When it comes to art about your political opponents, there’s nothing wrong with writing a broadside: “Masters of War” doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the inner life of the man in charge of Raytheon. But there’s also something to be said for attempts to humanize and understand people you disagree with, whether they’re sincere (see, e.g., Jim Shepard’s short story “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me”) or deliberately half-assed (see, e.g., Phil Ochs’ song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”). Aimee Mann’s new song about Donald Trump, “Can’t You Tell,” falls somewhere in between, taking a couple of obvious shots at Trump while genuinely considering the question of what it might feel like to be him. Mann’s song was released as part of the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project, which is releasing one anti-Trump song a day until the election. She starts from the theory that Trump decided to run the night Obama roasted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner, and, well, things got out of hand. As Mann puts it, her vision of Trump’s catastrophic campaign is that
… it wasn’t really the job itself he wanted, but the thrill of running and winning, and that maybe it had all gotten out of hand and was a runaway train that he couldn’t stop.
There’s something disturbingly plausible about her chorus (“Isn’t anybody going to stop me? … I don’t want this job, my God,”) given the number of ways Trump tried to self-sabotage in the primaries, to say nothing of the waking nightmare he seemed to be living during the last debate. And that was before the latest round of accusations Trump must have always known would eventually surface to complete his humiliation. “Can’t You Tell” is an empathetic portrait of Trump in his Face in the Crowd days. But he’s a moving target; since Mann wrote the song, the whole campaign has moved on to Lear and his fool raging against the storm. At this rate, by Election Day we’ll probably make it to Salò.
