The re-emergence of former President Donald J. Trump on the national stage has coincided with the waning of woke’s assault on American culture. This is no accident.
Regardless of one’s opinion of the 45th president, one thing is without doubt: pretend niceties and political correctness hold little interest for him. Indeed, he has built a late-in-life political career all about degrading and poking fun at traditional political order, including but not limited to the use of often biting (sometimes clever) nicknames for his Democratic and Republican opponents.
Trump’s simple (at times brutal) rhetoric strikes a chord with the average voter. Many prefer direct and blunt — not the way traditionalists (let alone woke rhetoricians) choose to communicate.
In Washington, D.C., Trump’s relentless campaign against woke’s ways and means and ends is well known. Readers are familiar with the particulars: He calls out ESG’s hold on the Chamber of Commerce and C-Suite liberals; he calls out politicians/liberal-arts majors who pretend to possess a monopoly on the truth on climate change; he calls out the judicial activists endorsed by the American Bar Association in favor of the Federalist Society’s originalist thinkers; and he (with great glee) regularly calls out the liberal pundits who masquerade as “mainstream” news reporters in the national media — a tactic wildly out of line from (all of) his predecessors. But Trump’s assault on things progressive and woke has another element to it that tends to drive the left over the edge crazy: humor.
You see, Trump is only too happy to decry — and ostracize — progressivism’s most outrageous practices and beliefs. And so he points to EVs (and their charging stations) freezing up in cold weather — and the insanity of deprioritizing domestic oil and gas exploration while begging despots like Venezuelan strong man Nicolas Maduro for his dirty fossil fuels — and the specter of physically developed biological males dominating female athletics — and hypocritical “defund the police” politicians who demand 24/7 security for themselves — and the incomprehensible specter of allegedly “elite” colleges and universities which employ and suborn anti-Semitic professors and administrators, while begging their Jewish alums for annual giving dollars — and even those way-too-soft paper straws that so often collapse in defeat when confronted with the likes of an ice cold chocolate milkshake.
Trump’s essential appeal here is not difficult to understand. To wit: He is willing to label silly things…silly…and not worry so much about the subsequent melting-down of our self-appointed cultural value makers. Not such a gutsy move in bygone eras where a sense of humor was more valued — but quite out there in the age of progressive intolerance. To boot: He continues to talk the talk on his own (pedestrian) terms while daily facing down America’s establishment media so intent on taking him down for good. For all this he is despised by both party establishments but remains immensely popular in a flyover America that has had enough of woke’s humorless over-the-top attacks on objective truth within our institutions and culture.
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan often employed humor to great effect. Perhaps another four years of indicting woke’s most ludicrous policies and practices will allow Trump to join this special echelon of American presidents.
God knows the progressive agenda has provided him with enough material.
Bob Ehrlich is a former Governor of Maryland, Member of Congress and State Legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”
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