Little Man, What Now?
One of the strangest arguments to account for Donald Trump’s presidency and the personality cult it engendered is one advanced by his admirers and detractors alike: that it was all the pent-up yield of an angry “white working class” against an oblivious establishment. Like most American myths, this one endured past the point of plausibility or diminishing analytical returns, but it took the ignominious closing chapter of the Trump era, a lethal assault on the seat of lawmaking, to make it look ridiculous. Can anyone now deny that the core of MAGA is a molten cauldron of cultural and psychological pathologies characteristic of middle-class dilettantes and people with at least enough money to have way too much time on their hands?
A nationwide FBI dragnet and dozens of Justice Department indictments have done in a fortnight what all the pundits and cable news guests could not do in four long years: show us exactly who these people are and where they came from, which is not, as it turns out, the factory floor or coal mine but the real estate brokerage and suburban split-level.
Gore Vidal once said that the three saddest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.” He was wrong. They are “Florida man identified.” Everyone by now has seen the viral photograph of a smiling, long-haired Trumpist named Adam Johnson carting away U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern from the House of Representatives. What few may have noticed is that Johnson was later shown to be a stay-at-home father of five from Parrish, Florida, whose physician spouse is the only reason he is not now sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial. “Johnson was released on conditions that his wife co-sign his $25,000 bond and that he abides by a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew with GPS monitoring,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in a sentence that really does a lot more work than it was ever intended to. A breadwinning doctor being forced to guarantee $25,000 because her idiot husband purloined a tchotchke from Congress under the banner of “Stop the Steal” is many things; a cri de coeur from the 99% is not one of them.
Or consider Jenna Ryan, a Dallas real estate agent and life coach who came to Washington on a private jet and fretted about the lack of port-a-potties at a putsch she had absolutely no compunction about turning into a marketing opportunity. “We’re going to fucking go in here,” Ryan shouted as she broke into the Rotunda with the rest of the MAGA mob, according to federal prosecutors. “Life or death. It doesn’t matter. Here we go.” Had she left it at that, Ryan might have convinced some that her motivation was hanging Mike Pence rather than Always Be Closing. “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor,” she then shouted from the top of the stairs. “Jenna Ryan for your Realtor.”
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/little-man-what-now/
