NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE H ave you seen that woman on Twitter who posts those embarrassingly sycophantic pictures of Donald Trump? Her name is Brigitte Gabriel, and she likes to share images of the former president in heroic poses throughout history. One has Trump next to Martin Luther King Jr., with the caption, “Two of our nation’s greatest advocates for Civil Rights: MLK and DJT.” Another — complete with the caption “President Trump is on a mission to save the country!” — has Trump in a flight suit standing next to a fighter jet. Trump has also been depicted as a Founding Father, as a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam, and as . . . well, as whatever this is. The whole thing is absurd and embarrassing and unctuous, and, unless we do something about it, it’s going to be our future: A lackey memeing on a human face — forever.
Gabriel is just one person — albeit a person with nearly a million followers. But her approach serves as a neat illustration of where we now find ourselves politically — which is sitting in a world of artificially induced scarcity, trying desperately to bang square pegs into round holes. If the Republican Party wanted a candidate who matched its self-conception, it could find one. Instead, it’s trying to turn straw into gold. Artificial intelligence notwithstanding, Donald Trump is not, in fact, an advocate for civil rights; having claimed bone-spurs to avoid the Vietnam draft, he is not, in fact, a soldier fighting the Viet Cong; because he is a classic demagogue, he would have been shunned rather than embraced by the Founders; and . . . well, once again, he’s about as far away from being whatever this is as it is possible to be. In a country such as America, the instinct to treat any politician in a panegyrical manner ought to be mocked and resisted to the last. But that politician? How lazy can an electorate be?
Democrats reading this critique will recognize instinctively the absurdity of trying to turn Trump into a saint. But I wonder: Can they see the same beam forming in their own eyes? If not, perhaps they will permit me to explain that what Brigitte Gabriel and her accomplices look like to you is what the people endeavoring to sell those “Dark Brandon” memes look like to us. I am told that, in Joe Biden’s campaign store, “Dark Brandon” merchandise is a best-seller. I have no reason to doubt it. But ask yourself: Who goes to political-merchandise stores 16 months before a presidential election? Freaks, monomaniacs, and the chronically maladjusted — that’s who. Ultimately, the audience for “Dark Brandon” is similar to the audience for Brigitte Gabriel’s Trump memes: crackpot fetishists who mistake politics for life and do not understand the country in which they live. As we are reminded daily by our legion of pollsters, most Americans do not actually like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, let alone see them as heroic. Trump is less popular than sewage. Biden’s approval rating is worse than that of every president ever polled bar Jimmy Carter. The fix for this problem is not a new sculptor; it is new clay.
To illustrate the problem, try explaining to a normal human being what “Dark Brandon” is:
“So, a long time ago, a crowd at a NASCAR race was shouting “F*** Joe Biden,” because—
“Why? Isn’t that bad?”
“Well, yes. It’s bad. They were shouting it because they blamed him for the Afghanistan debacle and for the spiking inflation rates and for—”
“Okay, so—”
“—so, for reasons that would take a long time to explain, that chant was swiftly transmuted into ‘Let’s go Brandon,’ which then became an anti-Joe Biden chant that, in turn, made it onto T-shirts and into a few hit songs and—”
“This still sounds as if it’s bad for Biden, because—”
“Wait, wait, I’m getting there! So, then the Biden campaign reappropriated it after an oddly lit speech that the president made, and now it’s—”
Good Lord, what are we doing here?
Esoterica aside, the core problem faced by both men’s boosters is that the virtues they are trying to sell represent the polar opposite of the truth. Trump isn’t a soldier; he’s a draft-dodger. Biden isn’t a badass; he’s a senile blowhard. Time and time again, we see acolytes of both parties try this stuff, and time and time again, we see them fail. President Biden is represented as a trustworthy family man; the public believes he is nothing of the sort. Donald Trump is cast as the only one who can win; he lost the 2020 election and dragged Republicans down in 2022. Joe Biden touts “Bidenomics”; voters hate his economy, are falling deeper into debt, believe the situation is getting worse, and trust the other party to remedy it. Donald Trump is described as a Christian man who cherishes the Constitution; Americans know that he cheated on his wife with a porn star and then tried to stage a coup. Sensible political movements would realize that, when your product is indelibly broken, moonshot marketing campaigns will take you only so far. Alas, neither of America’s political movements is sensible.
Which is why, instead of addressing their problems, they have turned to mindless boosterism suffused with impotent catchphrases. From time to time, I will meet somebody who watches too much cable news and I’ll realize instantly that, where a normal person’s mind would be, they have only the lexicon of their tribe. “Deathsantis,” “Demonrats,” “Moscow Mitch,” “Libtards,” “Drumpf,” “The Big Lie,” “Clinton Body Count,” “We’re Still in a Pandemic,” “The Former Guy,” “What Time It Is,” “But Her Emails,” “The Regime” — these utterances, and others, let me know immediately that my interlocutor is functionally braindead. At the fringes, such habits present a problem. That our two major political movements seem to be adopting them in lieu of picking palatable candidates presents a crisis. If, in the course of my daily life, I were to encounter a person wandering around in public muttering about “Dark Brandon” or the “Trump Train,” I’d move my family to safety and then call the police. Next year, at this rate, those flacks will both be on the ballot.