‘Trump is the big, stupid bully at the back of the classroom’

The right-wing satirist PJ O’Rourke voted for Hillary, the second worst choice for America.

PJ O’Rourke in Sydneylast year. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

PJ O’Rourke was unconvinced by President Donald Trump’s more restrained tone in his speech to US congress address this week.

“He was at his moderate best,” the veteran right-wing satirist says. “But oddly enough I covered your last election and I saw Nigel Farage at his reasonable best. So, you know, everybody’s sane from time to time.”

The self-styled “Republican Party reptile” is still in shock from finding himself voting for Hillary Clinton. “My hand quivered. Marking the ballot was one of the hardest things that I have ever done. I would have willingly instead gone out and shovelled a mile-long driveway from New Hampshire snows.”

In his new book he suggests that to call Clinton robotic “is an insult to androids” but “better the devil you know than the devil who knows nothing”. He voted for her because she was the “second-worst thing that could happen to America”. The worst thing happened in the form of “the big, stupid bully at the back of the classroom”. He beat a candidate who was the class swot with “her husband’s grasp of minutiae but there it stops. She is that person who had her Monday’s homework done on Friday night”.

“It really is absolutely ugly,” he says of Trump’s presidency. The election was a “rebellion” against perceived elites — political, business, media and institutional.

Liberals should not blame others for the rise of Trump. “No one is without their blame. The leftist side of America has been working for 80 years to build a bigger and more powerful central government and then there is shock and surprise when some idiot gets control of the thing.”

He has not met Trump. “Nor do I particularly wish to. I know a lot of people who know him. At best they would say he’s capable of charm. Their verdict pretty much accords with what we see: a person of enormous self-absorption, a bully at worst, a noodge at best.”

Noodge? “A nice Yiddish word meaning somebody who is always elbowing you in the ribs to do something.”

Bill Clinton was a narcissist but the new President “takes it to a clinical level. All politicians are high-functioning narcissists. Now we’ve got one who is a high-­dysfunctioning narcissist.”

O’Rourke, 69, is in his barn office at his home in New Hampshire and says he is examining a manual on mental disorders that lists 11 indicators of narcissistic personality disorder. “Yeah he’s got them,” he says. “I’m sort of scared to look at ‘sociopath’.”

As a journalist, O’Rourke says he wants to give Trump 100 days in power before he properly arrives at a verdict. Many presidencies are chaotic in their early days.

“The whole first two years of (Ron­ald) Reagan’s presidency was extremely divisive and bitter.”

O‘Rourke’s humorous style and strong libertarian streak in his 18 books have not always endeared him to mainstream Republicans. “He’s kind of a spoiled rich kid,” he says of Trump.

“He’s possessed of a certain peasant cunning. It’s an intelligence unconnected to intellect. A dubiously successful businessman. Very successful at branding.”

“He is such an American type. He doesn’t drink but he is the guy on the end bar stool between you and the men’s room. He is that loudmouth, and some of the things he says are funny, some are even true, but there is so much that he says — and he never shuts up — that you feel like going outside to take a piss, rather than brave the end of the bar. He’s more recognisable to Americans, and probably to a lot of Americans therefore less scary.”

The US may be divided but the divisions should be put in historical context. “The civil war, of course, being the example. You know, your civil war was an example of populism getting out of control too, and that didn’t work out all that well.”

The jokes stop when the conversation turns to the ban on refugees and travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the US. How does he feel about it? “Like shit! Did we learn nothing from the 20th century? America did the same kind of thing — loads, loads worse — with the Jewish refugees from Europe after it became clear that Hitler wasn’t kidding about wiping out an entire religion. We turned away boatloads of them. I mean, it was just absolutely horrifying. We took the rich and talented ones, you know, as best we could. But that left the ordinary guy and his family.”

He is alarmed by plans for increased deportations of illegal immigrants to Mexico. “It’s just absolutely tragic for them. Look at the Latino population of the US. They’re good Catholics, they’re family people, they’re hardworking. What possible objection could you have?”

He has driven the length of the border with Mexico and is sceptical about the proposed “great wall”.

“The terrain is incredible and really, really difficult and it’s ­pretty well cordoned off already. I mean, I suppose you could spend all the money in the world. All it will benefit is the Mexican ladder industry.”

Trump’s positive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin are “strange to say the least”. The attraction appears to be “the strongman bond. They recognise each other as like-types”.

This week the former president George W. Bush said “we all need answers” on contacts between Trump’s team and the Russian government, an intervention O’Rourke regards as “amazing and very much against the Bush tradition. I have a good friend who is a good friend of his. And ­George W. told my friend about a phone call he had with (Barack) Obama after Obama had taken office. And the gist of the phone call was: ‘You’re never going to hear anything from me and my dad, it’s your thing now. We had the burden when we had it, and the burden is yours now. But watch out for Jimmy Carter.’ ”

I wonder how long Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary who has been lampooned on Saturday Night Live, will last. “Not as long as Trump.”

Excluding certain major news organisations from press briefings is “pretty ridiculous, isn’t it? That’s like excluding the cute girls from the beauty contest.”

There is, however, an “icky kernel of truth” in the view of Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, that the media is the opposition party. “They are your adversary because ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.

“They’re always looking for trouble. On the other hand, sometimes they’re your co-conspirators. There was that awful moment at the beginning of the Obama administration with constant reports of him walking across water.”

There have been suggestions, rejected by Trump, that Bannon, the former head of the right-wing Breitbart website, is really calling the shots in the White House. “Bannon is the intellectual force of the world’s least intellectual presidency. So I’m not sure he’s my main worry.”

The Times