodelled for Carefree, instead of wrapping himself in some off-brand rags. If this was a proper cult, all the delegates and everyone at the next Trump rally would also stick pantyliners to the sides of their heads.
First guy in the stampede to the feminine hygiene aisle would obviously be newly installed Clacton MP Nigel Farage, who has immediately left behind his left-behind constituents and told them why in a column for the Telegraph. Headline: “I’m flying to America to support Trump in this desperate hour.” Thank you, Nigel. He’s been asking for you. Speaks of little else. There is zero shame in flying thousands of miles for a two-second handshake opp. I know you can nail it!
The rest of us, meanwhile, might ponder the historic events in Pennsylvania at the weekend and marvel at our own ability to already be talking about other things. To adapt that old Steve Bannon line, the zone seems flooded with more shit than ever. As arguably the most significant dopamine druglord in modern politics – the El Chapo of discourse spikes – Trump has himself been a significant part of the shift to a world where there are about 37 news cycles a day and where, three days after an assassination attempt, all sorts of people have already moved on.
The experience of watching such an extraordinary historic event fail to stop everything for a while has been unsettling. But then, perhaps “moving on” is the defining corrosive dynamic of our age. We scroll on, literally and metaphorically. And yet, it’s just possible that this moving on has been in one direction, and that it isn’t a good one. The chaos of the past few days suggests there has never been a better time to stand still and take stock – yet it feels as if we are hurtling somewhere at twice the speed we were even last week.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
