Though it is an oversimplification that parents are perhaps ultimately the root of all evil when it comes to the children they hath wrought (here’s lookin’ at you, practically every serial killer), a music video has to do its best to get across a powerful message in a short amount of time (even if not as short as some people would like most narratives to be nowadays a.k.a. less than a minute, per Instagram rule).
Clean Bandit, no stranger to the “statement” video (as made evident by their knockoff of City High’s “What Would You Do?” concept for “Rockabye“) has thusly brought us, in conjunction with Ellie Goulding, their interpretation of why Donald Trump might be such a gaping void of an asshole. The reason? Why, Daddy, of course. Or, more to the point, never getting any love from him as a privileged child forced to literally sink or swim in the family’s private indoor pool. Starting with the boy version of Trump running through a desolate outdoor area near a lake, he trips in front of his stoic patriarch, who doesn’t so much as bat an eyelash at his sobbing son. Incredulous at going unnoticed in his state of pain, the look of shock that comes across the boy’s face denotes that the emotional pain of this defining moment is far greater.
As the years go on, little Trump tries his best to be a “man”–or what he thinks his father might interpret as being manly–by joining the military. In @realDonalTrump’s case, going to a military boarding school for his high school years was, indeed, his father’s order upon finding out that preadolescent Donny would make secret trips into Manhattan without telling his parents. That DT would never actually enlist in the army thanks to a number of constant excuses (including having spurs in his heels, making him, now very ironically, “unqualified for duty except in the case of a national emergency”) is presented by Clean Bandit in the form of him ignoring his fellow soldiers in their time of need, taking one look at them and scampering off in the other direction.
This transitions into Trump’s father getting into his chauffered (by a black man, of course) car as his moody son awaits him. Flashes to his child self occur again, seated at the piano while Daddy grabs the maid’s ass–so yeah, where do you think DT picked up the learned behavior of how to treat (or rather, “handle”) women?
With scenes of boy Trump in school, we see his inner child merely wanting to dance about and scream–be noticed in any real way that is not somehow detrimental to the psyche (to the point where it would seem DT would simply have to tune it all out so as to become immune). By the time he reaches adulthood, it is thusly no wonder that the only way he knows how to receive attention is when it is negative. Precisely, to be sure, why he ran for president in the first place–the period in his “sad” life addressed by Clean Bandit as he embodies the so-called American dream while eating a cheeseburger in one of his lavish penthouse apartments, regurgitating Daddy’s behavior by unwantedly smacking Melania on the ass as she gets into bed and watching the election results only to almost choke at the shock of actually winning. Because no, as documented during his early media blitzkrieg in 2015, Trump never genuinely believed he would make it to the once highest office of the country (based on his ascension to it, however, one would probably have to say that “pop star” is the highest office in America at this juncture). It was all, at its psychological core, an attempt to say: see Daddy, look at what I can do. Even though Frederick Christ Trump–yes, you read the name right–died in 1999, because evil rarely dies, or if it does, it lives well into its nineties.
Suddenly faced with the gravity of what it means to have won, our music video Trump promptly runs into the bathroom to yak before scenes of all versions of himself sitting in the hot seat of the Oval Office appear, the little boy inside still raging and screaming–manifesting very much on the outside “adult” version of Trump. As Melania blithely eats a fry (as if she ever would) in the bedroom, Trump frantically calls Mommy for some sort of guidance (alas, Mary Anne MacLeod died in 2000, so that’s just creative license).
Even if “Mama” was originally intended to be about romantic love and how falling for someone else can, in turn, change the relationship you have with your own self, Clean Bandit clearly couldn’t pass up a perfect opportunity to postulate on how any human being could possibly be so depraved (too bad for Hitler, music videos weren’t a thing during WWII–unless you count the Andrews Sisters, but they weren’t really fucking with that kind of thematic content).
While it’s a lovely theory to speculate that maybe Trump might have been a better human being were it not for his upbringing, the fact of the matter remains that there exist plenty of people in this world who were not nurtured or loved “correctly” as children that did not turn into complete dickheads. To imbue Trump with this sort of roundabout forgiveness for his despicable behavior is to relieve him of being responsible for his own actions, which are always ultimately driven by one’s own free will, not the toxicity of others.
