Breaking News

Donald Trump does not exist. He is the vacuum nature abhors, the no-there-there, the nothingness beneath the orange hair, the card-sharp with fake watches up his sleeve who came in on the last train from Yuma and just left. He’s the rumor of gold in the hills, the petrol-spill who slid in on snake oil with a pocket full of panaceas. The wagging tongue, the trouble in River City, alien landing in Grover’s Mill. He is Friday’s circus, Saturday night’s bacchanal, and Sunday morning’s brimstone. The shadow lurking in the hearts of men, the recall of hot air bags, miasma from the swamp, the choke of smoke-stacks and cigar fumes from the boys in the backroom. He is the exudate of our sap. The residue of killed dreams. The man who promises to move the clock hands back, to restore America to a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. He hurls abuse from his Tower of Babble. He shouts hallelujah to God, guns and now gas enough to frack us to the Promised Land.

That is why Trump is so beatable.

And this is why he is not:

He has come with the wind, as the zeitgeist. He smells the fear behind the gates, the snarl in their teeth. He channels the massive blurt of America, the distilled and refracted rage of shuttered factory towns. Trump has triggered his twittering finger, aligned with the worst case new, the buzz. He is tomorrow’s tabloid headline. He feeds them red meat, tracks the convulsion in our heartland, arrives with a bag of empty answers but he can mimic the mood as the ventriloquist of discontent.

Trump is what Marshall McLuhan predicted. He is the unscripted orator / conversationalist. Casual not canned. He is hot because he is cool. Cool enough to be a blank screen upon which any projection obtains. There is no debate, no issue to chew on. He has made ignorance an asset, replaced substance with a mash-up of hash tags. He broadcasts ten times a day from his Twitter-feed. He understands the erasure of the American mind. He has captured the antennae and dodged the narrative but owns the meta-narrative. His incoherent static is the media, is the message, is all there is. The message is that there is none. He presumes we are somnambulant with an attention span of seconds. What he says will be forgotten by tomorrow. We love that he says it like it is even if there is no “it.”

e promises

The breaking news is that the news is broke, fractured into bites, then particles, now dust. In Donaldom the treasury is broke, government has broken down. He is the broken-field runner without a huddle, zigging and zagging downfield, stepping out-of-bounds, breaking rules, past missed tackles. He is Groucho in his gait, Mussolini with his chin out, Chaplin’s tramp turned Trump, turned Fuhrer.