The Liberace President
The Dallas Morning News had a profile of Stormy Daniels’ estranged mother which ends with her hoping that the news of her daughter’s affair with Trump would not hurt the President. Daniels’ mother resides in Baton Rouge, in what the paper calls a “rough neighborhood she can’t afford to leave”, hooked up to an oxygen machine. The policies of Donald Trump and the Republican party will do nothing to help Daniels’ mother. Rather, they are intent on cutting back on Medicare and Medicaid, which I assume she relies on. And yet she says, “If Mr. Trump runs four more times, I would vote for him every time. I like him. I like the way he handles things. It’s time this country is put back where it belongs — taking care of the people here instead of the people who don’t belong here.”
For some reason, the first thing that came to my mind when I read this was Liberace. For those of you too young to remember, Liberace, known as “Mr. Showmanship”, was a famous piano-playing entertainer who, despite clearly being a homosexual (although always denying it), was the one of the highest paid performers in the world from the 1950s to the 1970s. With his famous candelabra on the piano, Liberace’s shows were more than piano recitals; they were spectacles. He was enthralled with ceremony and reveled in his own luxury.
One of the more interesting features of the Liberace phenomenon was the women, old and young, that were a large part of his devoted following. As described by Darden Pyron in the book “Liberace: An American Boy”, “‘You are the man all mothers would like their sons to be,’ one woman wrote. ‘Loving and artistic, you take care of your mother. You are nice, warm, gentle, polite, considerate and still have a sense of humor.’…Liberace’s Good Son persona overlapped with that of Model Man, but this icon, in turn, conjured images, willy-nilly, of Ideal Lover. Thus, a vaguely incestuous devotion simmered behind the affection of the mother and grandmother fans.”
Of course, almost all of these women were good, Christian folk who would have been absolutely appalled if their son or their Ideal Lover was actually gay. Yet, despite Liberace’s pretty obvious homosexuality, they believed.
Yes, it was a different time when stars’ private lives were largely protected by the media but the suspension of belief in Liberace’s case was truly remarkable. In many ways, I see so many of Trump’s true believers, like Daniels’ mother, in the same way as Liberace’s groupies. There is nothing that will dissuade these people from the vision they have that this billionaire narcissist is somehow going to be the one that saves them, when all evidence shows that he is only interested in himself and cares not one whit about them. As Trump himself has stated, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still retain his popularity.
Like Liberace, where the show became secondary to his skills as a pianist, Trump has decided the show of being President is actually more important than the actual business of being President. And as long as he can keep his true believers enthralled and entertained, they will continue to believe in him. The (un)reality show must continue.
