It is typical of bullies to kick down and
kiss up. Donald Trump is in at least one respect a very atypical bully: not
many bullies make it to the presidency of the United States. But in respect of
kicking down and kissing up, he is perfectly typical. The kicking down part
hardly needs documenting. Hardly a day goes by that Donald doesn’t attack
someone, and from his official perch, which is high despite his dwelling always
at the bottom of a moral cesspool, most any attack will necessarily entail a
downward thrust. But not all his interactions with the rest of humanity are
hostile. Some are merely condescending, and some, as the world saw with
startling clarity during his just-finished trip to Asia, are downright affectionate.
In classic bully fashion, as nasty as he is to those he deems his underlings,
he acknowledges his place in a hierarchy and kowtows shamelessly to those he
recognizes as outranking him in it. Thus his serial fawning over Vladimir
Putin. Thus his sycophantic kissing last week of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
ass.
During
the campaign Trump accused China of “raping” American workers and “robbing us
blind” and vowed to get tough with it. Then he went there. In Beijing Trump absolved
China of any blame for the imbalance in trade between the two countries. “I don’t blame China,” he said. “After
all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another
country for the benefit of its citizens? I give China great credit.” To Xi, a communist apparatchik who has
recently succeeded in consolidating his grip on one-man rule over the country to
which Trump seems to be relinquishing with unseemly haste the United States’ longtime
role as the world’s dominant power, he tweeted effusive thanks “for such an
incredible welcome ceremony. It was a truly memorable and impressive display!”
And he called him “a very special man.”
If
that wasn’t enough, he proceeded to the Philippines and gushed there about his “great
relationship” with President Rodrigo Duterte, a man who boasts even more openly
of having committed homicide than Trump has of committing sexual assault. Logically,
Duterte should not outrank Trump in any hierarchy except perhaps one of
depravity. But in the psychic Good Fellas-like strutting tough-guy world they
both inhabit, a tough guy who can boast of having killed someone outranks a
tough guy whose greatest claim to infamy is having stiffed a bunch of
contractors, bamboozled tens of millions of credulous white people into voting
for him and prevailed in a number of professional wrestling matches. Those are
all formidable credentials, but none of them compares with real murder, and
though Trump may yet succeed in killing billions of us, hands-on homicide is
one crime he can probably not yet boast of.
When
Trump was a mere bankruptcy-prone real estate developer and casino boss in New
York and Atlantic City thirty years ago, he routinely bullyragged his
executives and humiliated them in front of one another. You can go on YouTube and
watch Trump’s cabinet members degrade themselves back in June in an almost
ghoulish round of apparently on-command bootlicking. It’s a creepy spectacle
that would seem more appropriate to a totalitarian fantasyland than to the
United States. If his signature smug grin is any indication, Trump seems to
relish that sort of thing as much as he does the approval of the thugs he makes
no secret of currying favor with around the world. The problem, or one problem,
for Donald Trump is that second-tier tough guys, like Mussolini, with whom he
has so much in common, or like Tommy DeVito, Joe Pesci’s character in Good Fellas, the wannabe made man with
whom Trump also has a lot in common, tend to end badly. After a while reality
intrudes on their pretensions, and all their tough-guy swaggering dissolves in
a brief epiphany of helplessness.
In Donald Trump’s
case, that moment, if it comes, may wipe his signature smug grin from his face for
good. That would make for a gratifying spectacle. But if it were somehow
possible to cut a deal with the great artisanal dealer and just have him crawl
back under the rock he emerged into our politics from, back into his tabloid
netherworld of gambling and boxing and professional wrestling and beauty
pageants and Roy Cohn and racial discrimination and sexual predation and bankruptcy
and stiffing contractors and firing people on TV and Howard Stern interviews and
racist conspiracy mongering and Chinese neckties and prenup agreements and extramarital
affairs and massive Trump University-style fraud, and have him take with him all
the sycophants who want to kiss his ass and all the thugs whose asses he wants
to kiss and all the yahoo birdbrains who feel so free to vent their racist
passions at his ugly rallies, he can sit there and grin all he wants. That
would be fine with me.
