America's Mugshot

If someone had told me 10 years ago that the host of The Apprentice was going to emerge as an important freedom fighter of the 21st Century, I’m not sure if I would have even laughed. A freedom fighter? The man I was at 25 – a drug-addled, arrogant grad student – still conceived the figure of the freedom fighter in modernist and Leftist terms: Lenin, MLK, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, and so on. Whether militant or peaceable, all these guys correspond to an archetype: Literate. Intellectual. Inspiring. Appealing to Enlightenment principles. Fighting for emancipation… Donald Trump, on the other hand, is brash and provocative: the pinnacle of the trash heap of late imperial entertainment: reality TV. But at the time I was stuck in the past, or not even the past, but a version of history as relayed to me by my leftist professors: a fantasy past. I now recognize that Donald Trump is the American freedom fighter of the 21st Century precisely because of his vulgar, loud qualities.