Deputy Director of the Middle East Strategy Task Force Jessica Ashooh writes for Foreign Policy on how both ISIS and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump give voice to troubling narratives of marginalization and disenchantment with the status quo:
Earlier this summer, cultural critic and noted provocateur Camile Paglia raised eyebrows when she equated Donald Trump with the Islamic State. In a freewheeling interview with Salon, Paglia recalled an episode in 1980 wherein Trump jackhammered an historic Art Deco sculpture to make way for Trump Tower. Despite offers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take the sculpture, which had previously adorned the entrance of the famous Bonwit Teller store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, “Trump got impatient and just had it destroyed,” Paglia recounted. “I still remember that vividly, and I’m never going to forget it! I regard Donald Trump as an art vandal, equivalent to ISIS destroying ancient Assyrian sculptures.”
Midtown isn’t exactly Palmyra, but the incident nonetheless displayed Trump’s Islamic State-like single-minded disdain for any vision other than his own. But the Islamic State and Trump may have more in common than a mutual hostility to historic preservation. In many ways, the two can be seen as equally giving voice to troubling narratives of marginalization and disenchantment with the status quo. Likewise, they have both benefited from a ferocious disregard for the conventional political wisdom, coupled with an elite class that dangerously — perhaps irresponsibly — underestimated them.