“You know I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.”
Paul Simon, You Can Call Me Al

Let’s admit at the outset that Donald Trump is the most over-covered subject in journalism today, and everything said about him – he’s entertaining, he’s got moxie, he’s the “Reality Show” candidate – is by the day getting emptier and older than 60 Minutes.
It’s still worth looking at his candidacy through an historical lens and, since he’s a baby boomer, a ‘60s historical lens.

Because we might be witnessing the beginning of the Donald Trump presidency. To see why we face a possible President Trump in 2016, let’s look back at the annus incredibilis and horribilis of the ’60s, 1968.

That year saw the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and the police riots of Columbia and the Chicago Convention, and it predictably yielded a tumultuous Presidential race that was the first one to have all the gonzo, third-party, and squeaker vote-total aspects that have characterized the elections of this millennium.

On the gonzo end was candidate Pigasus the Pig, nominated by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the Youth International Party (Yippies). Granted he was a boss-selected candidate who pretty much did what his backers told him to (their slogan being “If we can’t have him as President we can have him for breakfast”). But as Hoffman pointed out, he was the only candidate who said the same thing in every state; he demanded to be brought to candidate foreign policy briefings; and he bravely endured both an attempted (if theatrical) assassination and a riotous simultaneous nomination and arrest at the Chicago Civic Center, part of the clampdown on dissent that infamously went on that whole Convention week.

On the less funny side was George Wallace, the former segregationist governor of Alabama, and his American Independent Party run for President. Wallace downplayed his segregationist side (which, to his credit, he would recant at the end of his life in an African American church), pushed over and over for “law and order,” inveighed against liberal “guideline writers” micromanaging local affairs (his one decent point), and memorably stated that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Republican and Democratic candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, fought it out in a nasty down-to-the-wire election with Nixon winning by one of the narrowest margins in history. Among the elements of his victory were a kinder, gentler “law and order” campaign, an appeal to the “silent majority,” and a plan to end the Vietnam War that he claimed had to stay a secret so he wouldn’t interfere with President Johnson and the peace talks (while his people were interfering with and sabotaging the peace talks).

If any of this outrageous gonzo-ness and successful exploitation of a panicked public, skullduggery, and conmanship sound familiar to you, then you can appreciate why the next Presidential inauguration may be huuuuge.

Trump began his campaign with the kind of outrageous bullshit statements Abbie Hoffman used to pull all the time — with the exception that Hoffman did it for laughs, civil disobedience, empowering the poor and minorities, and shocking the public into a higher awareness. Trump instead made an awful accusation that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals sent here by the Mexican government. That lost him some business, but won him his following.

Like all good cons, it had a grain of truth in it. The Mexican narcotraficantes do regularly penetrate the border to maintain their American market, from marijuana in L.A. to meth in the Midwest. Not that the Mexican government sends them, not that they’re immigrants, and the immigrants now are from Central America anyway, not Mexico, but what the hell. His bullshit got him the attention and support he needed on a hot-button issue.

Then he played the third-party insurgent threat – brilliantly – to cow the Republican Party into not unifying against his candidacy, while running, in effect, a third-party insurgency campaign from within the party. And it has a lot of the Wallace points. “Not a dime’s worth of difference” becomes that both of the principal candidates, Bush and Clinton, are terrible, TERRIBLE. Law and order and implicit racism become the anti-immigrant rhetoric, pushing those old political panic buttons about macro- and micro-home invaders. Attacks on “guideline writers” becomes “our leaders are incompetent,” but don’t worry, the negotiator-in-chief will put together a group of “killers” to work it all out.

Finally come all the Nixon elements, the use of the term “silent majority” (which Trump wisely does not associate with its user), the secret plan to stop ISIS, the hyper-controlled campaign stops, complete with unceremonious evictions of the too obstreperously Hispanic.

The big difference? Trump is a hell of an extemporaneous speaker, pulling off rhythmic riffs that fall between motivational speaking and standup comedy without jokes – and like a veteran of the standup circuit, he knows how to handle the hecklers. And that leads to his biggest strength; he’s the entertainer-in-chief, the Reality Show Candidate, but not in the way the pundits say.

The essence of the reality show is a world where there is no team in I. Any teamwork or alliances are preludes to betrayals, and the one who betrays best wins – and there can be only one winner. The thought that you could, to use Trump’s slogan, “make America great again” with that philosophy is an obscenity; it’s a prescription for anarchy and chaos.

Yet people love it on tv to the point they may embrace it in political life, with Trump as both Number One and the boss. And with that they’ll also embrace that the game is rigged. In year two of The Apprentice it came down to a serviceman and a young woman from Harvard. Trump discarded all pretense of a fair competition and used everything but an RPG to blast the young woman off the stage. No big news here: reality show fans know that reality shows are part contest part con — and love it anyway. All that matters is the vicarious enjoyment of people’s psychological destruction and the victory of Number One they can also vicariously share in, the entertainment at all costs, the paying no attention to the men behind the curtain — and that can be a prelude to a “reality show” government of cruelty, lies, and video violence. Or at least W Redux: a secret cabal of “killers” planning energy, business, and international policy, and a Number One President who wants it all simplified so that he in the most simple and one-man terms can be the decider.

So do the ‘60s yield any clues as to how to campaign against Trump? Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Nixon, almost won when he finally cut himself loose from President Johnson’s failed Vietnam War policies and became his own man. But he did it too late. Since then we’ve learned that candidates divided against themselves, like McCain or Gore, practically defeat themselves. Which means that Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker have probably already lost, since they’re stumbling all over themselves to go against their own instincts and follow Trump’s lead (Bush clutzily using the term “anchor babies,” Walker even suggesting an America-Canada anti-immigrant wall).

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is an excellent issues-oriented candidate who could never win a general election as an avowed socialist.
As for Hillary Clinton, no matter how well she speaks or how smart her policies, she’s unfortunately beginning to look more like the ‘60s Great Prevaricator than Trump does. There’s the carefully controlled campaign appearances (an aspect of Nixon’s victory pointed out by Joe McGinniss in his The Selling of The President); her campaign opening speech on Roosevelt Island was in New York’s least accessible and most restrictable location. There’s the perpetual sense she and her staff are up to underhanded stuff against her rivals, most recently in the control of the number of Democratic debates. There’s the secrecy, especially on issues like the Keystone Pipeline, and the claim that that secrecy is for government-related reasons. And there’s a scandal right at the campaign stage, aggravated by Nixonian disdainful initial dismissals of the problem and a “modified limited hangout” release of the emails at her own speed. It’s doubtful her email problems will amount to a Watergate, unless they involve secrecy about what happened in Bengazi – and trailers for a new Bengazi action movie by one of Hollywood’s most conservative directors, Michael Bay, hint that the movie will in part be about major conflict between the CIA and State Department and may turn Bengazi into a live scandal all over again.

How about Vice-President Biden? Putting up a man who radiates integrity and older-style liberate-moderate values against a man with a background of deception and wildness might work. But of course that depends on whether Biden is physically and mentally ready for it. His hesitation is reminiscent of the ultimate noncandidacy of the late Governor Mario Cuomo.

Perhaps the only hope is to follow the advice of a great writer of the 1950s and the 1960s, William Burroughs. When asked the purpose of writing, he replied “Wise up the marks.” Burroughs certainly did his bit to save marks from con men. His novel Naked Lunch was in part about the con of tough principled cops busting evil drug dealers, showing in comically surreal ways that the narc and the user are part of the same system. His articles for Rolling Stone were the first big expose of Scientology.

So let’s end with Burroughs’s advice. Trump 2015 is, in essence, a con man. Let’s leave aside the fact that he did build on his inherited wealth, and at a time when no one had faith in New York, he at least believed in the city enough to make a killing in real estate; since then he’s built an impressive (at least at Christmas) Trump Tower, done a great job renovating Trump Wollman Rink, and tried to make casinos work for poor old Atlantic City.

But now he’s building an edifice of false promises and utterly destructive lies. His deport-all-the-undocumented plan is either impossible or ruinous or a prescription for America becoming a pariah state with its own intifada. His tactics of negotiate deals and sue as a backup when they go wrong may work with other American high rollers, banks eager to be in business with him, and his poor vendors and partners, but will not work with China or Iran or Daesh/ISIS. He says “I was never bankrupt”: of course not, the corporations he established and controlled went bankrupt, and he may very well try to shape the economy in that personally distanced but overleveraged fashion, since he knows no other way. His online real estate school has been the subject of lawsuits accusing the school of shortchanging students with sham courses and worthless diplomas.

So Fox stop scowling, MSNBC stop smirking, and CNN — stop being CNN. The task now for the media is to relentlessly wise up the marks, for the marks in this case are the American electorate. It may not work. It might just be that the Obama administration, on the way to winding down two wars, guiding an economic recovery, addressing climate change, and giving us some kind of health care, also gave us a heavy dose of patience, complexity, and responsibility. That’s no fun. Now the country wants to go on a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Now it’s time, as one pundit pointed out, for our own Silvio Berlusconi taking our country down the road of corruption and overspending and lies, but with plenty of hype and pizzazz and maybe some American bunga bunga parties for that Tinder crowd.

If Trump takes it all, we’re the taken, and it will take more than a very special set of skills to get us back.