Many are now positing what was recently unthinkable: President Donald Trump, the beta-carotene-hued king of all things camp, is suddenly “cool.”
“Trump is cool now,” an incredulous Bill Maher remarked on a recent episode of HBO’s Real Time. “I mean, rappers like him, the athletes … “I mean, the Village People are gay for Trump now!”
However, while this narrative is everywhere right now, the improved perception of Trumpian aesthetics has little to do with Trump himself. No, he remains as tacky and ostentatious as a gold-plated toilet brush.
Instead, the shift has more to do with the Democrats becoming decidedly uncool and Trump benefitting, by way of comparison. By morphing into everything it once stood against and adopting a succession of repellent trends, the cultural Left, and by extension, the Democratic Party, has shed every ounce of cool it earned since Allen Ginsburg rapped to the beat of a bongo.
And as always, Trump is the primary beneficiary of Democrats’ ill-consideration.
Counterculture goes mainstream
Ironically, the Left’s claim to “cool” has been undermined by its own overwhelming success in the culture war.
By the end of former President Barack Obama’s second term, cultural progressivism had come to dominate every nonreligious institution in the nation (and some religious ones, too). Its key tenets — relativism, sexual liberation, and anti-Americanism, to name a few — were expounded upon in academia, perpetuated through the news media, celebrated on the silver screen, and enforced by Democrats and “moderate” Republicans on Capitol Hill. In the late 2010s, it was impossible to evade a highly specific form of cultural conditioning, which came to be known as “wokeism.”
However, this success robbed the movement of a characteristic central to its identity and was responsible for its appeal since the 1960s: its claim to being the “rebels.”
In recent years, the contradiction has become impossible to conceal. No matter how it tried to simultaneously be both the authority and the insurgent, the illusion that the Left was “punching up” against a dominant traditional culture became progressively more ridiculous.
When the acclaimed singer Sam Smith strutted the Grammys stage in 2022 in a red dress and a dog collar while performing a satanic ritual on live TV, America was neither “shocked” nor challenged to rethink its values — it simply groaned.
When a mulleted and vaguely unshowered-looking Kristen Stewart, previously of Twilight fame, posed for a risque Rolling Stone photoshoot wearing garb meant to evoke lesbianism — a softball jersey, high athletic socks with racer stripes, “granny” underwear, etc. — America suppressed laughter the way one does at a teenager who emerges from their bedroom with a hoop through their septum.
“I want to do the gayest f***ing thing you’ve ever seen in your life,” Stewart said in the interview, driving home her desire to fit in with the times. “If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a f***ing happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would.”
Enforced compliance
When massive and all-powerful DEI bureaucracies were erected on campuses and in boardrooms to enforce the universal adoption of its ideology and corresponding verbiage, any remaining doubt about who was really in charge of our culture vanished.
The progressive Left, heirs of the 60s counterculture, became the mainstream. The rebels became the authority. It is definitionally impossible to be both dominant and “edgy,” to be “in charge” and be “cool.”
And once it captured near-total cultural power, it enforced its moral vision with merciless glee.
For a century, dystopian authors imagined vast techno-bureaucratic regimes enforcing conformity through centralized power. However, cultural progressivism became so powerful that the masses were conditioned to enforce the new morality on their own.
Through a phenomenon known as “cancel culture,” in which frothing mobs hunted down heretics and burnt them at the reputational stake, the new authority made sure careers were lost and friendships were severed, that everyone understood the price of nonconformity. Accepting the counterculture or suffering the consequences seemed to be the message.
Not even such powerful compliance mechanisms could conceal such an inherent contradiction.
Role reversal
During the 2024 presidential campaign, this role reversal stood in stark relief, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, the Democratic Party chose to emphasize this shift in explicit terms.
By framing the race between former Vice President Kamala Harris and President Donald Trump as being between an outlaw and a prosecutor, the Democrats ditched their claim to “cool” and offered the role of the “rebel” to Trump on a silver platter.
Beyond the incoherence of going from “defund the police” to “vote for the prosecutor” in a matter of three years, this strategy exposed a stunning ignorance of the cultural forces that inform our politics. The attempt to cast Trump as an outlaw, which began with a transparently coordinated effort by the Justice Department to convict him of a felony, any felony, so it could say the words “Donald Trump, convicted felon” as often as possible, only enhanced his appeal. The nation saw him less as a mob boss finally facing justice than as a flawed but ultimately innocent man being hounded by a crooked sheriff.
The strategy stunk of cultural disconnect and decay. Even if the Democratic Party had succeeded in casting Trump as a criminal and itself as “the man,” the outcome may have very well been the same. The outlaw is an American archetype, after all — and one of the “coolest.” Millions upon millions of rap albums have been purchased on this very premise. America has long rooted for the “bad guy” in movies.
There are numerous reasons for this. America had long been enamored of the anti-hero, from Jesse James to Tony Soprano. People are skeptical of authority and have been since the Boston Tea Party. Americans are ironic and humorous people who enjoy flipping the bird at conventionality. That, in fact, might be the act at the very heart of “cool.”
Authenticity gap
However, above all, Americans value authenticity and detest artifice, and the matchup between Trump and Harris could not have offered a clearer contrast in this regard.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s character — and indeed, books could not contain all there is to say on the topic — one cannot accuse him of artificiality. He is authentic to a fault. We always know what he’s thinking because he never stops expressing himself. All of his faults are revealed in this way, but also all of his merits.
If being “cool” means being yourself, then Trump is the modern-day Miles Davis. He is manifestly incapable of being anything else.
Harris, on the other hand, campaigned behind an impenetrable shield of canned slogans such as, “I grew up in the middle class … I believe in the dreams, ambitions, and aspirations of the American people … ” She changed her accent depending on the audience, a behavior known as “code-switching.” Her campaign had to reshoot visits to the gas station with her running mate multiple times to make it seem genuine.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
It would have been impossible to stage a less “cool” campaign.
In the long term, the staggering losses of 2024 will do the Democrats good. Being banished to the cultural wilderness will help them to rediscover their edge and their authenticity. However, they’ve earned their place among the lame for now. (One can hear, even now, the shrill echo of a woke scold remonstrating my use of the word “lame”).