Apr 4, 2020

REVIEW: The Man Who Skewers Presidential Numbskullery

Masterful essays take aim at the numbskullery of Trump, his hapless political opponents, and the boneheaded media warriors who flounder hopelessly in the president’s turbulent wake. Tony Sutton looks at C.J. Hopkins’ latest book, Trumpocalpse

Every political leader needs a tame biographer to weave the fine-spun words that will help create the lasting legacy of a political colossus. Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, is, I’m sure, seeking that person right now.

Whoever lands the job, I can say with certainty that it will not be C.J. Hopkins, the German-based American playwright and author who has, for the past four years, been crafting a collection of darkly satirical essays that skewer the numbskullery of Trump, his hapless political opponents, and the boneheaded warriors of the corporate media who flounder hopelessly in the president’s turbulent wake.

“Back in the summer of 2016”, writes Hopkins in the introduction to Trumpocalypse, the first volume of his Consent Factory Essays, “like most other halfway rational people, I regarded the candidacy of Donald Trump as some sadistic cosmic joke the gods were playing on anyone foolish enough to believe in American electoral politics. This was, after all, Donald Trump, the B-List celebrity billionaire buffoon who went around plastering his name on everything in big, gold, shiny, ostentatious letters … hotels, casinos, country clubs, you name it. He put his name on steaks for Christ’s sake. The man even had a fake university. His ‘candidacy’ was clearly a promotional prank. He was probably preparing to launch a line of Trump-branded condoms on QVC, or a New York Times bestseller, or something.”

Then, Hopkins, along with the rest of us, watched in astonishment on November 9, 2016 as Trump, propelled by a simplistic ‘Make America Great’ slogan that drew the votes of millions of working-class supporters – memorably described as ‘deplorables’ by his opponent Hillary Clinton – was proclaimed President of the United States, leader of the ‘free’ world.

Trump’s political opponents, seeking someone other than themselves to blame for St Hillary’s humiliating election rout, homed in on a secretive band of scheming internet-enabled Russian ne’er-do-wells.

“Apparently”, writes Hopkins, “these Russo-neo-fascists (aka the ‘Putin-Nazis’) had been lying in wait throughout the glorious eight-year Reign of Obama the Beneficent, and now, like a mega-swarm of locusts, they poured up out of their lairs en masse, took to the Internet, and unleashed a veritable blitzkrieg of silly Facebook posts, ‘discord-sowing’ Twitter memes, and other such ‘divisive’ propaganda on the minds of innocent Western consumers.

“This Putin-Nazi attack on democracy was discovered by the US Intelligence Community more or less the moment Trump won the nomination, so just as the previous attack on democracy (better known as the Global War on Terror) was winding down after fifteen years.

“The Intelligence Community alerted the media, which seamlessly switched from relentlessly flogging the ‘suddenly self-radicalized terrorist’ hysteria that they had been relentlessly flogging for several months to relentlessly flogging Putin-Nazi hysteria.

“Which is more or less where I came in.”

What followed has been a satirist’s dream: four years of unrelenting political chaos, senior government officials sacked by email, a beautiful, but still awaited, southern wall to keep marauding foreign criminals at bay, bombings, dronings, sanctions, and endless late-night and early-morning Twitter attacks on the ‘fake’ media and anyone who doesn’t swallow the Great Leader’s shameless lies about, well, almost everything.

So, who do we blame for the chaos and consternation that followed Trump’s election victory? If it’s not the Ruskies or the Chinese or the ‘fake’ media, it must be someone else…

Well, Hopkins has the answer to that:

Americans did this. They did this knowingly. They elected a completely politically unqualified, clinically narcissistic, borderline moronic, word-salad-babbling ex-game show host who boasted of ‘grabbing women by the pussy’ and was promising to build ‘a big beautiful wall’ to keep out the imaginary hordes of Mexican rapists that were storming the border.

Americans knowingly walked into their polling stations and elected this ass clown, not because they had been brainwashed by the Russians, not because they had suddenly morphed into a bunch of Hitler-loving white supremacists, but because they were utterly exasperated with the empire and its soulless ideology, and its simulation of democracy, and above all its political stooges, and they saw a chance to toss a massive stink bomb into establishment headquarters … a stink bomb by the name of Trump.

ColdType readers will already have read many of the essays in this first volume, but that shouldn’t be a barrier to buying it and future volumes (the second is due later this year) of what will almost certainly be the most incisive chronicle of the reign of the 45th President and Buffoon-in-Chief of the United States of America.

Those of us who live outside the US will also hope that Trumpocalypse finds a place on the curriculum of every American school – it might just deter kids from voting for the mindless fuckwittery that their parents polling habits have forced us all to endure.