Buckley, Vidal, and me: How a 16-year-old Malaysian boy witnessed the birth of Trump

It’s hard to believe it began in a tropical land with durians, dragonflies, and dodgy transistor radios, but there I was—in late 1960s Malaysia—watching the world come unhinged—assassinations, acid rock, and American napalm dropping like hellfire onto my teenage consciousness. The world wasn’t just changing; it was combusting. I was watching it unfold from across the globe, seated on a wooden stool under a mosquito net in the kampung, with one ear to the BBC World Service and the other tuned to Radio Australia.

 

Somehow, I understood that everything was connected. JFK’s head snapping back in Dallas. Dr. King dreaming in Memphis, then bleeding in Memphis. Vietnam dragging on like a family feud that wouldn’t end. Then, like a plot twist written by a manic screenwriter, came Woodstock, as if someone declared: “Let there be freaks, flowers, and freedom!”

 

But the real detonator—at least for me—didn’t drop from a B-52 or emerge from the Haight-Ashbury haze. It exploded from a grainy, black-and-white television in a Northern England student nurses’ residence sometime in the early ’70s. The show? Parkinson. The guest? Gore Vidal. The moment? Revelation.

 

He walked onto that stage like a cat who knew where the cream was. I’d never seen anyone speak like that—like every word had been aged in bourbon and dipped in irony. He was everything a curious, self-aware, slightly rebellious brown boy from Malaysia didn’t know he needed: articulate, dangerous, witty, and impossibly cool.

 

In that roomful of nurses—who I suspect were only half-listening between their late-night tea and tales of pub flirtations—I was spellbound. Here was someone who talked politics the way Ali boxed: stylish, cutting, and with the occasional knockout blow of truth. And like Ali, Lennon, and Dylan—Vidal meant it. But unlike them, he wielded words like a rapier, not a guitar or glove.

 

Then I learned about Buckley.

 

William F. Buckley Jr., with his lockjaw patrician accent and eyebrows raised as if the rest of the world smelled faintly of socialism, was Vidal’s arch-nemesis. Their infamous 1968 televised debates during the Democratic and Republican conventions were the crucible in which modern political television was forged.

 

That was when politics became performance. That was when argument became blood sport. That was the seed, I would argue, from which Donald Trump sprouted—hairspray, ego, and all.

 

Because Buckley—God help us—invented political entertainment.

 

Not intentionally, perhaps. The man believed in ideas, even if some of them were carved from the ossified bones of empire. But once he snarled on national TV at Gore Vidal—“Listen, you queer…”—the line between policy and provocation was forever blurred.

 

It was prime-time intellectual mud-wrestling. The network execs saw the ratings. And the genie—well-groomed, seething, and Ivy League—was out of the bottle. Buckley had opened the door, but it was the showmanship that won the room. Vidal, of course, knew this. He was performing Buckley, like a tragic character in a Wildean satire.

 

What happened next is history. McLaughlin Group. Crossfire. Fox News. Farage. Trump. All of them owe a debt—begrudging or gleeful—to that 1968 stage. They didn’t just inherit the circus. They built the funhouse around it.

 

Would Trump exist without Buckley vs. Vidal? Not in the same way. Without the model of the televised ideological cage match, Trump would still be hawking steaks and shouting at apprentices. And Farage? He’s practically Buckley in a pub—minus the vocabulary, subtlety, and blazer collection.

 

And yet—and here’s the uncomfortable truth—none of this spectacle would be possible without freedom of speech. It’s the double-edged sabre of the liberal dream. Without Enoch Powell and Buckley being allowed to spew bile and elitism, there’d be no stage for the rebuttal. No Vidal. No Ali saying “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” No Lennon in bed for peace. No Dylan calling out hypocrites from the Newport Folk stage. No me, a Malay teenager, sitting thousands of miles away, being formed.

 

So what do we do with this paradox?

 

We acknowledge it. We own it. We thank Vidal for the gloves-off eloquence. We thank Buckley—reluctantly, and through gritted teeth—for the stage he helped build. And we weep, occasionally, at what has been done with it since.

 

In the end, I believe the true warning wasn’t in what Buckley said, or even how he said it, but in how it worked. The outrage became the show. The insult became the currency. Truth became secondary to theatre.

 

And now? We’ve elected the ringmaster.

 

But I’ll say this: when I watched Gore Vidal that night on Parkinson, I didn’t just witness television. I witnessed the first flickers of my own voice—the sense that ideas matter, that style and intellect can coexist, and that watching the world doesn’t mean you must remain silent in it.

 

The circus may be louder now. But some of us, who watched its first flicker from faraway lands, are still here, still listening, and—thankfully—still speaking.

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