White Read online

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  On election night, my boyfriend relapsed into a mild opiate addiction that we thought he’d beaten over the summer. It had flared back up when Trump won the primaries but faded with the optimistic certainty of Hillary Clinton’s victory. His trajectory was typical: then thirty, he was a lifetime Democrat from an upper-middle-class Jewish-showbiz family and raised in Calabasas, so his leanings were obvious, yet like so many millennials he was briefly sidetracked by Bernie Sanders and his utopian pseudo-socialism and later was disillusioned with the Democratic National Committee when Hillary won the nomination over Sanders, even though this was so inevitable that I was surprised by the outrage that coursed through many young people I knew. For about a week he’d briefly flirted with the notion of Trump because he seemed to have more in common with Sanders than Clinton did, and also because he was upset by the DEA’s decision to ban a natural and organic opiate powder called kratom available in head shops everywhere that he and his friends enjoyed, so now they were disgusted by government interference and bureaucracy. But the Trump ethos repulsed him, and he took such dramatic offense against the man that I thought it bordered on derangement. I myself had long thought it was Trump’s aesthetic—the needy vulgarian bully with crazy hair and orange skin—that fueled his detractors more than whatever his actual ideology might or might not be, given that he was formerly a liberal New York Democrat.

  But what was happening to the person I’d been living with for almost seven years reflected the epidemic of moral superiority that was also engulfing and destroying a faction on the Left. During the months after the election I could count the number of times my inconsolable boyfriend had left the condo—and didn’t need more than two hands to tally them up. His hair became long and tousled, he hadn’t shaved for months, and he also developed three nonopiate addictions: Russian conspiracies as discussed on Reddit, Rachel Maddow detailing Russian conspiracy theories on MSNBC, and playing Final Fantasy XV. If I made even an offhand quip disparaging legacy media or fake news or the striking shifts in tone and bias that had occurred in certain national news organizations, his hackles would rise and he’d glare at me, believing deeply that anything the Trump administration said about fake news and the awful media could not be trusted. He was part of the supposed resistance—though too tired and stoned to actually go out and resist. The election had turned him into a wreck. At times he resembled a bedraggled and enraged Russian peasant, ranting and stomping around the condo, MSNBC blaring, yelling “Piece of shit!” whenever Trump’s visage appeared on the TV screen in the living room. If he read something in any of his feeds that implicated Trump in some Russian involvement he’d jump up and down and start clapping his hands in delight. “Impeachment! Impeachment’s coming. I can’t fucking wait.” In the early spring of 2017, this was sometimes amusing, and I would laugh, but as the year rushed forward I occasionally found myself wondering, What have I signed on for?

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  Everything had been calm prior to this seemingly endless campaign. The millennial and I never discussed politics previously, mostly because I wasn’t interested and Obama was keeping him happy. We’d met during the second year of that administration, and the 2012 election barely registered on us—too preoccupied with our separate lives. Obama won, life moved on, there were no protests in the streets and the media mostly fawned, if you didn’t watch Fox. But in the summer of 2015 something began to distract me, something odd was happening, something didn’t seem right: the mainstream news that I had read and mostly trusted my entire adult life, legacy institutions like The New York Times and CNN, wasn’t tracking what seemed to me a shifting reality. The disparity between what I saw happening on the ground—through social media and other news sites and simply with my own eyes and ears—and what mainstream organizations were reporting became glaringly obvious in a way that it never had before. Suddenly I began paying attention to a presidential campaign, which was—historically—something I’d never done. And this was because of how the media had chosen to cover Donald Trump, with an absolute cluelessness. A prankster had appeared—an actual disruptor—and the press was flummoxed. The disruptor followed no rules, there was no protocol, he wasn’t a politician, he didn’t give a shit. He was like the Joker in The Dark Knight: what made him so frightening to some was that he (apparently, at least) didn’t need or want anyone else’s money. He insulted everyone, and his most potent insults were hurled at white, male, Establishment figures—not just Muslims, women and Mexicans. The Trump insult machine was aimed at everybody he had issues with, and white men got it first and far worse than anybody else, yet as the national press corps explained it, this was not the case. Trump was the poster-boy antithesis of the proud moral superiority of the Left as defined forever by Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, as well as by Michelle Obama’s breathlessly condescending “when they go low, we go high,” both of which were quoted approvingly in the legacy media.

  At some point I found it distracting to be living in a country whose press had become so biased and highly corporate. Instead of trying to figure out and dismantle Trump intellectually, by changing their old-ass game plan and institutional worldview—which to battle the disruptor was what you needed to do, and learn to play by his rules—it seemed they preferred to hang on to a journalistic status quo that offered an outmoded consideration of a brand-new world that was flowering before their very eyes. Because of this, the media became so completely freaked out that they abandoned the hallmarks of neutrality and perspective. In a CNN interview in the summer of 2015, Trump said that Fox anchor Megyn Kelly was bleeding from her “eyes” and “wherever” when she aggressively questioned him during a presidential debate, and The New York Times decided to make this the top front-page headline the following day—the most important news of the day was supposedly how gross and juvenile Trump was in making a reference to Megyn Kelly’s menstrual blood. I stared at this headline for a long time that morning, asking myself, Why the hell is that the headline? The media continued to demonstrate an inability, or unwillingness, to put themselves in the other side’s shoes—their view remained fairly narrow—and I believe that if they’d reported about Trump more objectively he wouldn’t have won. But if you went to The New York Times website you were told at one point he only had a 2.5 percent chance of winning—and this on election eve no less, and surely it summarized everything the Times had gleaned about America and its voters over the course of their extensive coverage. For me political conversations increasingly became less about policy or the candidates themselves than about how all of this was being covered, and to some people it seemed I was defending Trump instead of criticizing the media.

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  That I had little or no interest in Hillary Clinton didn’t seem to bother anyone I talked to throughout 2016, when or even if the subject came up. I rarely met anyone, at least not in metropolitan Los Angeles, who had a hard-core enthusiasm for her, while during that spring and summer I encountered many people who harbored exactly that for either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. The majority of the millennials I was working with on a web series in the summer of 2016 shared my uninterest in Clinton, yet that didn’t prevent them from going along with the media’s demonization of Trump. In fact the media’s panic was the root of this problem. That sense of moral superiority manifested itself when it gasped and clutched its pearls at every Trump outburst and joke—when taking him literally was the biggest mistake you could make as a reporter; taking Trump literally was about as useful as complaining about the Kardashians. There were possibly more than shadows of misogyny and sexism in how Clinton was portrayed, but she clearly had been anointed the moral savior of the Establishment, the Corporation. And when her supporters mindlessly touted her as the “most qualified candidate in history” my blood froze with dread, knowing that there was a real hunger out there for the absolute opposite: someone who might not be “qualified”
at all. “Most qualified” became for many a terrifying reminder of something vague, sinister and bureaucratic that needed to be zoned out in Washington. You couldn’t get around the fact that the way the legacy media was covering the election of 2016—Clinton as heroine, Trump as villain—would prove to be an utter moral disaster for the country because it helped turn Donald Trump into the biggest underdog in American political history.

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  I’d made Donald Trump the hero of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and researched more than a few of his odious business practices, his casually brazen lying, how he’d let Roy Cohn serve as his mentor, the whiffs of racism that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in a man of his age and demographic. I’d read The Art of the Deal and followed his trajectory and done enough homework to make Trump a character who could float through the novel and be the person Bateman’s always referencing and quoting and aspiring to be. The young men, Wall Street guys, I hung out with as part of my initial research were enthralled by him. Trump was an inspirational figure, which troubled me in 1987 and 1988 and 1989, and also why he’s mentioned more than forty times in the novel. He’s who Bateman is obsessed with, the daddy he never had, the man he wants to be. Maybe this was why I felt prepared when the country elected Trump as president; I once had known so many people who liked him, and I still did. One could certainly dislike the fact that he’d been elected and yet still understand and grasp why he was elected without having an absolute mental and emotional collapse. Whenever I heard certain people losing their shit about Trump my first reaction was always, You need to be sedated, you need to see a shrink, you need to stop letting the “bad man” help you in the process of victimizing your whole life. Why would they do that to themselves? Surely there were people—DACA recipients, or the targets of ICE raids—who had a right to freak out, but the white, upper middle class in colleges, in Hollywood, in the media, and in Silicon Valley? If you hated Trump, why would you let him win figuratively as well as literally? But that was exactly what continued to happen throughout the following year and into 2018: people who hated Trump were in fact getting Trumped. The rich and entitled liberals I knew always had the hardest time and were always the most hysterical.

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  In March 2017 I had dinner with two friends who were visiting LA from New York. One was a commercial director, a Jewish liberal (and I point this out because my two longest relationships were with Jewish liberal men and obviously I have a thing for them) who’d voted for Clinton but basically considered himself an independent: he had accepted the election results and moved on. My other friend, a woman in her fifties, Jewish and liberal as well, had not, and I was shocked by how frazzled she seemed. In a restaurant on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood, the director and I talked about the recent Oscar telecast and agreed that La La Land should’ve won Best Picture over Moonlight, and would have in a different world. If the transition in Washington, starting with the inauguration and leading into the spring, hadn’t been depicted as such a disaster by the media during the Oscars’ voting period, if the fear and hatred of Trump hadn’t been at such a delirious fever pitch in Hollywood, maybe La La Land would have. Moonlight could be seen as a protest vote, a rebuke to Trump, though it might have been that given the Academy’s newly devised and complicated preferential-ballot system Moonlight had been backed more successfully than La La Land so maybe it wasn’t only a protest vote.

  He and I soon got into a conversation about ideology versus aesthetics, and how the entertainment press considered Moonlight first and foremost an ideological triumph, not simply an artistic one, though we both thought the latter claim was directly inflated by the prevailing ideology of the moment. We agreed that 2016 had been a terrible year for movies, and neither of us had cared passionately about any of the winners one way or the other, but our general debate led us briefly onto the topic of Black Lives Matter, since Moonlight obviously qualified due to the world into which it was released. But the difference, we argued, was that Moonlight’s aesthetics were sometimes exquisite while the aesthetics of Black Lives Matter were not. Perhaps if they had been, the movement could have reached the wider audience it wanted instead of turning off so many people. The Black Panthers’ aesthetic grasp turned them into rock stars for young people, black and white, in the 1960s, but Black Lives Matter was a millennial mess with no sense at all of forming a coherent visual idea or style in presenting itself—and this culture presentation ends up being, for better or worse, everything. You would have to be a moral idiot not to recognize the movement’s importance, but it was frustrating to see their message get eclipsed by a lurching, unformed aesthetic, and we noted that it could belong to the list of things on #WhyTrumpWon.

  My female friend had been listening to us while drinking heavily and at this point she suddenly exploded into a spastic rage, telling us that she was disgusted to hear two white men faulting the aesthetics of Black Lives Matter (which we’d done for about thirty seconds) and that we were both guilty of “white male privilege” and what in the fuck were we talking about? Trump hadn’t won the election, and she couldn’t bear sitting at the table listening to members of the “white patriarchy” rip apart the aesthetics of such an essential movement. “What?” she asked. “You want the Black Lives girls to be thinner? Is that what you’re implying?” What she actually was implying was the sentimental narrative that said white men shouldn’t be allowed to privately criticize anything about Black Lives Matter. She kept ranting, often nonsensically, and though I’d known her for more than thirty years I’d never seen her so angry, so deranged, talking right over us when we tried to explain what we meant, as if it needed any clarifying. We finally calmed her down, but our dinner had already been ruined by the outburst. Though we all kept it together for the rest of the evening, the frustration I felt seemed familiar: a continuation of the knee-jerk overemotional lashing out that had become endemic in the culture when it came to Trump, and particularly viral among the morally superior wealthy people I knew: coastal Democrats whose bubble lives the election had burst apart. This friend of mine lived in a penthouse with stunning views of Central Park and probably had a net worth of more than ten million dollars, so I kept wondering why her vast misery was all Trump’s fault? How had she let this happen to herself? Where were these cries of indignation coming from? Had Trump made her act like a sloppy mess by relentlessly victimizing and antagonizing her? And what about the almost sixty-three million people who’d voted for him? Were they also making her sick?

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  Barbra Streisand told the media she was gaining weight because of Trump. Lena Dunham told the media she was losing weight because of Trump. People everywhere were now blaming the president for their own problems and neuroses. This happened again when Meryl Streep accepted her lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes in January 2017, and rather than paying tribute to all the filmmakers she’d worked with who had passed away in the last few years (Michael Cimino, Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron) or—especially—talking about what playing Carrie Fisher in Postcards from the Edge was like, since Fisher had died just two weeks earlier, she used this opportunity to go on an anti-Trump rant for ten minutes. Instead of eulogizing her friend, she’d reinstated the new corporate moral superiority and ignored the aesthetics of the occasion by pushing her own ideology. But it wasn’t a surprise, really, since this is a company town, and in the waning days of February I was again reminded why I didn’t go out much in LA when I attended a pre-Oscars party where two wealthy players at our dinner table spent the entire time complaining about Trump. One of them had worked with Steve Bannon during his Hollywood days, and in fact he showed us a text he’d just got from Bannon, then the White House’s chief strategist, noting that if his wife ever found out he was going to text Bannon back she would probably divorce him and take the kids. That sounded extreme to me, and I jokingly said so. But he was serious and stared at me sternly
when he explained that his wife had been having “breakdowns” ever since the inauguration. Yet, during the awards season of 2017, a month after that inauguration, while the rich man’s wife was having breakdowns in a palace on a hillside, no one ever acknowledged that a small district in Beverly Hills, its northwestern edge spanning Sunset Boulevard, had actually been carried by Trump—the only red district in La La Land’s sea of blue. How could anyone fit this into a neat, sentimental narrative? The outrage, indignation, panic and horror of the Trump Apocalypse was really just the manifestation of being forced to look at the underlying bubble and wonder in shame where it all went wrong.

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  The agony and the self-victimizing were still going strong in the spring of 2017, at yet another dinner I had with another two friends I hadn’t seen since the election—both men in their sixties and privy to vast fortunes. Drinks had just been ordered when one of them muttered darkly about whatever Trump had “fucked up” that day. When I countered with something noncommittal about the day’s events or perhaps offered another opinion, placing the supposed fuckup in context, they both lost their shit and became infuriated, lashing out at me in ways I’d never seen from either of them. I had known one of them for more than thirty years—we’d met when I was twenty-one—and I had never seen him this apoplectic before, and in a swirl of morally superior self-regard and indignation he started lecturing me until I was ultimately hounded to say okay, forget it, you’re right, you’re both right, just forget all about it. Later, after both men opined that Trump actually hadn’t won the election, I mentioned the Electoral College—and they immediately shot back that the Electoral College shouldn’t count, either. One of them said the Electoral College was “bullshit” and that Los Angeles and New York should determine who “the fucking president” is. “I don’t want any goddamn know-nothing rural hicks deciding who the president should be,” he growled. “I am a proud liberal coastal elite and I think we should pick the president because we know better.” My blood froze, or at least I went cold, when I heard this, and it certainly wasn’t what Clinton’s advisers Robby Mook and John Podesta had said when Trump called the Electoral College “a rigged thing” and “a fraud,” suggesting that maybe only the popular vote should matter. I was going to point this out just because their outrage was so over-the-top annoying but then backed down, pretending to be the contrarian in order to mollify them, even though I actually thought I was the only one who was being logical about this. I was never good at playing the alpha dog, anyway.