Sex pistol: The punk-rock appeal of Donald Trump

But frivolousness, insubstantiality, has been one of the hallmarks of the Trump campaign. He doesn’t mean it, he didn’t say that, he wasn’t serious, the transcript is wrong. He flames here and there, impossible to pin down, an ignis fatuus topped with a toasted golden ghost of a hairdo. (“A solid, solid person,” he said of his vice-presidential pick, poor Mike Pence. What an insult.) I’ll say this for Trump: He doesn’t use clichés. He may not know any. His language, stunted as it is, is all his own. And the single cliché that the pundits have managed to stick on him—that he has “tapped into” something in this country—barely captures the complexity of his effect. For Trump to be revealed as a salvational figure, the conditions around him must be dire. Trumpism—like fascism, like a certain kind of smash-it-up punk rock—begins in apprehensions of apocalypse.

“No regrets,” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ infamous shyster/prankster of a manager, after the swearing-on-TV incident. “These lads … want a change of scene. What they did was quite genuine.” McLaren—a post-1960s provocateur for whom the band was only ever a way to upend the culture—would have been a fantastic asset to the Trump machine, to its great political rock-’n’-roll swindle. Like the Trumpites, he saw mob manipulation as something in the nature of an artistic duty. The buttons are there to be pushed—how can you not push them? By the end, the Sex Pistols were engulfed in fabricated outrage, real violence, and corrosive self-disgust. The band’s last show, at the end of a short, horrendous American tour, was at San Francisco’s Winterland. A scary, disintegrating, beasts-unchained kind of a night, like a Trump rally gone south. Greil Marcus, covering the concert for Rolling Stone, saw a man in a football helmet butting his way through the crowd and—perfectly Trumpian—knocking somebody out of a wheelchair. The set concluded with an imploding version of the Stooges’ “No Fun.” And as the song, and the band, and civilization fell to pieces, lead singer Johnny Rotten delivered his coup de grâce: “A-haha! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Goodnight!”