Donald Trump, sad clown

Sometimes, a joke changes the more times you hear it — and precisely because of that, it stays fresh and funny. And sometimes, as you keep telling it, the joke goes from satire to farce to black comedy to, finally, pathos.

That's exactly what's happened with Donald Trump's joke of a candidacy. It's become downright sad.

A year ago, I asked the question:Why not Trump? It was a funny question for me to ask, I wrote, as I had "barely ever thought about [Trump] over the past 30 years, and never seriously," and that "Trump's greatest weakness as a candidate has always been the utter ridiculousness of the proposition."

But the 2016 election desperately needed Trump. Before his entry, itlooked likelythat in the end former President Bill Clinton's wife would face off against former President George W. Bush's brother. The election would have been pure trench warfare, with both candidates aiming to vindicate their party's preexisting positions, and avoid any reckoning with the ways in which they have failed. Trump changed all that. Suddenly, what was going to be a slog turned into a circus.

This wasn'tthe dispiriting clown car of 2012in which candidate after delusional candidate did their pandering little tap-dance before the cane pulled them off into the wings. Trump was different. From the moment he descended his golden escalator, Trump dominated the stage — not merely because he was entertaining, but because he exposed the folly of his betters. AsJan Kott said of the Fool inKing Lear, Trump also "does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty, and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good."

It felt like America needed to hear from a fool like that. From foreign policy to trade to immigration, Trump punctured the comfortable Washington consensus that everybody knew was right even though anybody could see it wasn't working.

It didn't matter that Trump was fabricating his own opposition to both the Iraq and Libyan wars, or that he invented spurious economic statistics on the fly, or that he merrily trafficked with racists and xenophobes. So what? By saying what you couldn't say, he was forcing the establishment to defend its own consensus views, rather than merely repeat them like a mantra. And anyway, he wasn't a serious candidate.

Then he won.

http://www.theweek.com/articles/645151/donald-trump-sad-clown