Gods Don’t Bleed. Trump Is Bleeding.

NYT OPINION: Gods Don’t Bleed. Trump Is Bleeding.
By Charles M. Blow
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: December 21, 2022 at 02:00AM

Where some Republicans once saw invincibility, they now sense weakness and injury.

I wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who liked him, which meant that his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only did not damage him, they added to his legend.

The folk hero is transcendent. He defies convention and defies gravity — in Trump’s case, political and cultural gravity. He overcomes the impossible, wins the improbable, evades authority.

He was a classic trickster figure, common in folklore.

For instance, for a Black child growing up in the American South, Stack-O-Lee (or, among other variations, Stagger Lee, as we pronounced it) was a folk hero. “Stack” Lee Shelton was a Black man, a pimp, who in 1895 shot another man dead for snatching his hat. The story became the subject of so-called murder ballads. Shelton bolstered his legend when, after being released from prison, he killed another man during a robbery.

This man, this figure, who negotiated the space between slavery and freedom, between criminal and hero, “came to personify the collective feeling of blacks at the bottom of society, and it was in this sense that Stagolee became a symbol of the Black community,” as Cecil Brown wrote in his book “Stagolee Shot Billy.”

Writing in Mother Jones in 2011, Joe Kloc described how Stack-O-Lee became a hero in Southern Black society by unapologetically breaking its rules. The murders he committed “only serve to illustrate the injustices of southern society,” Kloc wrote. “For all the myth surrounding him, there is something very rational about Stack-O-Lee’s character: Why follow some of society’s rules when so many others work against you?”

This is why I so instinctively understood Trump’s appeal and heroizing.

Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.

Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/opinion/trump-losing-support-2024.html

POLITICS News and Tweets