Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The Fourteenth Canto of Dante’s “Inferno” introduces the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, the ring of burning sand that grips and torments those who were violent against God, Art and Nature. On the morning after his interminable State of the Union address, there was little doubt that President Donald Trump is on his way to the ring of hot sand where no one escapes. To judge from the color of his face, maybe he already buries his head, like an ostrich, in a bucket of that sizzling sand. His credentials are all in order. He has broken enough Commandments (remember “bear false witness”?) to cancel any hope of reconciliation with God, and anyone who flatly denies global warming and the climate-poisoning of fossil fuels is the archenemy of Nature and of Life itself.
But perhaps it’s his violent sins against Art, against the aesthetic possibilities of human intelligence and insight, that explain his rapid, unlikely rise to the summit of power in 21st century America. It’s well known that Trump’s taste in art and architecture runs to ridiculous glitter and grandiosity, to an overdose of pointless gilding that has made a joke of the Oval Office and will soon overwhelm the White House. (Has anyone referenced Apuleius’ 2nd-century novel “The Golden Ass”?) By seizing, renaming and now virtually eliminating the Kennedy Center, he has effectively banished high culture from the nation’s capital. He loves TV, avoids books. Even his favorite sports — the bogus beefcake ballet of professional wrestling, the grisly bloodbath of mixed martial arts—-are the ones attended by the lowest percentage of Ph.Ds.
I was intrigued by a dialogue from the opinion section of The New York Times, published under the headline, “Trump brings out the worst in everyone.” It was the columnist Bret Stephens, the most conservative of the paper’s regular pundits, who wrote, after the Kennedy Center debacle, “It gets at a part of what so many of us find so loathsome about Trump: the aggressive tastelessness, the suffocating tackiness, the absence of class … I miss the days when not just the Kennedys and the Obamas but also the Reagans and Bushes upheld standards of taste and decorum in Washington. What we have instead is the D.C. version of the Beverly Hillbillies.”
Touché. How “suffocating tackiness” would have mortally wounded poor Donald, if his keepers ever let him see The New York Times. His whole life has been a struggle — a successful one, in his terms — against the snobs who laughed at him when he tried to climb New York’s social ladder and kept slipping, rung after rung. Those of us who were young in the city when he crawled onto the scene remember that every disc jockey had a routine that mocked him. In school I knew a couple of people from families prominent in the same profession as the Trumps, commercial real estate, and when you asked one if his family ever did business with Donald or his father Fred, he’d give you this incredulous look as if you’d asked him if he ate Rocky Mountain oysters.
Class, of course, isn’t just good taste and social graces. It’s also about an entrenched class system that Americans always deny but manage to maintain. There are always people who know which fork to use, what not to say at dinner and how to pronounce the name of the wine. The false populists who support Trump’s MAGA movement call them “the elite,” and to their number they’ve recently added nearly everyone with expertise or a decent education. Donald Trump occupies a peculiar place in this undeclared class war. Born into lots of money, no doubt spoiled rotten as a child, he was unfortunately slow-witted and socially awkward, and his parents failed to offer him any of the social cues that might have helped him climb the ladder. What’s unique about Trump is that a profound inferiority complex, forced upon him by his betters, was combined with an absurdly exaggerated sense of personal destiny. Unlike most of the tacky and tasteless, fated to be always on the outside looking in, he was a narcissist who could never accept his exclusion from the ranks of the elite. Loneliness curdled into hatred, and his life became a tireless battle to put those smirking bastards in their place.
The great irony is that the mental illness that grips him is the root of his political success. It turned out that a disturbing number of his fellow Americans hate everyone they perceive as “better” than they are. And Trump, who in spite of his unlimited privileges turned out as tasteless and clueless as the least of them, has become their champion, the captain of their team. The unprecedented polarization of the American electorate, the redness and blueness of these gerrymandered maps we see, confirms a nasty recent trend in the national psychology. Instead of trying to improve themselves to compete successfully, tens of millions of the self-styled left-behinds choose to loathe and persecute the high-achieving.
This is the heart of MAGA, the new anti-meritocracy. Donald Trump, old and weird and shameless, is the beneficiary of the new order, rather than its creator. His greatest ambition is to put his name on everything, like a 10-year-old graffiti artist.
And we wake up one Sunday morning and find that he has stamped his name on history — the American president who launched the war that ended it all? The bombing of Iran and the murder of its chief of state — cheered on, no less, by the same Bret Stephens who calls Trump “tacky” — has placed half the world at the mercy of our matchless arsenal and the most incompetent government that ever controlled one. If a planet-torching nuclear war results, can we lay the blame on those self-doubting haters who voted for Donald Trump in 2024?
The one thing this president learned from his disastrous first term, and its horrendous conclusion with the Capitol riot, is that you can’t hire anyone burdened with pride, integrity or shame and expect that person to obey you blindly. So now the executive branch, which blithely ignores Congress, is an anti-meritocracy of handpicked intellectual and moral microorganisms like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Kash Patel. A world war directed by Trump and Hegseth would place loyal Americans in an impossible bind. We can’t root against American armed forces, against our own children and neighbors, but …? It brings to mind a quotation from an American genius of another century, Mark Twain: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”
How did it come to this? Each atrocity, each gaucherie — the invasion of Minneapolis, Alligator Alcatraz, the incinerated fishing boats, the president reposting a video portraying Barack and Michele Obama as monkeys — seems to be followed immediately by something worse. I watched Rachel Maddow on TV and found myself feeling sorry for her. Keeping track of the Trump administration on a daily basis is like covering automobile fatalities, with videos.
There’s no clear candidate for the worst of the worst, for the rock bottom of Trumpworld as historians will remember it. It depends, I guess, on your personal taste. But it would be hard to imagine a more misguided, irresponsible, almost homicidal stroke of misgovernment than the one Trump committed when he placed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in charge of the nation’s health. Kennedy is a severely damaged, conspiracy-nurtured crank whose vaccination policies have already kept morticians busy. Is there any limit? My friend Roy Blount, the multimedia humorist, publishes a Substack column where he often explores the jungle that is MAGA. But there was an item in his column a few weeks ago that I refused to believe.
“Surely not, Roy?” I emailed him immediately. He replied that it was true, unless the internet is totally unreliable. Blount was quoting from an interview with RFK Jr. a few years ago, where he answers a question about one of his unorthodox theories. “Afraid of germs?” scoffed Kennedy. “I used to lick cocaine off toilet seats.”
Taste?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” published in November 2025.
Email delennis1@gmail.com.
