On the October 12, 2016 edition of MSNBC ’s The Last Word With Lawrence O Donnell, Wayne Barrett, who has been reporting on Donald Trump among the longest and certainly as one of the best, said, ”But what he really has done is objectify himself…. the process of objectifying yourself is totally connected to the camera because that’s his lifeline…and he has turned himself into an object which is basically the great story of his life…."
David Corn, another guest on the show, took up that idea, "Trump is a commodity. He is a brand. He’s not a human being in a lot of ways it seems and that’s how he’s been selling himself and he seems oblivious to anything that goes on in the world outside of his own concern with his own brand, his own commodification."
Trump as a commodity, a showman who produces the spectacle that is himself and his business and his life recalls Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983) and its definition of the spectacle as "the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.”
DeBord, the French Situationist thinker and artist, also wrote, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of _spectacles_. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Trump himself has become a representation of himself. He’s beside himself as his own representation in his spectacular hall of mirrors and taken us all with him.
"In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.” Trump’s business as a developer has devolved into a branding exercise with his name prominently displayed in gold as THE selling point (a business model that may not last long past this election), an example of DeBord’s argument that "the spectacle is the main production of present-day society” and “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”
As “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images,” the images Trump projects have definitely defined a social relation among people that all of us are reacting to, positive and negative.
Other books which helped me understand Donald J Trump, if not his movement, were George Seldes' biography of Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/18/1434683/-Sawdust-Caesar-That-Mussolini-Lip) , and The Confidence Game by Maria Konnakova (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/11/1581155/-10-Steps-of-the-Confidence-Game:An-Election-Year-Dance).
In fact, understanding the steps of the classic con game leads me to believe that at least modern American right-wing politics is a process of winnowing for True Believers rather than principled governance.