For more than a year and a half now, hundreds of intellectuals and historians and commentators have written books and articles and delivered lectures on the origins and meaning of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. A foreign observer could be forgiven for thinking every writer on politics and culture in America is required by law to produce at least one theory of the Rise of Trump. All of this has probably left the average literate American no wiser than before.
But fret not, dear reader, we have a long disquisition from the one thinker who’s guaranteed to give us an objectively true and unbiased explanation: Barack Obama.
His speech in Johannesburg to honor the 100th birthday of Nelson Mandela received lavish coverage in the American press (lavish, anyway, for a speech by a former president). The 44th president has been fairly quiet lately, but he evidently hasn’t grown less fond of hearing his own mellifluous voice—the speech lasted a full 90 minutes.
Several lines from the oration were widely quoted in our media, sounding as they did like criticisms of the present administration, but these struck us as rewordings of what a thousand observers have already said, and better. “Strongman politics are ascendant suddenly,” Obama let us know, “whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained—the form of it—but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.” And there were the usual tired metaphors of everyday American speechmaking, made to sound eloquent and profound by Obama’s dulcet baritone. “We now stand at a crossroads,” Obama said—has any politician in the last 50 years failed to tell an audience at least once that we stand at a crossroads?—“a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world.”
We’ll spare the reader more commentary, and instead suggest our own little theory on the Rise of Trump. Could it be that the current president’s wild, fragmentary semi-coherent gibe-and-insult collections—that is, his routine campaign talks—sounded somehow refreshing after eight years of Barack Obama’s measured and rhythmic platitudes?
