I’ll just pause here while those in the
reading audience who don’t know who Kaufman was look him up on Wikipedia…
Okay, when I said that about Trump being
Kaufman, there are one of two ways that you, the reader, could take it: 1.) I’m
being facetious about Trump *actually* being Kaufman, a notorious performance
artist who most assuredly passed away in 1984 from a rare form of lung cancer.
I’m merely suggesting that Trump has perhaps captured the same anarchic spirit
that Kaufman used to disrupt professional wrestling (as the “Intergender World
Champion”) and unleashed it on the modern-day GOP. Or 2.) I am sincerely suggesting
that Trump and Kaufman (who, let’s face it, you’ve never seen in the same room
together at the same time) are one and the same, and that Kaufman is playing
the obnoxious “Trump” character to perfection in his greatest role yet.
What if I told you I was leaning towards
number 2?
No, hear me out: When he allegedly “died”
in 1984 (at the height of the backlash from his Intergender Wrestling career,
mind you, having turned heel to battle Jerry “The King” Lawler and supposedly
suffered a broken neck and a public meltdown on David Letterman’s old NBC show
in the process), Kaufman had pulled so many hoaxes and performances that left
his audience’s heads scratching that no one believed it. Every few years
(especially since the evolution of the internet), rumors persist that Kaufman
is poised to “return” to the world at large after a significant time out of the
public eye. Rumors of his return were especially persistent in 1999, upon the
eve of the film Man In the Moon (a
Kaufman biopic starring fellow comedian and performance artist Jim Carrey…wait,
he was serious about that whole “anti-vaccine” thing?), and in 2004, the
twentieth anniversary of his “death.”
As a Kaufman fan, I do admit that I wanted
to believe that Kaufman perhaps had faked his death all those years ago, and
that he would indeed return. But my more rational, less conspiracy-minded self
was inclined to believe that no one would put their family through what Andy’s
family suffered (and indeed, they were skeptical about his fatal diagnosis when
it first came to light; they had put up with his fantasies and performances for
far longer than the general public had). Still, when friends posted articles
purporting to Kaufman sightings in Wal-Mart parking lots (perhaps akin to
Elvis, Kaufman’s idol, who seems to haunt Waffle Houses nearly forty years
after *his* alleged passing), I felt a twinge of “what if,” if only for a
moment.
Perhaps to better understand my conceit
that Trump and Kaufman are one in the same, it’s important to point out that
Kaufman the man was universally loved and treasured by his close associates
because, no matter how insane his antics, he was a deeply funny and warm human
being, full of kindness. No one’s ever accused Trump of having a soul, to my
knowledge. But Kaufman could go dark, for sure, whether as the wrestling heel
or as his most beloved-or-hated alter ego, Tony Clifton. In this role, Kaufman
got to play the world’s worst lounge lizard, a nightclub “entertainer” who got
to be as cruel, crass, and boorish as Kaufman was sweet and kind in real life.
Sometimes to throw the audience, Kaufman would appear onstage while Clifton was
performing, causing fans who “knew” that Clifton was Kaufman in heavy make-up
and garish Seventies garb to pause and reconsider. In those instances, it was
actually Kaufman’s best friend and partner-in-crime Bob Zmuda beneath the
distinctive Clifton wig and jowls. But the audience never knew that.
Now, I realize it’s crazy to suggest that
Donald John Trump is not a real person at all but a creation of a talented
performer whose most memorable characters either endeared themselves to the
audience (Foreign Man/Latka on “Taxi”) or drove that same audience to hiss and
boo and finally hate him (the wrestling champ, Clifton). But if you put aside
the facts for a moment (or “facts”), doesn’t it seem plausible? After all, how
do we know that Trump is who he says he is (son of a real-estate mogul, a mogul
himself, a graduate of the Wharton Business School, etc.)? Couldn’t it all be a
cleverly constructed ploy by Kaufman, long underground in the guise of this
“Trump” (doesn’t the name along suggest it’s a pun on something, or else a
too-real-to-be-real name, like that of fictional presidents in movies?) and
finally ready to re-enter the public life? Or hasn’t he been playing Trump
since 1984, if not earlier? Consider Trump’s facial appearance; you’d swear
that could be just a really poorly-rendered latex mask, if you didn’t know any
better. But what if you do know better? Why would his skin be so orange? And that
hair, it’s obviously a cheap wig, perhaps clamped in place Joe Dirt-style to
keep Kaufman/Trump’s brain from exposure to the elements?
My hypothesis (and keep in mind, like most
conspiracy theorists, I only use scientific terms to make my outlandish claims
appear legitimate): Sometime in the fall of 1983, Donald Trump as we knew of
him before then dies in a deliciously ironic way for a rich asshole (like, say,
actually trying to dive into a gold-coin pool like Scrooge McDuck and breaking
his neck), before the news gets out Andy Kaufman gets ahold of this information
somehow. Let’s say…carrier pigeon. No, Illuminati. Yes, every conspiracy
theorist’s favorite bugaboo, who control everything, they *arrange* for Trump
to die so that Kaufman (who can’t get work after the fall-out from his
wrestling-heel days) can step into a new role. It’s Tony Clifton writ large,
and he and Zmuda get to work. But they can’t have Kaufman known to inhabit the
role, so they concoct the “rare lung cancer” diagnosis so that Kaufman (who was
not a smoker) can suitably “die” with a cloud of suspicion over him to distract
fans from the sudden re-emergence of Donald J. Trump from, say, several months
of vacation in Antarctica. So when Kaufman’s “death” is announced in May 1984,
Donald Trump can slip back into American consciousness and no one bats an eye.
Over the rest of the decade, “Trump” becomes louder, more obnoxious, declares
bankruptcy (actually a front so Kaufman can finally get actual surgery to “look
like” Trump, he’s been wearing the latex mask all this time and it’s starting
to show), bounces back, has numerous public scandals, takes to social media
with the instincts of a tween Taylor Swift fan, and finally emerges in 2015,
thirty-one years after his “death,” to destroy the GOP from the inside, because
it will be the greatest Andy Kaufman performance of all time!
I suppose you have a better theory…?
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