Exactly One Reason to Be Grateful for Donald Trump

From Esquire

This is not a post about Donald Trump. Sure, Trump is the catalyst, as he's been for the past 18 months of virtually anything tangentially related to the state of American life. But this election is no longer about Trump, even if his name appeared in the headline of this excellent Charles Blow column in The New York Times. Blow is ostensibly writing about the orange demagogue, but he's tackling so much more:

He is a ball of contradictions that together form a bully, a man who has built a menacing wall around the hollow of his self. He is brash to mask his fragility.

"The hollow of his self" is an interesting phrase. As kids, we're taught that bullies do what they do because they are lonely and unhappy. They build themselves up by beating others down. They try to exert control out of panic and insecurity. That phrase, "the hollow of his self," has echoed in my mind all morning. What worse adjective could you ascribe to someone? "Hollow" is on a different level than "mean," because it encapsulates the sheer lack of what should be there, what's supposed to be there, what other people have that this person does not. A "hollow" man will never be full, no matter how many casualties he racks up along his race to the bottom.

Blow continues:

America has a habit of romanticizing the playboy as much as the cowboy, but there is often something untoward about the playboy, unseemly, predatory and broken.

Predatory. Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Jerry Sandusky, all those deer-in-headlights guys on To Catch a Predator. There are those who prey on people allegedly weaker or lower in stature than themselves as a means of self-preservation. These are the hollow individuals who seek to fill the void with radical behavior. The only way for these types of people to feel strong is to juxtapose themselves with their perceived opposite. It works, for a time. Until one person comes forward, then a few more, then a few more, then it's not one voice but a cabal, then the cabal becomes an army.

Blow goes on:

He seems genuinely offended that he should be held to the same standards of truth, decorum and even law as those less well off.

With him you get a man who believes himself superior in every way: through the gift of fortune and the happenstance of chromosomes. He believes the rules simply don't apply. Not rules that govern the sovereignty of another's body, not rules that dictate decorousness.

I read that last sentence a few times, thinking about how "the hollow of the self" is directly connected to the violation of "the sovereignty of another's body." It immediately brought me back to this excerpt of Between the World and Me, where Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son: "Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage."

It happens because it's normal. It's normal because people don't say anything.

There are exactly three weeks until election day. Of course, the whole thing will drag on for weeks or months past that, with Trump's vapid propaganda of voter fraud and a rigged system dominating the conservative national dialogue. But even when Trump goes away, or when he starts his TV network, what he brought to the surface will never sink back down. We see Trump's absurd behavior and narcissism reflected all around us. We see shaky iPhone videos of the destruction of black bodies at Trump rallies. We see new sexual assault victims come forward, putting themselves on the line for nothing but the excavation of the truth.

What he brought to the surface will never sink back down.

President Obama recently said he sees a direct line between the rise of Sarah Palin in 2008 and Trump's candidacy in 2016. There's a similar line between "Grab 'em by the pussy" in 2005 and millions of men, from Sandusky to Cosby to Steubenville, who think they are above consequence.

So it's not about Trump.

It's about acknowledging that, amidst all the hatred and ugliness of this never-ending campaign cycle, we are finally nearing a tipping point for the destruction of bodies, and we're no longer willing to let the destructors win simply because they're used to winning. This whole election cycle has been exhausting and anxiety-inducing, but if there's one thing to be grateful for, it's that we're no longer afraid to talk about the ugliness that surrounds us.

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