I think I’m starting to get what Ivanka means by ‘Make America Great Again’

Last updated on: November 9, 2016 at 1:22 pm by Justin Tse

I think I’m starting to get what Ivanka means by ‘Make America Great Again’ 2016-11-09T13:22:31-07:00 Justin Tse

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Jacob Riis, Hell's Kitchen and Sebastopol - [Public Domain (before 1890)], via http://www.zeno.org/Fotografien/B/Riis,+Jacob+A.%3A+Teufels+K%C3%BCche+und+Sebastopol

Jacob Riis, Hell’s Kitchen and Sebastopol – [Public Domain (before 1890)], via http://www.zeno.org/Fotografien/B/Riis,+Jacob+A.%3A+Teufels+K%C3%BCche+und+Sebastopol

But wait. Let’s not get too theoretical here. As a millennial, I feel like I’ve seen this show before – while binge-watching Netflix. When Ivanka says that Trump cannot bear to see the ’empty main streets and boarded up factories’ of postindustrial America, an image flashes before my eyes – that of, indeed, a huge man with an attractive woman standing by his side, both of them looking out of a window. Hell’s Kitchen is burning, and the huge man intones, ‘This city…’

‘Rebuilding this city’ is what Wilson Fisk tells his lover Vanessa when she asks him what he does for a living – at least on the version of Daredevil I watched on Netflix. ‘I want to carve something beautiful out of its ugliness,’ he continues, ‘set free its potential.’ Like Ivanka, Vanessa replies that he is an artist; like Trump, Fisk is just a ‘man with a dream.’

At one level, rebuilding the city takes force. ‘What I said about the city is truth,’ Fisk tells Vanessa in another scene. ‘But money and influence is not enough to usher change on such a scale. Sometimes it requires force.’ Or as Trump says: ‘I would knock the hell out of ISIS. I would hit them, I would hit them so hard, and you have to take out their families.’ Perhaps this is why Trump employs the rhetoric of the non-apology apology so much; contrary to those who think that Trump never apologizes, one of his verbal ticks is: ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but…’ To #sorrynotsorry so much is the sign of a man who, like Wilson Fisk, gets things done:

I’ve done things that I’m not proud of, Vanessa. I’ve hurt people and I’m going to hurt more. It’s impossible to avoid for what I’m trying to do. But I take no pleasure in it, in cruelty. But this city isn’t a caterpillar. It doesn’t spin a cocoon and wake up a butterfly. A city crumbles and fades. It needs to die before it can be reborn.

The cocktail party has focused on the offensive things that Trump has said, but Ivanka is right that beneath all of this destruction is a new urban dream, not unlike the Kingpin. Of course this version of the city is multicultural: in Fisk’s city, the Russians and the Chinese and the mysterious organization called the Hand are also running their underground syndicates. By this, I am not insinuating that Trump has ties to organized crime; I am instead saying that Daredevil places organized crime in its proper place in the urban economy: it is the multicultural funding for Fisk’s beatification of Hell’s Kitchen. Like Ivanka says, it’s all hands on deck to make America great again; you are all employees now of Union Allied Construction.

But like Daredevil‘s Fisk, Trump is not an unsympathetic character. Not only is the Trump Organization a meritocracy that even includes women and pays them well, but Trump, like Fisk, is a human person. It has been said by many that part of Daredevil‘s genius is that its main villain is a sympathetic character. He has tastes. He is an artist. He loves his lovers and his family, and by the end of the show, we are just as much rooting for Matt Murdock to take him down as we are for him to stay together with Vanessa. It turns out that we may have been watching the wrong show after all. There may well be a straight line from The Art of the Deal to the Apprentice to the Trump Campaign. But the story in which we find ourselves is neither one of board room deals nor firing incompetent employees with glee. It’s Marvel’s Daredevil.

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