"Trumputin." Flickr/Chris Piascik. Some rights reserved.The current media frenzy over the darling of the Republican anti-establishment, Donald Trump, seems to fit particular American stereotypes about our political propensities. We Americans like a scrapper, a stubby, come-from-behind, up-by-the-bootstraps, half-Rocky Balboa, half-Horatio Alger amalgam of anti-establishment and egalitarian tropes. In this iteration, Donald Trump is the self-made man that he wants to appear as, and we appreciate how compulsively he weaves this ostentatious narrative.
Trump speaks truth to power, all the while a powerful and wealthy figure himself, the apotheosis of the schismatic dualities that we appreciate in our public figures.
But seeing Trump as an isolated, ‘American’ phenomenon may miss the point and tell less than half the story about the global trends played out in his candidacy. Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 – and especially since the rash of fiscal crises in Europe, the aftershocks of which are now being coupled with the refugee problems of mass exodus from the Middle East – European politics has become more tempestuous and its politicians more unruly.
