Joe Hildebrand: Trump did nothing to embarrass America’s cultural and political gatekeepers again – they did it to themselves

Even after a decade of bitter experience, all the smartest guys in the room just can’t figure Donald Trump out, writes Joe Hildebrand.

It says something about the greatest nation on Earth that the entire collective wisdom of the American elite is now officially dumber than Donald Trump.

They ignored him, they laughed at him, they sneered at him and they even tried to jail him. And then he played them all like a bunch of rubes.

That he did this even once is embarrassing enough. That he is on the verge of doing it again is a scarlet letter of shame for America’s cultural and political gatekeepers.

But the most embarrassing part is that Trump didn’t really do it at all. They did it to themselves.

The decades-long rise of the urbane upper-middle class left, which coalesced around indignation, identity politics and the policing of language, is nauseating enough.

Demonstrators protested outside of Manhattan Criminal Court as Donald Trump attended the first day of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs. But the urbane upper-middle class left failed to connect with the former president’s greatest strength – he connects. Picture: Adam Gray/AFP

But until the recent rise of right-wing populism it was effectively cloaked by a cloistered political class in which governments politely changed hands among broadly like-minded people.

Ironically these are often the kinds of people who latterly lionise Labor Right titans like Hawke and Keating but at the time were railing against them at anti-uranium rallies and inner-west dinner parties. Trust me, I was there.

Then in a fateful juncture of the space-time continuum, Vietnam-era Boomers and #metoo-era millennials collided with the birth of social media and the age of outrage was born.

Suddenly all the privilege and pontification was no longer confined to dinners and demos. It was in all the places, all the time and for all the world to see.

And it didn’t look good.

The pet obsessions of this new wave of progressive crusaders were for mainstream citizens either irrelevant or openly hostile.

Workers struggling to put food on the table next week had little regard for climate targets next decade. Meanwhile, migrants with traditional social values found little traction with the #freethenipple movement.

At every crossroad, the concerns of the most genuinely poor and disadvantaged deviated from the causes championed by those who once claimed to care for them.

Did the Black Lives Matter movement actually do anything to improve black lives in the United States? If anything, it did more for Donald Trump’s re-election.

Did the Voice campaign actually improve the lot of Indigenous lives in Australia? If anything, it improved the lot of Peter Dutton.

It is not that these causes were unworthy – I was an increasingly despondent champion of the latter – it is the fact that they were prosecuted by people so utterly disconnected from the great majority that made them such an abject failure.

This brings us back to Trump, who appears likely to again become the President of the United States through no real fault of his own.

Throughout this campaign – as throughout the last one and the one before that, and his whole life – Donald Trump has done not much more than simply be Donald Trump. Bombastic, colourful, a dealmaker, a lawbreaker; crude, rude and once famously nude.

He’s not a hard guy to get a read on. But somehow, even after a decade of bitter experience, all the smartest guys in the room just can’t figure him out.

And this abject failure of mental capacity ends up spilling over into the snobbish mendacity that makes Trump everything that he is.

The strength of Trump’s campaign isn’t anything he can articulate – nor that Kamala Harris can’t articulate any policies of her own.

It is that he connects.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump hands off an order of fries after working alongside an employee during a visit to McDonald's in Pennsylvania. Picture: Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP

The high crucible of this was when Trump donned an apron to man a McDonald’s Drive-thru in Pennsylvania. He became working America incarnate.

My great Labor mate Timmy G, a high school dropout from Mascot, instantly understood the genius of it. Yet the all-too educated and enlightened commentators at MSNBC were oddly baffled.

What in the world could he be doing? they literally wondered out loud, before concluding that it was – SPOILER ALERT! – a “stunt”.

What a penetrating insight for the viewers. No shit it was a stunt, and a brilliant one. The perfect positioning of Trump handing out fries like a god in the temple of Middle America.

Trump is the ultimate showman, a political PT Barnum, and his chorus of scolds are too crushingly dopey and humourless to even see what he’s doing, let alone match it.

These are the sort of sophisticates who get fleeced by the first carny they see in Sideshow Alley and spend the rest of the night still throwing rings.

It is so mind-blowingly stupid and sad that it has to stop. The broken brains of the posh progressive left need to be melted down into some more practical purpose.

The transcendental truth here is that it is not Trump who is destroying democracy with his endless sticks and stones, and whom democracy itself may well reward.

It is those who have lost all touch with the actual people that democracy is supposed to serve.

Listen to The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Trump did nothing to embarrass America’s cultural and political gatekeepers again – they did it to themselves