Molly Crabapple has been following the US presidential nominations. Here, the writer and illustrator lifts the lid on a lurid campaign of Russian hackers and tangerine demagogues, body armour and BDSM.
Over the last few years, the world has had a torrid love affair with fascism. In , when more than a million humans fled poverty and war for Europe , Europeans fled to the far right. The provincial US media might paint Donald Trump as a new type of candidate, birthed by reality TV and social media, but one look at the global zeitgeist would fix their illusions.
Tangerine Mussolini builds nothing himself. Not campaigns and not skyscrapers. He merely lends his face. A mix of socialism and nationalism, if you will. More than anything, Trump voters feel aggrieved. Some of the grievances are legitimate. Globalisation, backed by both democratic and republican elites, has decimated vast swaths of the US midwest β replacing family supporting factory jobs with precarious, humiliating work at Walmart.
However, these legitimate fears coexist with talk-radio hallucinations. One Trump voter I met in Cleveland β a courteous, wholesome truck driver β told me that Democrats were mass importing undocumented Mexican immigrants to illegally vote.
Another, a blonde woman selling Trump shirts, told me her husband feared for her safety at the Republican national convention , and demanded she carry a pistol and wear body armour. Some are Islamic State. Others are the work of broken, poisoned men.
