Exploiting the Archives: Holy Shit, I've Written About President CHUMP a lot. Here's Proof
I try to refrain from writing about politics here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I feel discoursing extensively about matters political is something that should be reserved exclusively for glitzy awards shows but, to be brutally honest, I am just not feeling this Donald Trump dude as President. At all.
I hate to be harsh, but he seems like a bad person with bad ideas and a bad brain who is leading our country on a bad path. Unfollow me and delete your pledges if you must, but I don’t care for Donald Trump, nor do I think he’s doing a very good job as President.
But it turns out I have written about Donald Trump fairly extensively in the past, to the point where I’ve written two books (or book-like entities) about him in the past year alone in the form of 7 Days in Ohio and more recently, Kanye & Trump, which has proven so unpopular it’s somehow sold minus 47 copies. Instead of a royalty statement, Amazon sent me a bill saying I owe them twenty-three dollars.
Last year, when Trump’s chances of winning the Presidency appeared about as solid as the Washington Generals finally defeating their eternal nemeses The Harlem Globetrotters, I masochistically read Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal for my Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club column over at The A.V Club.
I have read a lot of garbage in my life. That’s kind of my thing. If you were to ask me what kind of books I like to read I suppose I could say memoirs or biographies or non-fiction books but my favorite kind of book is undoubtedly the garbage book. Now I have read multiple books by notorious hip hop groupie nicknamed “Superhead” and all manner of self-published nonsense, including one particularly odious, self-serving tome by the doctor who killed Michael Jackson.
Yes, I specialize in literary garbage and The Art of the Deal is the most toxic, clueless, tone-deaf, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic horse shit I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It took me a long time to get through The Art of the Deal because it somehow manages to be boorish and agonizingly, unreadably dull.
It was a book I had to force myself to finish, as well as start, and also continue. My brain said, “No! You don’t want to spend time inside this dude’s head! That’s literally the worst place in the world (and I’ve been to New Jersey!)” but out of professional obligation I felt like I had to experience this literary nightmare.
Last year I also wrote about the similarities between R. Kelly, Trump and Bill Cosby’s media strategies for GQ and this year I returned to the pages of Cracked to chronicle how Trump’s appeal to his base mirrors ICP’s own diligently cultivated cult following. I also apparently wrote an article for Cracked about how we need to stop seeing Donald Trump and his Presidency through a pop culture lens that I honestly forgot writing. Anywho, looks pretty good! Worth a glimpse, at least!
I’m sure there are three or four or five Trump pieces floating around the internet I haven’t linked to, but just aggregating all these far-flung articles is tiring. I suppose I write about Trump as a way of making sense of the unfathomable lunacy of his Presidency and existence and also because you can’t be a culturally engaged writer in 2017 and not write about him all the time.
I’d like to say that I’m writing about Trump a lot less these days, but then I rifle through the past few weeks of The Big Whoop and realize that I’m writing indirectly about him at least once a week. Writing about Donald Trump can feel like a pointless and masochistic endeavor, since he and his most fervent acolytes live in an alternate universe and alternate reality untouched by facts or reality or any criticism of Trump whatsoever. But that doesn’t mean we should stop writing about him, it just means we should perhaps let go of the illusion that Trump’s followers are reachable by even the most undeniable and compelling arguments against the man and his mindset.
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