Obama's basket explains better than any political analysis why Americans vote for Trump
The left still thinks that the ex-president's coolness can make it shine with reflected coolness, but the average American, the one who doesn't like someone incessantly reminding him of his inadequacy, is exactly the voter who will choose the horrid again. Donald
The best editorial on the US elections is fifteen seconds of video tweeted by Olivia Raisner, who curates the social networks for Joe Biden's campaign.
They were in Michigan: Barack Obama, the president of photogenic history, the Kennedy of blacks, was there to campaign for his former deputy, now candidate for president. Perhaps you have seen a photo in which the two were holding a sign with a Halloween ghost, and the words "Don't boo, vote" (an incitement already formulated by Obama in various rallies: instead of whistling the opponent, dear my electorate excited, go vote).
They are leaving that same field, where there has therefore been some electoral initiative, they all have masks because they are the disciplined left, and Obama signals someone to pass him the ball. He is already off the field, far from the basket, and Obama does.
That is, he does what without effort, without sweating, without fidgeting, gives a flick of the wrist and hits the mark from afar. Then he does the least cool thing in the world, that is, he emphasizes the coolness: while he is leaving to applause for the casual basket, as he goes he turns, lowers the mask, and says "That's what I do", that's how I do. I'm the coolest, and I'm sorry for the others.
And at that point the average American, the one who sweats and the basket does not do the same, the one who does not know where coolness is at home but is happy that he is not in the White House, tiring him out by reminding him every day of his inadequacy, that who does not want to aspire, he wants to identify himself, that American there at that point runs to vote for Trump.
I have thought hundreds of times in recent months about what would happen. One morning, 48 hours from now, when we wake up and what we refused to consider has happened: that Trump has won again.
Although all the educated commentators assumed defeat for certain (but they also took it for certain with Hillary); despite all the American screenwriters and novelists and journalists I follow on Twitter for months have chosen the line "vote Biden because Trump made you Corona's grandparents to die", as if there were governments that have instead found a solution to a pandemic; despite the unpresentability: indeed, precisely because of that.
There is a scene from a twenty-year-old film that everyone really likes to mention. The film is Almost Famous, the story of a boy who goes to interview a rock band. It's an autobiographical story: the director, Cameron Crowe, worked for Rolling Stone as a young boy. And he really had as a teacher a legend of music journalism, Lester Bangs, who in the film is Philip Seymour Hoffman.
In short, at one point the kid calls him from the tour, he is following the band, he is a fifteen year old from the province and his head is spinning in that world there. And Bangs tells him I know what they did to you, they convinced you that you are friends, they convinced you that you are cool, but I know you, you are not cool. You are not cool. The kid knows he's right, but he doesn't want to believe it. Like the rest of us who cite the scene simulating self-irony, we, the intellectuals that this era can afford, who look at Obama and are nostalgic for that presidency so instagrammable, so aspirational, which made us so shine with reflected coolness. Which convinced us that we too, like him, were cool.
Every time I see a photo of Trump, in his horrendousness, with that foundation that hadn't seen one so wrong since Emilio Fede was leading the news, with that hair that makes me want to re-evaluate all the hairdressers who have mistaken the color in our life (one had to make me mahogany and made me pink: I apologize for the one placed in 1988, Trump resizes all gravity), with that tie of the wrong length, every time I think that perhaps only Salvini made up for the deep need to look at the photos in the newspapers and think: how much better am I, how much better is my image in the mirror, how much better is dinner on my plate.
If "That's what I do" Trump had said, we would have sputtered it to the bitter end, we deluded that coolness does not exclude us, we unaware that we resemble him. We would have sneered at him because you can only marry if you're cool as a rock star, not if you pretend to be cool as a rock star interviewer.
In the blockbuster that I would write, "That’s what I do" would be the opening sentence of Trump’s second term. He'd put a fake vaccine on the market today, grateful Americans would run to inject it and vote for it, and then, when it turns out it was distilled water, it's late and he's president again. They would ask him why he lied to voters about the vaccine, if he is not ashamed, if he does not consider it a coup, and he: That’s what I do.
The US edition of Vanity Fair asked scriptwriters, novelists, television writers and redeemed ex-Trumpians to write Trump's last scene as if it were a script. Hardly anyone laughs (perhaps the wittiest is former Trump spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, who says that when Trump doesn't want to leave the bunker, they lure him out with a Big Mac), and I wondered why: I'm one of the the best there are, heck. It is because no one thinks of a victorious scene. They have decided that not even as a joke, by dystopian hypothesis, by creative gesture it is possible to conceive that America will elect Trump again, the ugly and bad one, the one who resembles his electorate.
Saturday Night Live is a very left-wing variety and I will already be accused of having made a show on Trump in 2015 (those who can't speak would say: "clearing him through customs"); in short, accused of the same accusations addressed to the talks that in Italy invite Salvini: the left is stupid in the same way all over the world. Yesterday the SNL was guilty again: Saturday night it was led by comedian John Mulaney, who summarized the upcoming elections as follows: "It's a contest between two old gentlemen, whichever old gentleman you choose won't change much for America, the rich they will continue to prosper and the poor will not ”. How dare you, you don't joke about epochal choices.
(Maureen Dowd wrote yesterday that it is because Trump is so creepy that it is not possible to deal with it lightly, to write the colored pieces that were normal with his predecessors. that we tweet?).
What seems to me more serious, however, is that Trump is not given his greatest merit: being the one who has provided us with conversation material for four years. What would we talk about, from Wednesday, if America were to have a presentable president again?
Of Kamala's photogenicity? Of the polleggio (sorry for the Bologneseism) with which he descends from the stairs of the planes in tennis shoes? About her being a Barack with a string of pearls?
Or the good old nineties topics, do you remember those blissful years without social media and when Italy was a leader in the field of governmental unpresentability? I don't know: we could go back to talking about metrosexuals, recover an age of innocence where if a male pricked his eyebrows you could mock him without fear of insulting his gender identity, and if the left said that the head of the right represented the end of democracy you could mock it without feeling right.
We could go back to that too short century where, if you were home, you could say like Lester Bangs that you were always home, because you weren't cool. We could do what the Trump presidency has not allowed us to do in these four years: make uncoolness cool again. Wouldn't that be great?
