While I can certainly understand why the average Joe on the street might hesitate to say a good word about Donald Trump, I find endless humor in the outrage machine that Trump generates online. Recently, the 45th President released his latest self-aggrandizing marketing gimmick, this time in the form of another fragrance, called Fight Fight Fight, which has a photo of him with upraised fist emblazoned on its otherwise unremarkable square bottle. As you may have guessed, this didn't go down well on Fragrantica.
My take on Donald Trump and the fragrance community is this: we wouldn't have to worry about Trump if the West weren't so badly calibrated that it gave rise to the fragrance community in the first place. Let's face it folks, we're part of the problem. We spend all day, every day obsessing over very expensive perfumes that most lower and middle class people could never in a million years afford, and most Americans wouldn't buy. As upward mobility has decreased in my country, the 1% have lined their pockets and studded their wardrobes with the latest from Malle, Parfums de Marly, Creed, Guerlain, and Chanel. Designer price brackets have all but disappeared in the last eight years, with ranges that were once tagged between $75 and $95 now in the $125 to $175 range, and any "exclusive" offerings bumped sixty to a hundred dollars over that.
This isn't strange to us because we're desensitized to it. We see it and read about it every day. We live it. Most Americans are struggling to afford diapers and children's clothing and rent. The last thing they're thinking of buying is the 2025 release of Guerlain's Muguet. Creed's new Kering offerings, Centaurus and Delphinus. Malle's Acne Studios. Chanel's Allure Homme Sport Superleggera. Parfums de Marly's Palatine. It isn't that hard working people don't want them; they simply can't have them.
These privileged fragrance reviewers flaunt wardrobes that cost more than a new Toyota Corolla, then turn around and virtue signal when Elena Knezevic writes about Fight Fight Fight, as if the usual hand-wringing will change anything. It's 2024, people. We've been living with Trump in the sociopolitical culture for nearly a decade now. Enough already. He was President once. Was it the greatest four years in America's history? Hell no. Covid took care of that. But was he Orange Hitler? Was he Orange Mussolini? Were there citizens being lined up behind the outhouses and shot because they weren't wearing Trump Sneakers? I ask this with the utmost sincerity: how much longer must we pretend that Donald Trump is the antichrist?
Just look at some of the comments under Elena's article, starting with "Trixie Salamander":
"How the hell do I delete my account?
Then there's "SaulGoo":
"When someone's shooting at you and there are innocent people standing behind you, you stay down if you're the target. Why? Because as long as the person firing sees you, they'll keep shooting. Standing up again to pump his tiny fist for what he KNEW would be a great photo op, was an opportunity for new merch GALORE."
Or perhaps we should listen to "istvan.budda.779":
"Who is the perfumer? And 200 dollars, even Chanel doesn't charge this much and Chanel is well known for being a greedy company."
And last but not least, my favorite comment by "FiaM":
"Is it time to count the balloons yet?"
My responses to each in kind: Trixie, you don't have an account. Nice try, though. SaulGoo, to quote Janosz from Ghostbusters II: "Everything you are doing is bad. I want you to know this." To istvan.budda.779: sorry about your Chanel fail, your consolation prize is a $325 bottle of Comète. And to FiaM: don't count them before they pop, sweetie. Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly a problem for all of you. The sad thing is, it makes you look stupid, because it makes you say stupid things that nobody really believes, or even takes seriously. Eighty million Americans support Trump. I'd wager the majority of them don't have Fragrantica accounts. Time to look in a mirror.
I don't know if these complainers are Americans, real people, or just sophisticated AI bots planted by the Chinese government, but whatever they are, they're not winning, and they still haven't realized it. Their endlessly whiny and logic-free complaints about one man, a man who cut every American's taxes and protected the border as well as he could, is exactly why he's up in the polls. It's 2016 all over again.
If people want to make the energy monster go away, they should stop spewing their aggrieved energy at him. It's the strained pearl-clutching and the endless whinging that strengthens the case against them and for him. They never learn.
