Escalator Redux

Jury says "guilty," Trump says the horror, the horror

“Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now. From prisons, mental institutions, terrorists!”

That’s Trump, speaking at the courthouse right after his conviction, his arms uncharacteristically limp and his tie uncharacteristically blue, his inner ju jitsu instinct raw and exposed. I stopped counting how many times he spit the word “disgrace” when I realized what he was trying to do: claim the expression, flip the script, imprint disgrace in the minds of his followers and the gullible press as a term not for his felon-self but for the rule of law that had brought him there.

And then: “Prison, mental institutions, terrorists.” Disgrace? That was the warm-up. But this terror trinity? That was the pitch. It’s been a staple of rallies, but who watches rallies? The choir. Who watched this? Ratings through the roof.

Liberal America was too pleased with the verdict on Thursday to pay this ugly formula attention. But Friday morning at 11 am, Trump made the mantra plain. Where? Trump Tower—the golden escalator, site of hisfirst mythic descent on June 16, 2015. Now, May 31, 2024: born again. “Political prisoner,” self-declared; fully martyred in the minds of the believers. Right from the top, he returned to his theme. “Jails, prisons, mental institutions.”

Sometimes Trump says other countries empty theirs into ours; sometimes he says we do it to ourselves, blue cities, “deliberately” sending “criminal aliens” from behind bars into the (white) countryside, “where they are free to offend, where they are free to kill, where they are free to rape.”

Trump’s a man made of old impressions, his rally playlist—Billy Joel, Elton John—stuck in ’80s rotation, and his mind, like Reagan’s, made up as much of movies he’s seen as of any engagement with actual people. Other countries emptying their prisons into the US? Odds are this dyspeptic bubble of an “idea” floated up to his consciousness from a dim recollection of the 1980 Cuban Mariel boatlift, during which 125,00 Cuban refugees came to the U.S. Or, more likely, Al Pacino’s 1983 film Scarface, which begins with the false claim that 1 in 5 of those refugees was a predator sent by Castro to ravage America.

From the trailer:

1980, Miami, where the American dream had a price tag and only one man in a million was hungry enough to pay. Al Pacino is Scarface.

Within Trumpism, The nightmare and the dream are always intertwined. The appeal of Trump for his believers, as with all fascist figures, is that to them he simultaneously embodies the threat and its resolution.

That’s why he’s lately been comparing himself to the ur-American gangster, Capone; that’s why you can buy Trump ’24 t-shirts and hats and decals and posters depicting the candidate in Scarface’s famous white suit and black shirt.

And maybe that’s why, when for The Undertow I sifted through hundreds of hours of videos made by those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, my eye landed on this:

In the months leading up to the January 6 attack, Trump t-shirts and flags depicted him as Rambo (1982)—

Or as The Terminator (1984)—

And most commonly through a synthesis of both—avenger and killer—via the now ubiquitous skull logo of The Punisher, a comic book vigilante created in 1974 and ascendent in Reagan’s ’80s, a Vietnam veteran, “stabbed in the back” by a decadent society that won’t confront crime, who takes vengeance without mercy.

From Rambo to Scarface, avenger to strongman: The story Trump is telling in ’24, the story out of which his believers reconfigure their American nightmare/dream, isn’t just more of the same. It’s darker.

And it’s scarier. What’s really new is the growing centrality in Trump’s imagery, evident in his comments following conviction and the day after, of “mental institutions.” The insane asylum: not just crime, now, but hallucinatory crime. Which is to say, not just revenge epics, but horror movies.

“Mental institutions”? He means “psycho killers.” He means “wonderful” Hannibal Lecter, of Silence of the Lambs, who he invoked at his recent New Jersey rally. He means Halloween’s Michael Myers, he means 1977 Son of Sam, and he doesn’t care if one was in a movie and the other stalked Brooklyn and Queens. He means “machetes at McDonald’s,” right now, as he muttered at the foot of the escalator, and he doesn’t care, either, whether you’re a reader of the New York Post and know about the day before’s bizarre attack in Times Square. The “point” he’s trying to make is mythic, not actual. Myths, writes scholar Wendy Doniger in her brilliant book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, “say, this could happen to you.” Emphasis Trump’s.

Theology was part of Trump’s escalator rant today, too. Speaking of Judge Juan Merchan and his treatment of Trump’s witnesses, he said, “They were literally crucified by this man, who looks like an angel, but he's really a devil.” Of course it’s just a metaphor; but just as Trump now closes rally with a QAnon theme song, he invokes the evangelical imagination with ease. He knows if he calls someone a devil, his believers will look for their horns. He doesn’t need to say or even know Ephesians 6:12 to grasp the story of good and evil he’s telling, the one many of his followers will hear as a call to arms in spiritual war:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Trump worked his hands like a bellows as he spoke, squeezing and expressing his words like an accordion. It’s a sales method, a rhetorical technique, a hypnotic effect. Does one sentence follow one another? Do the words “make sense”? Doesn’t matter. Follow the hands.

Sunlight filtered gold cut across the backdrop of flags, illuminating the left side of his jaw and his right hand. There were evangelicals for whom the golden light was as loud and clear as anything he said.

And everything he said mattered, to the believers, but not only to them. This was national. This was for the faithful, yes, but also for the rest of us. Trump didn’t need to take a gender studies course to master grievance masculinity, the art of indignation that plays upon the American misogyny mind, trained to hear white man anger as sincerity. Trump, sincere. If you’re reading this, you likely didn’t hear it that way. Trump doesn’t care about that, either. You’re not the customer. You’re not the mark.