In July 2016, Trump Jr. was asked about the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Convention. “It’s disgusting, it’s so phony. I can’t think of bigger lies,” he said.
Recently, it was discovered that one month earlier he received an email promising dirt on Clinton and replied minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
From Trump’s campaign through his presidency, Democrats have been struggling to pin him down. Everywhere we see Democrats fact-checking, exposing Trump’s lies, lies, lies and, when exasperated, resorting to ominous prophecies and even spiteful curses. Yet Trump remains tweeting away in the Whitehouse, seemingly unfazed with the broad support of his base intact, conjuring up new scandals du jour while the world watches, astonished.
What kind of Trumpery is this?
Trump is often referred to as a Cheeto because his artificial tan glows similarly orange. But there is a more profound parallel. The Cheeto, like it’s round cousin, the Cheezy Puff, is scientifically engineered to be the perfect snack. They’re compulsively edible and completely lacking in substance so you continue to inhale them. This is basically the situation with Donald Trump: he’s a reality TV star, perfectly designed for mass consumption. There isn’t much there to digest – his policies are slogans, his positions are vague and mercurial – but people love and hate him. America is fascinated with Trump.
The interesting thing about Trump is not simply that he became president of the United States, but that he is occupying that office as an actor playing the role of the president of the United States. He treats the Whitehouse like a film set and his staff like co-stars bracing to be fired on his former TV game show, The Apprentice. And this is part of the reason why Democrats are struggling to regain control of the script.
There’s an ancient quarrel between philosophy and theatre, truth and masquerade. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates wrestles with an actor named Ion who thinks playing the part of the general makes him, basically, a general. But Socrates struggles to pin him down definitively because Ion keeps performing – his virtue is to pretend, there’s nothing behind whatever role he’s playing at the time – a charioteer, a physician, a lover.
Similarly, Trump moves from comic blunder to tragic scandal as if there were nothing at stake beyond entertainment. Even when he discloses classified information that poses a threat to our national security, Paul Ryan is there to remind us that it’s all a play because, after all, Trump isn’t a real politician.
The Democratic party has become the de facto party of reason and rationality. Trying to grasp why rural America voted for Trump, the Democratic question was “why would people vote against their own economic interest?” This question operates according to the same misguided premise that confuses “rational agent” economists – why don’t people spend and invest according to their rational self-interest? If people were strictly rational, economics would be an exact science. But economics, like politics, has very little to do with rational agents – and much more to do with desire. The poor and working-class in rural America didn’t vote against their own self-interest. They didn’t even consider themselves poor. Their plea is more passionate. They consider themselves cheated. And resentment is a feeling that plays right into Trump’s arena.
The literary critic Roland Barthes was fascinated by pro wrestling because it presented a spectacle of excess. “What the public wants is the image of passion,” he wrote, “there is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in theatre.” Wrestling is gratuitously fake, but it nonetheless riles the passions of the spectators. Trump’s pro wrestling career that resurfaced with his video tweet depicting him trouncing a man with a bobbly CNN logo for a head reveals exactly how he considers the presidency: it’s a show that might very well increase his fame and wealth. The video is emblematic of his presidency – bizarre, provocative, and spectacular. It’s horrifying to realize, but his performance as president reveals how well suited he was for his WWE Hall of Fame character – it was simply an exaggerated caricature of himself.
The only problem with all this show business is that the office of the president is a very real institution. Yet Donald Trump doesn’t seem to really believe in anything, including the established protocols of the presidency of the United States. Therein lies the missing premise that makes Trump so difficult to understand, let alone argue with or debate. Propositions that refer to an external state of affairs can be true or false. But it doesn’t make sense to ask if a play is true or false. Trump’s rhetoric has more in common with theatre, doublethink, and postmodernism. His wildly rambling and inconsistent speech often stretches so far that it crosses the threshold of the egregious and dives into the absurd and nonsensical. Asking if Trumpspeak is true or false is like asking if Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky is true or false: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
Trump’s statements and tweets are passionate outbursts that are nonetheless strategically deployed to evoke responses in an audience. Faced with immense tallies of incongruences, Trump and his supporters conveniently encourage us to take him seriously, but not literally – a specious formulation whose bald objective is to relieve Trump of any accountability for his statements. But presidents are conventionally trusted. This is what is particularly exasperating for the party of rationality. The labor is lop-sided: Trump has cultivated a nightmarish situation where the burden of proof shifts from the person making the claim (Trump) to whatever audience suffers the misfortune of having heard it. And it doesn’t seem like this labor of constant verification is alleviating the political exhaustion of the left.
Everything may change in 2018. The Russia question seems closer to an answer. Trump is also increasingly unpopular on the world stage. As the Australian journalist Chris Uhlmann recently reported from the G20 leaders’ summit, Trump was “obsessed with burnishing his celebrity,” but his performance didn’t work as well as it did in America last November: “He was an uneasy, lonely, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense that some of the leaders are trying to find the best way to work around him.” This global isolationism may eventually prompt some of his base to agree with Uhlmann’s diagnosis that “Trump has pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader.” Once it becomes clear that “Make America Great Again” really means blatantly lying to the American people, diminishing our stature in the world and colluding with Russia, Trump’s voter base may realize the emptiness of that slogan. Then again, impeachment is only as likely as Democrats winning the House, and removing Trump from office is only as likely as two-thirds of the Senate voting to convict him.
All of this seems even less likely given what Trump’s blustering success at home reveals about where America stands regarding truth and politics. It’s become clear that the good and noble work of logically evaluating Trump’s incredible number of incongruent utterances is an exercise in futility. That maneuver doesn’t disturb Trump’s base – it’s simply a distraction from the real problems post-truth problems facing the Democratic party. In fact, seeing the success of Trumpery, it would be surprising if Trump weren’t doling out lies intentionally. It’s the functional equivalent of a giant law firm drowning a smaller firm in paperwork – there are simply too many discrepancies, confusions, and downright lies to address. So far, it’s a winning strategy at home, even if it’s a flop everywhere else.