The Art of the Con, by Donald Trump Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420084/donald-trump-puts-camp-campaign
Trump is a sort of action star for the sedentary, a boardroom gladiator, and that is what makes him so successful as a reality-television freak. One of the functions of popular entertainment is wish-fulfillment, a chance to imagine oneself in various satisfying situations, in this case scenarios involving the exercise of executive power.
.. Trump’s performance-art character is butch in the sense that certain gay icons are butch — bikers, cowboys, and the rest of the Village People — and appealing to certain men for similar reasons, one of which is overcompensation for threats against their virility.
.. Every age produces its reactionary fantasy: The overpowering domesticity of the 1950s, followed by the heaviness and drabness of the 1960s and 1970s, provoked American mass culture to a series of ever more frivolous and exotic retreats: Disneyland, Las Vegas, Playboy, Star Trek, Deep Throat. Trump’s act is a way of ritualizing certain insecurities — certain specifically male insecurities — in order to tame our terror of them.