Trump, Biden, Clumps of Sick, and Casual Eugenics

I once went to an art performance in Hackney, London, where a young couple frantically assaulted each other with clumped handfuls of rotting fish, flung from plastic buckets. I recall the feeling of panic as the stench of rotting fish-offal slapped against my face and stained my clothes, groping for the exit, straining to see by the chaotic flash of the strobe-lights in that dingy basement. The performers pounced and tumbled through the space to an eardrum-bursting soundtrack of violin shrieks and smashing furniture. I remember thinking “this is out of control, nothing we do in this space can control this madness, it’s beyond me,” I never wanted to enter that mental head-space again, but alas, last night Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential debate took me there.

Now, for many of us in the global audience, Trump’s unapologetic ignorance and performative bullying have been a constant source of flabbergastery since 2016. We struggle to see his appeal, and for many of us who consume so much American media, it's difficult to believe that this is what Americans would vote for. I have lived in Washington DC for an accumulative period of 1 year, and in the Summer of 2008 I lived with political interns in GW halls of residence. Today I was reflecting on that experience and trying to assess whether I could have predicted the madness we are living through.

“BUT WHAT DO THEY DO WITH THE RUNTS ON A FARM?” demanded the intern across the hall, a young man from a military family with a prison-block haircut and an evangelical intensity in his eyes. He was serving as an intern for a Republican Senator. “Ummm, well, there are cases where farmers separate the runts, look after them, and then they grow up to be just as healthy as the others in the litter,” I replied. “No! He retorted triumphantly, as though he’d pushed me into some kind of lib-tard trap, “farmers allow them to die for the economic benefit of the farm!” We were talking about the Welfare State, and no, we were not actually talking about animals on a farm, we were talking about humans. To my disbelief, this nineteen-year-old was inadvertently espousing the virtues of eugenics to a room of excitable young students, many of whom treated his comparison of human and cattle healthcare to be quite normal. “You’re talking about letting people with disabilities die? And people who cannot afford healthcare? Or the elderly?” I asked, but the discussion had moved on.

I found myself in many situations such as this, and the Republican sentiment was almost always along the lines of “the cream will rise to the top, and the rest should work harder.” It’s in no way dissimilar to the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mantra of the UK Tories, but there was one stark difference; the element of performance, almost as though the performance in itself was an argument. There were more projected-voices, memorised talking-points and body language exaggerations in those circles than any drama school social I’ve encountered - and my mum used to make me go to stage-coach every Sunday to dance to the music from Cats. Try enduring that tormented forest of jazz hands for 3 hours at a time!

“Well this is a lot,” I thought as I scooped up another cup of Kool-Aid, red wine, tequila, and whatever other alcohol I could scavenge, wondering how much I had to drink before I’d have the confidence to drag these guys to a bar. You can’t drink until you’re 21 in the US, and back in 2008 I was only 19… I’d been legal in the UK for over a year and that was besides the point because many British teenagers, armed with photoshopped passport scans, began drinking in bars at the age of 15 or 16. I was determined to get this group of interns out of the Halls and into a club; but after being thrown out of liquor-store after liquor-store, I soon realised that DC was really very strict. Eventually I got a stranger to buy me a large tequila, drank most of it myself, and we went to The Black Cat Club, where they put thick crosses on our hands in permanent marker to prevent us from buying alcohol. I washed mine off in the toilet three times and was eventually thrown out. Following that, there was lots of sickness, lots and lots of sickness - clumps of sickness, one might say, and the Taco Bell at Union Station would never smell the same again.

Back to politics. In the US, it’s usual for halls of residence to require you to share rooms with other students. In my flat there were initially only two of us in one bedroom, myself and a Democrat interning for a senator on Capitol Hill. However, after several weeks, the third intern arrived - a wildly confident jock-type Republican, who threw all his crap on the top bunk, slapped a bible down on the bed-side table and declared that he’d be regularly bringing home some “sweet pussy”, warning us not mind the shaking of the bunk bed each night. In debates, his key talking-points usually revolved around the “Christian values” which he shared with his fiancé back home in Alabama. Again, this guy held himself like a performer, with rehearsed lines, a plastic smile and buckets of rotten fish - I mean confidence, buckets of confidence. Unshakable, lacking in depth, and configured like a cerebral-bulldozer.

And this went on and on for three months. Another day I sat with some political interns at lunch, and an outspoken Republican was making the restaurant into his one-man performance space. His talking-point was very clear; he was concerned about the accessibility of the cinema. “Average, apple pie, American families cannot afford to go to the movies! They work hard all week and cannot afford the movies!” he kept shouting whilst waving his arms about. This was somehow his argument against immigration, and although others had counterpoints they wanted to make, his facade was impenetrable. Watching Trump and Biden on tv at 2am last night gave me flashbacks to these moments, “'I've done more in 47 months than you did in 47 years, Joe” Trump shouted over and over, “China virus,” he boomed, “I brought back football.” And the outrageous soundbites kept coming, “your son Hunter!”, “fake news, fake news, fake news.” 

And it’s not just Trump, this arrogant, soundbite approach to nuanced topics seems to permeate through the right-wing of American debate, far more than the left; just look at Ben Shapiro,

Candice Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos (please can we just say he’s American), each with their own catch-phrases, each more provocative than the next. Don’t get me wrong, in the UK we have buckets of our own rotten fish, but nothing with this particular brand of puke. In the UK I can only equate it to the subculture of the political upper-class from which Boris, Cameron and Blair arise, but even that posh-boy culture is often blundering and apologetic, and seemingly far less targeted.

Now, I’ve picked on Republicans here, and I’m sure the interns who were working for Democratic Senators were also debating and making their points in performative ways… but I cannot really remember a single one of them. I cannot remember a single retort which the liberals made against the conservatives. No mic-drop moments. Which was frankly surprising, considering outlandish and brash statements coming from the right-wing interns. I do, however, remember the nuanced arguments between the different factions of the left-wing interns, who seemed more comfortable debating one another than the Republicans. I remember discussions about the free-will of women in the Middle-East and the symbolic implications of wearing burkas. I remember some discussions about Affirmative action, I think. Maybe we talked about inclusiveness in children’s books? To be honest, the only things which stuck with me were the performative and unsubstantiated claims of the Republicans. Because they were entertaining. Trump is entertaining. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the room were spending more time arguing amongst themselves. 

So was this den of interns a microcosm of what was going to come? Maybe? Perhaps I’m overthinking it. Anyway; clumps of sick and clumps of rotten fish.