It was Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, who first said of Hillary Clinton that she “reminds men of their first wife”, a remark aimed at Clinton when she was still first lady, and lovingly embellished over the years by Fox News pundits going on about her “nagging voice” and “shrill” delivery.
Twenty years later and it is, perhaps, a source of some amusement to note that Trump now looks like the perfect male equivalent of that archetype. If Clinton triggers first-wife fear among Trump’s male supporters then Trump, to large numbers of women in their 70s, is the guy in the hat on their sofa, the back of whose neck they’ve been staring at with loathing for the last 40 years.
By rights, Trump should have been cast long ago in the media as America’s sitcom husband writ large, part the bigoted Archie Bunker, part Homer Simpson, forever getting into fights at the check-out or telling his wife to shut up; a man with only one volume setting who will never admit he is wrong. A few years ago I was in a Long Island branch of Costco; a man in front of me threw an item in his cart and, turning to his wife, snapped: “You don’t have to like it, you just have to make it.” That guy.
It’s an aesthetic that, were male politicians reduced to type with anything like the alacrity that attends coverage of their female counterparts, might have proven more serious for Trump than all his flirtations with racism, treason and sedition, able to trigger strong negative emotions in the most conservative women.
Even without prompting, many of them are making the connection themselves. This week, I talked to a Republican in her mid-70s who said if Trump was her husband she’d yell at him not for any of the substantive things he has done wrong, but for the more general crime of making a fool of himself in public and then not backing down, an anger that clearly came from long years of some sort of tangential experience.
If New York mayor Michael Bloomberg knows a con when he sees one, then so do 75-year-old women who came of age before the passing of the US equal credit opportunity act (1974), when they had to find a male co-signer to take out a credit card in their name. These women, who may or may not call themselves feminists, who may see in Clinton a horror or a saviour, will surely look at Trump and know in their marrow and for reasons no political analyst can nail: he’s full of shit.
Uneasy street
The fleet of private SUVs that cruise around Manhattan delivering ride shares for $5 a piece have proliferated to such a degree that the city is starting to look different. Uber Pool and Via, the two lead carriers, may be cheaper than yellow cabs and not much more than the bus, but they make for a disturbing visual. As I walked around downtown this week I became aware that fully a third of the traffic was SUVs with blacked-out windows, which in the old days might have indicated a passing VIP but is now the norm for anyone wanting to cross the city in a luxury bubble. It felt like the opening of a George Saunders short story, something creepy that won’t end well for any of us.
A higher calling
Then again, perhaps that line was crossed long ago. If you sit for 10 minutes at a cafe on a busy junction of Broadway, you will see every possible accommodation of want over need. This week, it was a monk on an iPhone. There he was, robes flowing, shaven headed, walking down 72nd Street towards the subway with his phone clamped to his ear. Clearly the call to renounce worldly goods doesn’t extend to the Apple store.