Our boiled fish complexioned President has been called many names: Orange Hitler, Adolf Twitler, Hair Fuhrer, Mango Mussolini, the Short-Fingered Vulgarian, Mrs. Putin, Fake President, President Spanky McLiarface, Impotus, Cadet Bone Spurs, Dolt 45, Agent Orango, Chancellor Cheeto, Tweeto, the Orange Ringmaster, the Angry Creamsicle, Cheeto Jesus, Barbequed Brutus, Vanilla Isis, Creep Throat, Utter Cockwomble, Rug Wearing Thunder Nugget, Mangled Apricot Hellbeast, Witless Fucking Cocksplat, Rotten Orange Fucknut, Degenerate Corn Beef Face Syrup Wearing Wankstain, and Gerbil-headed Woodstained Haunted Spunktrumpet. Cited from Mitchell 2016 in Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, ed., Language in the Trump Era (Cambridge UP, 2020), p. 30.
But what’s in a name? He has marketed himself as a name, incorporated a business whose only business is to lease the use of the name “Trump.” As a name, he is a rallying cry for millions of people, single-minded people, one-issue people: anti-abortionists, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-black, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-Chinese, anti-trans, anti-drugs, anti-government, anti-Democrats, anti-poor, anti-deficit, anti-welfare, etc., a motley congregation of angry, resenting, and vengeful people. MAGA is a coalition of antis who say they want to turn the clock back to the good old days. Yet, he, and the other capitalists who now run USA, Inc., is the master of their discontent: he it was, with the other capitalists, who created this world that they find so hateful. He, and the other capitalists, sucked up the country’s wealth and created the national debt, polluted the air and water, outsourced the jobs, discarded public morality for private gain, taught us self-interest and self-aggrandizement, taught us to compete, to live for winning, to be on top, and taught us how to demean others, to hate difference.
MAGA blames some category of others to give themselves the hope that the world is not really as bad as their masters, with their help, have made it. And the masters dish out that hope as tags of virtue — Western civilization, family, individualism, prosperity, nation – as they continue to make everyone’s life miserable. So, they call out his name, in despair and in hope.
But what is in that name, Avatar Donald J. Trump, @realDonaldTrump? Two days ago, in the evening, he posted on Truth Social the following: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/114690267066155731.
People who read @realDonaldTrump’s post in order to agree or disagree with what is expressed will take what it says at face value and agree or disagree with what he says. People who read in order to understand the speaker’s mind and thoughts — the perceptions, the views of reality, the intentions, the framing of ideas, etc. – the psyche that informs and shapes what is written, will find in this posting abundant evidence that @realDonaldTrump believes there are good people and bad people, that we all want a whole nation of good people, and that we want to get rid of bad people.
The following is my analysis of that post, reading it to find the person behind it. I recommend that you read the post first.
What makes people good or bad is confused in his mind. On the one hand, citizens are good, and aliens are bad. Never mind the fact that in America, all citizens except natives, were or descend from aliens. Furthermore, “real Americans” are good, assuming that fake Americans are bad, though being real Americans has nothing to do with being born or living in America or being an American citizen. So, citizens are not so good after all.
Bad Americans are “Radical Left Democrats.” Here we find a very tricky grammatical ambiguity. Does that phrase refer to a group within the larger group (the radical left wing of the Democratic party), or does it refer to the assumption that all Democrats are characteristically “radical left” (“Radical Left” being simply an adjective modifying Democrats, as we would normally say “green car” means the car is green). Whichever he means, these fake Americans must be attacked by ICE, the police, the FBI, Treasury agents, and the military. I think with the inclusion of the military, this is a declaration of war against either part of or all of the Democratic party. That is to say, @realDonaldTrump is secretly proposing a one-party political system. That is a revolutionary change in the political structure of the United States.
We may wonder why these bad Americans are to be politically removed from American politics, if not bodily removed from the nation or the earth. The writer, @realDonaldTrump, says it is because “there’s something wrong with them.” They believe in men playing in women’s sports. Yes, they are that “sick of mind.” They so “hate our country” [it’s, of course, not their country since they are fake Americans] that they believe in “Transgender for Everybody.” We need not elaborate the sexual fantasies that are the sources of this strange idea.
There seems to be a lot of these bad, fake Americans since they number in the millions and millions and control the country’s largest cities, LA, NY, and Chicago, their “Democratic Power Center.” So it becomes clearer that the fake Americans are not just the Radical Left of the party but the whole party; our President’s avatar is asking for a political, legal, law enforcement, and military purge of the Democratic Party. The ambiguity of “Radical Left Democrats” allows unwitting readers to leap from disagreeing with the politics of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to purging the country of the Democratic Party (or is it a purgation of the whole nation of the very idea of democracy – it’s not clear, is it?).
What these fake Americans do that is so bad (these Democrats or democrats, his use of capital letters creates this confusion which may be a confusion in his mind as well as in his writing) is that they use “Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base” [long proven wrong statistically], cheat in Elections [repeatedly established as wrong in many (over 60) court reviews of evidence and arguments], and grow the Welfare State [they grow the welfare state by subsidizing it since they pay more into it than they take out], robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens [mostly “Hardworking Americans Citizens” don’t do the work these hardworking aliens do; and how is getting hired a theft?]. This is all to say that the bad these fake Americans do is not real but a Presidential Fantasy.
Special attention should be paid to the use of the phrase “Inner City” in understanding @realDonaldTrump’s fantasy. On the one hand, fake Americans are accused of “actually want[ing] to destroy our Inner Cities.” This is a charge against democrats. On the other hand, law enforcement, supported by “real” Americans and @realDonaldTrump, the good guys, is charged to focus on “crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities,” also with the intent of destroying inner cities, just like the bad fake Americans. Uuhh, what gives?
When I was a kid, inner cities were called “slums.” That is an English word referring to the 18th and 19th century sociological and economical residential situations resulting from industrialization and capitalism. In America, these areas of the large, industrial cities were racialized, that is, they resulted not just from mass production industries but also from movements to northern cities of agrarian, southern blacks after the emancipation, then from European immigration, and subsequently from the migration of whites from the city to newly created suburbs in the fifties. “Inner city” became a liberal, sociological way to distinguish this American phenomenon from slums.
Avatar Donald J. Trump’s self-contradictory view of the inner city in his fantasy world must come from having been a slumlord. On the one hand, he believes in profiting from poverty and therefore has an emotional interest in keeping the inner city going as a slum. On the other hand, he detests the inner city’s people, refusing to rent to blacks and resenting the federal government forcing him and his father finally to do so. He knows perfectly well that the inner city has changed and now is mostly populated by browns, but as a liberal racist, his view has not changed. The blacks, the browns, they are all poor, sweaty criminals, rapists, “colored people,” undesirables who vote for Democrats, something no right thinking, white man would do.
One of the strange things about language is that when we speak, we reveal who we are. In that sense, a person who posts 15 times a day is transparent. Readers have only to know how to read to see him. In the case of @realDonaldTrump, it is not a person we see but an image of a personality, a figure created by the real Donald Trump and his social media manager Dan Scavino, of their writers like Natalie Harp, in order to appeal to the MAGA followers, their idea of what MAGA wants, in its hope and despair, an Avatar of Donald J. Trump, a city-dweller’s fantasy of what big cities look like to rural America and inhabitants of “idyllic towns” (like T or C) in the “Heartland.” There is no man behind the name. It’s all advertisement, as befits a business entity.