Donald Trump or the crooked lines of God

His profile is repeated like an icon, like Hitchcock’s. It seems that illustrators and photographers are hypnotized by that “Oaxaca cheese” style hairstyle that ends in a long quiff. Trump is elusive and disconcerting, his moon face only makes it clear to us that there is another that we cannot see: The face of darkness. His profile shows his most characteristic and revealing features: a disturbing essence that reminds us of what Plato explained when he compared imitative painting to magic: it can only produce ghosts; and we would add that it awakens a feeling of suspicion, of bad omen; Trump is an evoker of gloomy scenarios and a narrator of sinister stories, and perhaps here lies the planetary concern: Trump seems more like the double of a conventional president, the evil double of the person who is expected to be the one who sits in the oval office. His voice is charged with the power of strangeness. The same that is awakened by the improbable but resounding image of Donald Trump: That which scares us, a halo of irregularity, anxiety; it is a rarity that deviates from the norm, a distortion that makes the wave of a pattern jump. Like a character who recites a role that is from another play. An alteration that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. Trump does not behave like the others. That is, in part, the reason for his success but also the root of his uneasiness. He signs executive orders as if he were taking cookies out of the oven. He selects Supreme Court judges with the trappings of a reality show. He shakes hands with the tenacity of a town bully. He is one and the opposite at the same time: a millionaire and hero of the disillusioned worker; a businessman in a golden tower who has not lost the ominous sting of the Queens teenager. His rhetoric deviates from the presidential norm. He relies on recurring monosyllables: first, fake, sad!, right, great, look! His language seems clumsy and casual, but it is not. He knows what he is doing when he appeals to the second person, when he leaves the sentence unfinished for the spectator to finish, when he fires a word like a punch before the final period, when he rejects subordination. He flees from the linguistic sophistication of the conventional politician. This apparent simplicity in his speech is also in his profile. Trump is like that lady Chesterton spoke of: “we always imagine her in profile, like the edge of a dagger.” And the edge cuts reality, becoming the distorted and unsolemn double of the most powerful man in the world. The double that, according to Freud, would be an object of terror. No one better than Stephen King to describe the fear that Trump produces: “the worst kind of fear is when you come home and realize that everything you have has been replaced by an exact copy. But different.”

Nota publicada originalmente por Diego La Torre en el Heraldo de México