"He Is a One-of-a-Kind Grotesque"

"The text and the caption depend for their power upon—indeed they would be totally unintelligible without—Trump's built-in assumption that millions of people would find themselves almost inexpressibly outraged by his naive identification of Cinco de Mayo with all Hispanics, whom he claims to love in some absurd blanket sense—how when he is such an obvious gutter racist?!—and his uncouth assumption that 'taco bowls' are a real food to which superlatives might be applied at all and that the pseudo-salads are a part of Mexican cuisine. (This is probably not an exhaustive list of the number of micro-aggressions or dog whistles implied in this masterpiece of rhetoric.) The atmosphere of knowingly perverse cultural insensitivity—probably the closest thing we have nowadays to the teashop Orientalism of The Mikado—is heightened by the contrast between the high-school cafeteria quality food and the white napkin and silverware, to say nothing of the golf trophies and the view of the Manhattan skyline from the window behind him and his ludicrous grin. This, played with a thousand variations over the half decade or so in which he has been at the center of American public life, is the essential Trumpian conceit: playing a poor person's idea of what being rich is (having real linen!), a woke person's idea of racism (liking déclassé foods), a worker's idea of what a boss is (someone who fires people), and doing so without ever acknowledging the performance to any of the not-always overlapping segments of his audience, who in turn refuse to acknowledge it to one another."

In a 2020 article at The Week, Matthew Walther argues that Donald Trump "is essentially a camp figure."