Logan Paul, a wrestler with 23 million YouTube subscribers, called Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to his shooting ‘the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life’. It helped that it was photographed with Old Glory flying against a blue sky and Trump, fist in the air, mouthing ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ with blood trickling down his cheek.
Earlier the wrestler had also called it approvingly ‘the most gangster image of all time’. There is an overlap between gangster and badass. In his novel Londonstani (2006), Gautam Malkani has a character say: ‘Don’t get me wrong, we in’t wannabe badass gangstas or someshit.’
That was six years after Kid Rock peaked at 25 in the UK charts with ‘American Bad Ass’. Rock (real name Robert Ritchie) has supported Trump. The ruder version of ‘American Bad Ass’ was, I think, played at the start of a Trump rally (‘I’m a cowboy bad ass in black singin’/ From side to side, from front to back’).
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