Among poorer Chicagoans especially, already dealing with a national cost of living crisis, there is a growing feeling of deprivation and anger, especially as the city’s requests for help from the White House go unanswered.
Repeat that enough times in a country and, as one talking head puts it, you are sitting on a powder keg. No matter that Trump himself is a man who, according to Miles Taylor (the chief of staff when Donald J arrived) wanted to create his own Putin-esque mercenary force, and who appears to be making other preparations to run the country as much as a dictatorship as possible. People can get desperate enough to want to blow things up and see where the pieces land.
“Trump’s enduring domination over the Republican party despite the insurrection is the greatest riddle I have ever encountered,” says Moore early on. But there are moments when his tone suggests at least a possible partial solution to that riddle. He refers to the “Trump circus”, he reels in disbelief at a young, Black Trump voter, instead of fully engaging with her, and seems baffled as to how people can be taken in by him, rather than asking what they are responding to and why.
It all makes me want to ask – don’t you yourself, in some deep, buried part of your brain, understand the appeal? The longing to see what could happen? Isn’t it the same primeval urge that makes us want to stand on cliff edges? What if that fascination with extremes and flirtation with destruction was not tempered by being a citizen with much to lose? What if it was coupled with a far from irrational feeling that whatever does happen couldn’t be much worse for you and that there is a chance it may make things a bit better, at least in the short term? Do none of the Trumpers, none of the angry Chicagoans, have a point? If liberal orthodoxy and arrogance have played a part in making people feel unheard and disempowered, should programmes like Moore’s not try extra hard to avoid that themselves? No one wants to shorten the fuse on the powder keg.
