Being the media-anointed presidential candidate has its downsides. Ace a few fawning interviews with Pravda and it’s easy to get overconfident. Fox News? They’re not ready for Momala!
It’s the rare straight man who can hold his own in the longhouse.
How else to explain Kamala Harris’ recent ill-considered decision to sit down with Bret Baier, who took all of five minutes to dismantle Madam Vice President’s heretofore unchallenged campaign strategy of nimbly unburdening herself from what has been?
Contrast this with her visit to “The View” last week, in which she gamely sat for an utterly forgettable hour of softball questions.
A View to a Shill
It was Harris’ seventh visit to the gyneocratic gabfest, which has long been a friendly stopover for Democrat luminaries.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden top out at 10 appearances; Barack Obama and Al Gore each have two, alongside a who’s who of Beltway Bolsheviks, like AOC (three), Pete Buttigieg (12), and Bernie Sanders (12 — so that’s why he misses all those floor votes).
Depending on who you ask, “The View” is either America’s “most important political TV show” (New York Times) or its “biggest source of misinformation” (New York Post).
Unsurprisingly, the “women of different generations, backgrounds, and views” the show purports to represent all tend to be Times readers. “Diversity is our strength! Wait, not that diversity!”
Get Donald
But any — occasional! — slips in ideological balance might be counterbalanced by the startling fact that, at the time of writing, Donald J. Trump remains the show’s most frequent political guest, being warmly received no less than 18 times since it debuted in 1997.
That all changed, of course, on November 6, 2016. Presiding over her more somber than usual gaggle, Joy Behar pledged to resist the new regime: “The only checks and balances we have are us, ‘The View,’ that’s it!”
Given the ladies’ morally vexed record of idly gossiping with the same would-be dictator they now opposed, such dissident posturing was a touch unconvincing.
Easier to believe was a later, still more chilling threat: “We’re not going anywhere; we’re going to stay right here and talk.”
Tongue-tied
Lesser men than Trump have found themselves summarily routed by women talking. Even the most intrepid “The View” guest can find himself ill prepared for the show’s volatile female climes — which can shift in an instant from the pleasant summer breeze of flirtatious chitchat to the Category 5 hurricane of an HR-mandated disciplinary hearing.
Just watch Whoopi Goldberg and Behar storm off the stage after Bill O’Reilly launches a gratuitous blitz of statistics! Or Donald Trump Jr. shrink before Goldberg’s concierge call bell and Meghan McCain’s crocodile tears, or Matt Gaetz quietly despair as his reasonably sound arguments bounce off the panel’s impenetrable carapace of self-righteousness. Even Blaze Media’s own Glenn Beck admitted the whole thing made him nervous.
So one must concede respect for lionhearted types like Trump, who has shown a willingness to charge into this most hostile of environments time after time — and no doubt would even now, should the ladies deign to have him back.
Queen of Queens
It’s true that the 45th president performs better on the hot seat than in an echo chamber; a combative atmosphere trims the flab of his digressions (what his fans now call “the Weave”).
But another reason Trump feels right at home on “The View” is that he is a ladies’ man. Not a womanizer (though he is that), but a man who thrives in the chatty, gossipy, and cutthroat milieu of women. In other words, he’s a Gemini.
Astrology aside, Trump is constitutionally a libertine: urbane, morally permissive, and, if you’ll allow me to be irreverent, a little gay.
He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (“used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring”), and his rivalry with lesbian Rosie O’Donnell remains a gem of the catty naughties social feuds. “I said to her at the theater, ‘congratulations on your failed magazine,'” he breathlessly recounted to a cackling radio host.
And who could forget his love of Andrew Lloyd Webber?
Brag hags
But Trump’s rightful status as a camp icon has been obscured by the dogged efforts to smear him as a bitter misogynist. One of our culture’s great misunderstandings is the inability to distinguish between a hater of women and a male chauvinist.
Trump is the latter. Nobody probes female psychology as keenly, if indecorously, as does an authentic chauvinist. He loves women for their nature, red in tooth and claw.
“There’s nothing I love more than women,” Trump once riffed, sounding downstream of Camille Paglia, “but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!”
Gay men used to inhabit the cultural archetype of the b****y antagonist to the fairer sex, playfully puncturing their delusions, but today one mostly hears robotic “Yas Queens” from those coconut-perfumed quarters. If anything, it’s the physique-obsessed, self-styled Hellene manosphere crowd that has assumed that function, and they revere Trump as one of their own.
It’s the rare straight man who can hold his own in the longhouse. Can you name any other Republican who could kiss Barbara on the cheek and coax Whoopi into admitting that she loves him?
Yes, sentiments have since chilled, but as with all of Trump’s feuds, his beef with the viragos of “The View” plays out with a certain kayfabe-like knowingness.
Like many gays, Trump is a skillful dramatist, obsessed with details of staging, performance, and aesthetics. Yet his theatrics are not in the service of conjuring unreality, but undermining our unreal pieties at every turn. The trickster’s flair is what makes you laugh in spite of yourself.