Trump and the 70 Year Itch

Cable television devotees may still enjoy The Seven Year Itch (1955), starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, Billy Wilder’s 1955 dark comedy about a Manhattan midlife-crisis plagued publishing exec who tries to dally with the hot number upstairs who makes tv toothpaste commercials while his wife and kid are away in Maine for the summer.

Today, I think there is a more salient, underdiagnosed phenomenon that might be called the 70 year itch afflicting especially white men of a certain age. Despite all the media hype about 60 as the new 40 and 80 the new 60, 70 can represent a real crisis, physically and mentally, for men. I know this first hand, as do Bill Clinton and Donald Trump both of whom have recently turned three score and ten.

According to the demographics, American males of that age and slightly younger are beginning to suffer from what might be the “vodka, seppuku, and sayonara syndrome,” manifested in different forms in Russia where male life expectancy is in absolute decline and in Japan where it is stagnating in tandem with declining population reproduction rates.

Does Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra have an underlying psychic promise of “Make American Men Virile Again”? Indeed, is that ageless philanderer and ogler of beauty contestants, Donald Trump, the Viagra candidate for a generation of aging Portnoy’s with an increasingly acute gonadal complaint?

What troubles me is not that middle aged-and-older American males search for validation, which I can understand and even sympathize with to some degree. It’s the seeming inability of so many American men to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic male authority figures and role models—between, let us say, Dwight David Eisenhower, general of the armies, and Donald John Trump, a seventyish puckish Peter Pan who has never outgrown the antics of psychological puberty.

My nightmares revolve around a 70 year itch in which the orange-haired geriatric wonder Donald wins in what amounts to a national suicide pact between him and chronically immature aging white American males. This may sound impossible—hopefully, it is, given our demographically diverse nation. But bear in mind, if you like to flirt with nightmare scenarios, something similar is responsible for the male exhibitionist Putin’s rise to dominance in Russia. It also fuels Trump recent boast that he will prove America’s Mr. Brexit.