What Liberals Don’t Get About Trump Supporters and Pop
Culture
The seemingly bizarre pop culture takes emanating from
MAGA world are just reflections of its core philosophy.
By DEREK ROBERTSON
05/16/2020 07:04 AM EDT
"When President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, triumphantly invoked the “Star Wars” universe to liken the president’s reelection effort to the “Death Star,” all but ready to “start pressing FIRE,” it was both a standard display of MAGA braggadocio and a brief respite from the unrelenting, bleak coronavirus discourse.
Well-meaning liberals instantly took the bait and flooded Parscale’s replies to let him know he had, supposedly, missed the point — “Didn’t make it till the end of Star Wars, huh?” tweeted the Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast. NBC legal analyst Barb McQuade plaintively (and quite reasonably) asked, “Who chooses to portray themselves as the Death Star?” (Spoiler alert, for the uninitiated: The Death Star belongs to the bad guys. The bad guys lose.)
It was the latest in a pattern of baffling-at-first-glance pop culture references from Trumpworld. The president has favorably likened himself to the vile Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty. He earnestly approved a scene from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that otherwise mocks the MAGA phenomenon as a brotherhood of aggro white dudes. An official Trump campaign Twitter account posted a video with the president’s head bizarrely photoshopped onto Thanos, the genocidal alien despot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each instance elicited the same response from a certain set of liberals: Don’t they get it? Don’t the understand they have it all wrong?
Implicit to those questions is the assertion that either the Trump campaign and its supporters are so oblivious to “Star Wars,” the most ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon of the past 50 years, that they don’t know how it ends, or so incomprehensibly illiterate as cultural consumers that they don’t understand George Lucas’ fictional Empire is meant to be the baddies.
The real explanation is much simpler and more believable: When Parscale and his ilk approvingly identify themselves with pre-redemption Darth Vader, or Thanos, or even Dr. Evil, they surely understand those characters’ morality perfectly well. It’s not so much that Trump, et. al actively identify as “villains,” but that the behavior that makes one a “villain” in fiction—deceit, wanton rule-breaking, a willful disregard for collateral damage—is, in real life, more likely to get one branded a “winner,” provided one plays their cards right. Enron executives? Elizabeth Holmes? The steroid-juicing baseball heroes of the 1990s? Winners all—at least until they got caught.
Through that lens, everything from the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn post-guilty plea, to the president’s continued enrichment from his various hotels and business entities (to much worse) is as justifiable as the destruction of Alderaan. Rule-bound critics across the ideological spectrum can cry and moan as much as they want; the Trump administration has the power, is #winning and will do as it pleases, until they’re similarly caught red-handed. (To the extent that remains a possibility—the insulation from accountability provided by such magnificent power as the presidency is, of course, one of its most enjoyable perks.)
Of course, Trump’s opponents have a different idea of how power should be used. The defining ideological conflict of the Trump era isn’t between conservatives and liberals. It’s between those who embrace Trump’s gleefully anarchic, ends-justify-the-means bashing of “the establishment” and those who would protest, to quote another Larry David creation, that “we’re living in a society.” By reversing the polarity of a simple morality play like “Star Wars,” the MAGA camp isn’t missing the point at all. On the contrary, they’re killing two birds with one stone: expressing their philosophy with a wink and a nod while getting in some good-old-fashioned trolling."
moar:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/16/trump-death-star-pop-culture-mutiny-bounty-curb-enthusiasm-260471
the winning it hurts