Please Advise! Is the Bad Man Going to Win?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

Tuesday is election day in the U.S. I am frightened. How about you?

Signed,

Yank

Dear Yank,

Anyone who isn't in a nervous sweat right now is either comatose, chuckle-headed, sinister or just working on a really, really difficult jigsaw puzzle. Canadians are especially worried. At least Americans get a vote. We are like hostages locked in the trunk of a car driven by a drunken badger.

The campaign's home stretch has been shocking. Donald Trump is trying his damnedest to lose the election. The question is, will Americans let him?

Trump's entire campaign has been a remake of The Producers, that Mel Brooks film/musical about a stage show designed to be a commercial disaster that somehow fails to fail. Trump has piled up gaffes and outrages faster than a rat can procreate. He's like a serial killer who has figured out that if you just keep murdering people, the cops won't be able to keep up. Voltaire once said, “God is a comedian playing for an audience that is too afraid to laugh.” The same, we have lately discovered, is true of the devil. You want to snicker, but it's all too frightening.

Trump said his Madison Square Garden rally, where Puerto Rico was described as an island of floating garbage, was “a lovefest.” In Green Bay, he said, “I want to protect the women of our country.... I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not.” The man who recently rambled on about golfer Arnold Palmer's tremendous penis, the candidate favoured by a majority of American evangelicals, followed up this weekend by simulating fellatio on a microphone. He also told Tucker Carlson that Liz Cheney should have “guns trained on her face.” (Carlson made his own news this week when it emerged that he once claimed he was attacked and clawed by a demon. Well, OK. But shouldn't we hear the demon's side first?)

There's also the physical spectacle of Trump himself. Is his makeup artist a secret Kamala Harris supporter? Lately Trump's face has looked like he barely survived a booby-trapped papaya. He looks like he's been bobbing for hummus. They say after a while you get the face you deserve, and Trump's just desserts appear to have been applied with a trowel.

Over the years Dr. Steve has struggled to come up with new ways to describe Trump: “a traitorous horror clown,” “a rancid hate pumpkin,” “a mango Mussolini.” But there is a simple and succinct way to describe Trump: He's a monster. He's a one-man catalogue of human depravity. And according to polls, he remains the choice of almost half of American voters.

The quest to make sense of this is the holy grail of our age. How can a man who reveals himself, day after day, remark after remark, to be a shrieking abyss of malevolent spite, a cloud of free-floating, grasping resentment, a hateful fountain of imbecilic ignorance, continue to be a viable candidate for the most powerful elected office in the world?

Dr. Steve believes there is no one-size-fits-all-Trumpers explanation. Some are indeed drawn to his racism and cruelty and appreciate the licence Trump grants them to revel in their most hateful impulses. Others flock to him because he is hated by the people they hate.

Others, though, simply don't see him. After all this time, he remains a sort of fantasy figure to many — a straight-shooting, tell-it-like-it-is business tycoon. The fact that he is a serial bankrupt who still doesn't understand how tariffs work does not filter down to their level. He's a caricature.

Dr. Steve has noted before the preponderance of phoney Trump depictions — Trump as Rocky Balboa, Trump riding a dinosaur, Trump as an NFL player.

Nobody has ever done that with Barack Obama. They love Obama just as he is. Trump supporters meanwhile must create bullshit versions of their cartoon messiah. People leave his rallies when he launches into his interminable babbling speeches, but that doesn't matter — Trump the man is incidental. It's Trump the cartoon they love.

We don't know what the results of Tuesday's vote will be. But if Trump is a national character test, America has already failed. The rest of the world cannot unsee what we have seen about the world's most powerful democracy. Roughly half its voters neither understand nor care about the institutions that make America what it is. They will make America great again by stabbing it to death with flagpoles.

Should Harris win the election, the danger will not be past. Steve Bannon and his orcs will still be out there trying to subvert democracy and the rule of law.

But if America is going to survive the Trump era, a Harris victory is a necessary first step. So get out there and vote, Yanks. Then let us out of the trunk.