In addition to contributing to Democratic Senate candidate Foster Campbell (Louisiana runoff Dec. 10), and to pushing back in the coming policy fights, liberals must also resist the next president on the rhetorical level. On the level of words and themes, images and memes.
And on this level, we simply have got to do better.
As a start, and right now, we need ways to refer to the apparently next president without using his actual last name. Why? Because his name is his brand, which we do not want to help market. His name is also part of his strategy to dominate—the very word suggests that he ranks above everyone else. In other words, the name itself is authoritarian.
Despite this, a purported billionaire just convinced millions of working-class Americans that he was on their side—or at least more on their side than the Democratic candidate.
How did that happen? In part because we didn’t push back and show the falsity of it all. We need a way to refer to this doofus that shows why he must be resisted.
Now there are smart ways to do this—smart in the sense of being effective. And there are ways that are not so effective.
Names like cheetohead or tRump are resistive because they are derogatory—they reject the man. But they are weak, as rhetoric, because they merely mock. They do nothing to persuade. They carry no message about why our next president should be resisted.
“Manhattan Mussolini” might be useful later—when it becomes more obvious that the term Mussolini fits. Don’t get me wrong—I think it does. But at the moment, it may seem a bit over the top. At least to the 60 million people who voted for him.
“Don the Con” is better. It is memorable, because it rhymes. It also belittles our next president by using a very short version of his first name, which he apparently hates. But it’s good mostly because it shows why he must be resisted: he’s a con artist. He has deceived people before, and he will again. His campaign was the ultimate fraud, and buyer’s remorse is already beginning to set in.
But a con artist does not necessarily represent the billionaire class.
So I’m looking for a moniker that quickly conveys a number of different concepts.
First, yes, the fraudulence and the lies. Like “Don the Con,” we need something that conveys the man’s fundamental inability to be truthful.
Second, we need something that goes to his purported wealth. He gives us the impression that he is part of, as Bernie put it, the billionaire class. Well, let’s use that impression against him. Apparently the White House isn’t lordly enough for the new president; he prefers Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Let’s make that point. He is going to be working for the billionaires.
Yes, Americans have always appreciated self-made men. But our next president is the very opposite. He inherited $200 million in the 1970s. That’s back when $200 million was real money. We need a moniker that reinforces the idea that our next president always had unimaginable wealth.
Third, and this is slightly different from the truthfulness point above—we need something that conveys the flashy, gimcrack, style-over-substance quality that this presidency will have.
Fourth, we need something that reminds people that even the style is all wrong. Our next president has incredibly bad taste. His bad taste is part of him. He is the opposite of understated. The man thinks that the way to impress people is to be ostentatious—to blow us over with displays of wealth and power. It’s economic royalism, and it’s fundamentally unAmerican in so many ways, including the stylistic.
So how about this: gold-plated president.
Not immediately impressed? Work with me a little. Here’s why it makes sense.
First, without explicitly doing so, it immediately calls to mind the famous gold-plated toilet. That in and of itself is a powerful image of money misused—and more generally of how we should think of this purported president.
Second, it gives us a powerful way of characterizing his hair. This guy gold-plates his own head.
Third, it puts him firmly on the side of the billionaires. There’s a difference between gilt and gold plating. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anything gold plated in my life. Gold plating is expensive. And it carries a whiff of Russian-style kleptocracy.
Fourth, it emphasizes that beneath the gold plating, there is something much less valuable. We could think up all sorts of names for it, but let’s just call it dross. You only gold-plate dross—something that itself is not gold. And it is becoming very obvious that this incoming administration is dross. It is the very opposite of untarnished and incorruptible. Hence the need to pretend otherwise—in other words, to gold-plate it, to distract people, to hide what lies underneath. (Emphasis on lies.)
There is a possible downside to gold-plated president and that is the fact that it uses the word “president.” In this way, it reinforces his status, and accords him some power. So I am open to an edit here. At the same time it may be useful to point out that this guy is becoming our president—which of course is the problem. Perhaps the phrase gold-plated president is a call to action.
So…I offer gold-plated president up for your feedback and improvement. See what you think of it, what you make of it, and what uses you find for it.
