Why Trump Won, or WreckConPense

January 5, 2025: It’s the anniversary of Trump’s attempt to wreck the Capitol; a good time to reflect on how he, the Chaos-Bringer of his last time up, could have gotten reelected.

There are a lot of explanations flying around for how Trump won the election; that storm is sort of dying down, but I’m still in shock every time I bump up against the fact that slightly over half the voters thought electing a convicted felon found culpable of sexual assault is a good idea to lead the country.

Because of that shock, I’m still mulling over one of the reasons I discovered for why he won. It has to do with the male love of destroying things.

I have it myself; when I’m angry I break things. It feels great even though afterwards I feel foolish. But the act of breaking something is high-spirited and is a way of feeling this divine afflatus, as it were, shrieking through you.

In construction, I’ve always loved the demo part of the job—where we go in with sledge hammers, sawzalls, hammers, pry bars, chisels, pieces of 2×4 used as wedges—anything to break, split, shatter, smash, and reduce to rubble the constructed house we’re been hired to renovate. It’s noisy and dangerous and fun feeling yourself break things, and I’ve come to think of it particularly as a male mystery.

Just as there are male mysteries—destruction, wandering off, being restless—there are, of course, female mysteries—containment, awareness, aesthetic sensibility. These are essential archetypal realities, not limited to physical sexuality nor even gender.

However, having read several articles about a desire on the part of some voters to tear the whole governmental apparatus down, I was reflecting on the pleasure of doing so. To investigate how prevalent the impulse is, I asked my freshman seminar one day (13 males and 2 females)—asked the young men offhandedly one morning before class if they liked to
destroy things.

“Oh, yeah!” they cried with one voice and without hesitation. Their eyes sparkled and their shoulders flexed as if ready to tear something—anything—down.

And there you have it. No matter how perfect and right and decent Harris was—and she was on many levels—she could not speak to the male desire to destroy.

We all have the sometime feeling—as did my 95 -year-old father some years ago, that the system is so messed up that it needs to be torn down in order to rebuild. Harris could not talk that way, and so she was not trusted by my male students, much to my shock. I was bewildered by their inability to trust Harris and their willingness, if not to trust Trump (he the great con man extraordinaire and emblem of US character) at least to believe him and to like him when he wrecks standards, splits the foundations of our society pitting sides against each other, destroys the language, shatters expectations, and reduces to rubble the structures of government.

It’s, of course, a disastrously misguided impulse, since naturally Mr. T will in no way wreck the capitalist system that really would entail wrecking society; he’ll build it up, set it loose, benefit personally from it, and walk away from the government he’s wrecked.

We’ll be left in the rubble to do the cleanup. Because after the demolition of a job, there’s the slow heavy work of clean up, putting broken sticks into bags, and hauling them out to the dumpster.

But if we can’t figure out a way, in our oh-too-polite society wherein the main impulse seems to be not to offend anyone, to accommodate our love of destruction, if we don’t we’ll go on like this until we destroy everything. The spirit of tearing a part down can easily become an out of control instinct to tear it all down, until out of our rage and impotence
there is nothing left but a mess.

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