One can only wonder what Hunter S. Thompson would have made of the Trump “lovefests”
The late Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of the subjective and acid Gonzo Journalism, had a turn of phrase and an eye for the absurd. His classic is 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a wild, hallucinogenic journey fueled by an arsenal of drugs causing our hero’s perceptions to become increasingly warped, leading to visions of oversized, grotesque lizards.
He took a similar sensitivity to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, in which he followed the chaotic 1972 US presidential campaign, providing an unfiltered, darkly humorous, deeply personal and often exaggerated perspective. Ask Questions Later would pay good money to hire Thompson to do a sequel today, if we cold — and we would ask him to deploy the same tools, minus the exaggeration. It simply is no longer necessary.
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I won’t pretend with false equivalence. The Kamala Harris campaign is a little bit boring, like the candidate herself not too rhetorically inspiring, but it is basically standard issue (other than her bizarre coronation in place of a disastrously aging incumbent who actually won the primaries). Nay — the campaign that Thompson would need to cover is that of Donald Trump.
He could bring to this coverage the foundational wisdom that drove him in the 1970s. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, he said. This has obviously occurred already, all over the map. His true gift was prescience: There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment. Good Lord! How they most assuredly have.
Here are just a few recent moments that I’d love Thompson to have covered the Gonzo way.
The Lovefest at Madison Square Garden
Trump’s rally this week at New York’s Madison Square Garden was the kind of shitshow that beggars belief in a literal fashion: One cannot believe that it has happened, and yet it did. Speaker after speaker in the warmup acts competed on the outrage scale, yielding a result crazier than anything I have seen at a political rally anywhere in the world. In Russia, in the Middle East, in Latin America, crazy tends to take the form of scary — but this was different. It seems like something out of the movie Idiocracy, which I’ve written about before, when due to certain social dynamics, imbeciles rule the world.
The star of the event, as many will know by now, was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who made inflammatory jokes that targeted especially Puerto Rico. “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, adding that Latinos “love making babies.” Hinchcliffe singled out a black guy in the crowd and made a joke about carving watermelons for Halloween. Of Jews, he suggested that they hate to part with money. So originality was not a premium at the rally.
What are they going for instead? The message seemed to be: We’re proudly awful, and if you are too, well, that’s just fine. We’re all here to burn down the house of polite society. Revel in it!
So Tucker Carlson called Kamala Harris a “ Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former prosecutor” — getting one in four right, and obviously dog-whistling that we like to mock non-whites. Businessman Grant Cardone told the crowd that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country” — winking at the crowd that anyone with pimps must be a whore. There was also a screaming wrestler and a Trump friend named David Rem who called Harris “the devil” and “the anti-Christ.” Another weirdo, gender-challenged it seems, attacked Hillary Clinton, who is not running and is a woman, as “a sick son of a bitch.”
Hard to explain.
Trump, who several days earlier described the US as a “garbage can for the world” (referring, it seems, to immigrants and not to plastic waste), came onstage to pledge “the largest deportation program in American history,” claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square,” and that the Biden Administration “spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes.”
Considering that both campaigns are desperate for the votes of Puerto Ricans and Jews in must-win Pennsylvania — where each group has about a half-million people — this type of rally would seem to be an extremely dumb move. Trump famously hopes to sway black men too, so it all looks un-strategic.
But while Trump’s campaign distanced itself from the racist jokes, the candidate himself seemed delighted with the event. “I don’t think anybody has ever seen anything like what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden,” he said at Mar-a-Lago. “The love in that room — it was breathtaking.” Many told him, he said, that there had “never been an event so beautiful.”
“It was an absolute lovefest and it was my honor to be involved.”
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Thompson, who incidentally began his reporter’s career in Puerto Rico (where I too have lived), liked freaks well enough — but had his serious punditry side as well. He once put it this way: Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. When you consider voter suppression laws like the Georgia ban on handing people in line to vote water, you must conclude that reality has caught up. He explained GOP economics this way: If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all.
It’s adorable that this quote, from the 1990s, cast the Bushes in the role of the rich. Thompson would have loved Elon Musk, the world’s richest miser — I mean man. The latest Trump campaign narrative is that Musk, as Secretary for Government Efficiency, will cut $2 trillion off the federal budget (or almost a third). That will devastate the hated entitlements, like regular people’s already strapped Social Security and Medicare. Also the FBI, EPA, NASA, and virtually all non-defense federal programs.
The campaign has essentially presented the proposal as Musk’s own, and Trump has praised Musk as a “very exceptional guy” and said that Americans “won’t feel it.” Well, Trump and Musk won’t feel it, and they’re Americans (though the former hails from the immigrant Drumpfs, and the latter is a naturalized former migrant worker)!
Musk, slightly more honest, has suggested in a tweet that he knows the proposals would crash the economy in the short term (see here) — but the idea is to eventually put what is currently the Western world’s hottest economy “on sounder footing.” Sounder is always better — that’s for sure.
I suppose Thompson would find some pithy words to explain why the soon-to-be-impoverished MAGA masses will get precisely what they deserve.
The World’s Strangest Man Wants Daddy to Spank His Daughter
Musk is positively relatable and normal compared to the increasingly unhinged-seeming Carlson. This is actually what he truly, really, absolutely said at another “lovefest” in Georgia.
“If you allow your two-year-old to smear the contents of his diaper on the walls of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of this,” predicted the former Fox host.
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” Carlson reasoned, to raucous cheers of the crowd, where I’m guessing incels were disproportionately represented. “Dad comes home and he’s pissed! He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them.”
(Note to British readers: “pissed” in this case means “angry,” not “drunk as it would in the UK — though one cannot rule out that the speaker indeed was both.)
There is no mention of Mom. This is a return to the family of the 1950s, when dad was large and in charge, and incidentally blacks in various places rode on the back of the bus.
Carlson further refined his argument: “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
There is no mention of the boys getting spanked as Carlson elaborates on the home-truths approach this father would adopt: “No, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”
Why is this rubbish being said, and what is the campaign strategy? Trump — who the same crowd welcomed as “daddy” — needs the women of America to decide not to back the potential first woman president, and to put aside their widespread horror at the abortion bans enabled by the Trump-appointed Supreme Court (with more to come if the Republicans should win). Why on Earth is Carlson ranting about spanking little girls?
I imagine it is the same arrogance that compelled Trump to once declare he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. It’s why the crazy uncles of the far right are talking openly about crushing America’s democratic institutions and safeguards. Hubris sometimes comes before the fall — but sometimes it does not. It needs its enablers.
Evangelicals, spawners of the 1970s and 1980s “Moral Majority” narrative in the US, say that Trump is an “imperfect vessel.” In this, they show an almost British capacity for understatement. Truly, he works in strange ways. That is an understatement too.
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What would Thompson make of all this? Perhaps the most apt quote from his arsenal, the one he might be tempted to recycle and update, would be this: In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. Would he be referring to the candidate? His enablers? His voters? Thompson shot himself in 2005, so we will never know.
Make up our own damn minds, I imagine he would say.