The End of Childhood
Photograph Source: Photo by Rene Bernal
Donald Trump has always struck me as a repulsive figure. Not only because he is a political symptom of the terminal stage of cancer in American society, but also because for years he served as its television billboard. A man who managed to turn banality and arrogance into a full-fledged ideology.
Long before he would transform himself into a messianic figure for the American right, Trump was the creator of one of the most grotesque pedagogies of modern capitalism: the reality show The Apprentice. It was, in essence, a kind of prototype for the Balkan reality spectacles—only with golden elevators and Manhattan skylines in the background. In this spectacle, a group of hapless contestants competed to sell whatever could be sold—from bananas and plastic trinkets to real estate—simply to avoid the moment when His All-Successful Majesty Trump, seated at an enormous table like a corporate sultan, would cut them down with the famous verdict: “You’re fired!”
One of them has remained particularly vivid in my memory—a man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying that dull, sorrowful look of someone who already suspects he is merely a prop in someone else’s performance. With something close to religious devotion, he explained to Trump that he had never read a single book in his life except Trump’s own—How to Get Rich. Or How to Become Rich. Or perhaps How to Become Trump If You Are Not Trump. Something along those lines. The scene was so perfectly grotesque that it could have served as a textbook illustration of the entire cultural model Trump was selling to America—and to the world.
And that, in truth, was the main reason for my disgust. Not because he is rich—capitalism, after all, is full of wealthy people, and some of them even manage to go through life without turning into caricatures of their own offshore accounts—but because for years he preached one of the most morally grotesque pseudo-philosophies the modern world has managed to produce: the idea that the ordinary person need not think too much, nor ask too many questions about the nature of the order in which he lives. It is enough, according to this doctrine, to learn how to step over one’s fellow human beings more efficiently, more quickly, and more ruthlessly; perhaps then, one day, he too might approach the blessed state of living a life resembling that of Mr. Trump.
And, it must be admitted—he succeeded.
A man whose fortune rested largely upon inherited wealth managed, in America’s self-proclaimed age of “debunking all myths,” to sell himself as a kind of urban mythic hero: an anonymous striver who supposedly began his billionaire career by selling newspapers on the street, then—in the finest tradition of American fairy tales—“borrowed” his first million and built an empire from it. This carefully staged persona soon began parading through popular culture: from cameo appearances in Home Alone to guest spots in television series such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he was presented as a kind of benevolent, slightly eccentric, but fundamentally likable billionaire.
And in the finale of that series—if you are obedient enough, agile enough, and ruthless enough—you too might win The Apprentice and fulfill your American dream.
But in truth, Trump—and the entire Trumpist dream, even in its Zionist-evangelical interpretative key—is perhaps best summarized by a single line he delivers while once again playing himself in the film The Little Rascals (1994). Appearing as the father of the wealthy boy Waldo, he utters the following sentence:
“You’re the best son money can buy.”
In that one sentence lies the entire catechism of Trumpist civilization. Everything can be bought. Sons and daughters. Friendships. Elections. Morality. Truth.
Only in real life the matter turned out to be somewhat more… practical. Trump’s long-time business associate Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, did not travel the world—particularly through its poorer regions, and quite notably through parts of the Balkans—buying boys and girls so that someone might adopt them as sons and daughters. No. He bought them as sexual slaves. And, as we now know—and this is no longer some fringe “conspiracy theory,” but a matter surrounded by substantial and well-documented suspicion—also for the various satanic rituals of those who had successfully climbed to the top of the pyramid of the Trumpist dream.
And when all of this is placed in a broader context, the picture becomes even clearer. Through his unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu—the director of what has become the near-ritual destruction of tens of thousands of children in Gaza—through spectacular geopolitical acts such as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, or the notion that an ancient Iranian civilization might be “disciplined” by bombing—once again over the bodies of children—Trump has accomplished something that no American president before him had managed to do so openly.
He has, in the end, stripped bare the myth of the “American Dream.”
That is to say—a nightmare in which the entire world has been drawn into an endless episode of The Apprentice, where billions of people spend their lives in quiet fear of whether the supreme patron of mass murderers, oligarchs, and pedophiles might one day simply “fire” them from existence. And all of this under the comforting illusion that such a system—a grotesque hybrid of television spectacle and moral sewerage—is in fact the pinnacle of civilization and the only proven recipe for happiness.
Yet, paradoxical as it may sound, there is at least one thing for which Trump deserves a certain grim gratitude: his brutal, almost caricatural honesty. Through his sheer arrogance he has torn away the colorful wrapping in which this system had been packaged for decades—wrapped, above all, in the glittering cellophane of Hollywood popular culture.
For America, in no small measure, won the Cold War thanks precisely to that packaging. Sitcoms about harmonious families, perfectly trimmed suburban lawns, kitchens where apple pies were eternally baking, studio audiences that—when not laughing at some well-worn joke—burst into ecstatic cheers whenever a billionaire appeared on screen, sometimes even Trump himself.
And we all watched it.
And we believed.
Now that we have begun to understand that behind those cheerful television curtains there is, more often than not, a Jeffrey Epstein smiling at our children, it may be time to return to somewhat more serious reading. Frantz Fanon—once a frequent visitor to our own betrayed and ultimately shattered civilization called Yugoslavia—wrote the following lines in The Wretched of the Earth:
Supernatural magical forces reveal themselves to be strangely ‘egotistical.’ The strength of the colonized becomes infinitely small because it has been weakened by alien attributes. He no longer has reason to fight them, for power appears to reside in ominous mythical structures. Clearly, everything unfolds as a permanent conflict on a fantastical plane. Yet in the struggle for liberation, sometimes fragmented into unreal sectors, seized by inexpressible fear but also prone to lose itself in hallucinatory fantasies, the people scatter and reorganize themselves again, until through blood and tears they arrive at very concrete and immediate confrontations.
Perhaps, then, the most important lesson of our time is this: once a shattered civilization parts ways with its illusions, it is granted—perhaps for the second time—a chance to rediscover its dignity.
In that sense, this is the end of childhood—and, in our case, the end of a long and rather embarrassing infantilization.
This does not mean that the world will suddenly cease to be imperfect, harsh, and often nightmarish. What it does mean is that we no longer have the luxury of feigned astonishment—the comforting hope that our “civilized world” has merely taken a tragic wrong turn and will soon reset itself to its original settings.
Growing up, as anyone who has truly gone through it knows, is neither simple nor romantic. Least of all now, when we have finally said to Trump—and to his predecessors and successors who have long occupied our imaginations and our loyalties—what perhaps should have been said much earlier:
“You’re fired.”
