Trump is Global Journalism’s American Junk Food
(COMMON DREAMS) Christian Christensen — He’s everywhere.
Spray-tanned face and white teeth exploding through the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Implausible hair mesmerizing on Twitter and Facebook. Comments on female journalists and illegal Mexican immigrantsechoing across the ether. It is likely that Donald Trump will be nothing more than an ephemeral political phenomenon, but he is still a phenomenon.
Politically divisive at home, Trump unifies internationally. My utterly subjective sense is that he is the American many global citizens have been waiting for since the end of the George W. Bush presidency: an American the world can look at and ridicule, a symbol of US arrogance and anti-intellectualism. Paul Thomas of the New Zealand Herald put this view best when he wrote that, “Trump personifies everything the rest of the world despises about America: casual racism, crass materialism, relentless self-aggrandizement, vulgarity on an epic scale. He is the Ugly American in excelsis.”
Bashing the US is a favorite pastime of portions of the international press because we Americans have made it so damn easy. We trumpet the fact that our nation is created and protected by God. We parade our guns as evidence of freedom. We revel in a military power we are unafraid to use. We laugh in the face of facts and science. We elected George W. Bush. Twice.