I seem to recall a description of Trump, back in his first term, as “our first Central Asian president”, though when I search it now the only hits returned are to my own use of the phrase. If in fact someone else said it first, and then disappeared from the record, this was surely a riff on an earlier description of Bill Clinton as “our first Black president”, a distinction somehow earned by playing saxophone, with his “cool” shades on, for Arsenio — and also, I suppose, by being Southern and affable, and by proving himself again and again, when stumping in his 36’’ Haggars at the finest soul-food establishments throughout the country, to be a member in good standing of the “clean-plate club”.
The closest Trumpian equivalent to Bubba’s well-timed display of New Jack Swing fluency is surely his cameo appearance in Azerbaijani post-Soviet gala-pop artist and gangster-industrialist scion Emin Agalarov’s “In Another Life (feat. Donald Trump and Miss Universe ‘13)” (2013). We can deplore the excesses of the Russiagate accusations that dominated our news headlines for so much of the later part of that same decade. It remains however the case that what we are seeing in this video is profoundly, essentially un-American, utterly incompatible with our Whitmanian spirit. You could know already, from the support that the future president lent to this gross display of Eurasianist pop kitsch, that something was deeply rotten in our Republic. Bad taste, in sufficiently concentrated dosage, can be as great a threat to our American way of life as any subversive ideology…
