Donald Trump Conference Paper

“You’re Fired”: The Trump Candidacy and Contemporary Politics in an Age of Fantasy

            I wrote this abstract in September, not knowing what the status of the Trump campaign would be in March. At the time, I worried that by now, the campaign would have fizzled, or perhaps more likely would have imploded spectacularly. Unfortunately, my paper is even more salient in March than it would have been in September, and I’m now convinced that whatever the outcome of the 2016 election, the Trump candidacy will be important for political scholars and cultural scholars alike. At a popular culture conference, the connections between presidential campaigns and popular culture probably seems obvious, but I’ll briefly make the case. The relationship between presidential politics and popular culture were already deeply imbricated before one of the most successful reality stars in the US decided to throw his hat in the ring. Television shows such as The West Wing (1999), House of Cards (2013), Veep (2012), and Scandal (2012) are among the most successful and critically acclaimed television shows that prominently feature politics. Further, many commentators have remarked that the plethora of debates, the magnitude of the election coverage, and the popularity of election coverage on social media align political campaigns with the logic of reality television. Perhaps demonstrating a logical pre-Trumpian apex, at the height of the reality television craze, Showtime aired American Candidate (2004), a reality television show that groomed contestants in a mock campaign to be the next political star. Indeed, the argument that I am going to make today is that it’s not so much that Donald Trump brought the logic of reality television to presidential politics, but rather his seemingly obvious performance as a reality television star throws into stark relief the fact that presidential campaigns and reality television were already intertwined. Reality television in politics is not new; all of the candidates are participating in an elaborate reality television show. Trump is just a better contestant than many if not all of the other candidates.

In his 2007 book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe offers a desperate plea for progressives to embrace the politics of the spectacle. Guy Debord begins his famous Society of the Spectacle by arguing that “the whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (1). Debord is terrified by his proposition, and progressives have traditionally maintained a belief that truth and rationality will be the cure for an artificial society increasingly dominated by spectacle. For Duncombe, progressives have relied much too heavily on a commitment to rationality and truth, and an incorrect  belief in “an Enlightenment faith that somehow, if reasoning people have access to the Truth, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will see reality as it truly is and, of course, agree with us” (7). Duncombe saw a decade ago what many scholars and pundits are realizing now—that the kind of truth produced by logic and rationality is not necessarily the regime of truth that holds the most sway in the spectacular contemporary media environment, and the traditional version of truth may not hold much purchase with potential voters.

Writing in the middle of the Bush Administration—before Democrats had somewhat embraced the usefulness of spectacle in the form of Hope and Change—Duncombe believed that Bush and his handlers understood the power of a media-induced fantasy and its profound power in a way that the Democrats fundamentally did not. For him, the Bush administration “understood that people often prefer a simple, dramatic story to the complicated truth” (7). For Duncombe, Democrats and Progressives had gotten it all wrong in their myriad attempts to demonstrate that Bush was mistaken, wrong-headed, or even mendacious. Duncombe insisted that nstead of basing their campaign on appeals to rationality and truth, “Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form—a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells good stories” (9). As we stand in the midst of the 2016 campaign, the Democrats still rely too often on complicated truths rather than simple, dramatic stories, but one candidate running for the republican nomination has embraced what Duncombe has termed the “spectacular vernacular” to an extent that perhaps even Duncombe could not have predicted.

            The realm of the spectacle is where Donald J. Trump thrives; freed from any coherent ideology, he luxuriates in fantasy, and deftly negotiates the terrain of the spectacular vernacular. Trump has built an entire campaign upon his ability to manipulate the media and to present himself and his supporters as a spectacle that resembles a reality show or a Barnumian carnival. Duncombe is writing for an audience of Progressives when he argues that “if progressives are going to engage, rather than ignore, the phantasmagoric terrain of politics, we need to learn from those who do spectacle best: the architects of Las Vegas, video game designers, advertising’s creative directors, and the producers and editors of celebrity media” (14). Trump is the ultimate personification of the notion of politics that Duncombe describes. It’s almost as if Donald J. Trump read Duncombe’s book and used it as a how-too manual for his 2016 political campaign. He literally has a hand in Vegas architecture, advertising, and producing celebrity media, and the internet tells me that he even had a 2002 video game titled Donald Trump’s Real Estate Tycoon.

I perhaps flippantly used the term Barnumian to describe Trump, but the man in fact embraces the comparison to P.T. Barnum. In a January interview on Meet the Press, Trump stated that “we need P.T. Barnum, a little bit, because we have to build up the image of our country.” Trump does not care for a minute that Barnum is generally regarded as one of the world’s most famous hucksters, and Trump’s supporters continue to effuse the man and the campaign with praise. In a recent entry to the political blog, The Hill, Ross Rosenfield uses the psychological term “confirmation bias” to explain Trump’s popularity and compare him to Barnum. He writes that “Donald Trump is the P.T. Barnum of our time. He’s caught on to the fact that people will believe what they want to believe.” He goes on to explain that “no matter how much Trump lies—no matter how much he’s shown to be a con artist and huckster—his supporters just entrench themselves even more.” Yet, many politicians and pundits insist upon demonstrating the hypocrisy that pervades the Trump campaign.

Democrats and Progressives especially delight in catching conservative politicians in their duplicity as they lie, flip-flop, and talk out of both sides of their mouth. Rising to fame in the George W. Bush era, Jon Stewart was able to make an entire career out of using video evidence to out duplicitous politicians. But for die-hard Trump supporters, catching their leader in a lie, contradiction, or hypocrisy is beside the point. Trying to implement a version of truth that relies on rationality and reason to form an argument against Donald Trump is a fool’s errand, because Trump knows perfectly well that the version of truth he performs requires neither reason nor rationality. The desire to demonstrate the irrationality of Trump’s arguments assume that those arguments circulate within a field in which rationally and truth are the guiding principles. I mentioned Jon Stewart earlier, but the late-night comedian who more clearly presages the Trump phenomenon is Stephen Colbert and his introduction of the neologism “Truthiness,” which stems not from one’s brain (rationality), but from one’s “gut” (affect). Trump doesn’t care if he’s lying, and neither do his supporters; they only care that voting for him and supporting him feels good…in the gut. Jon Stewart lamented in 2015 that “America’s id is running for president,” but Colbert already knew in 2005 when he coined the term truthiness, that appeals to the id were often more compelling and effective in the political terrain than appeals to truth and rationality.

            The logic of truthiness relies on a complicated relationship to reality—a relationship to reality that has been molded in the era of reality television. Viewers know that reality television isn’t “real,” but rather that it’s a constructed version of reality that exists for the pleasure of the spectator. It’s not unlike Barnum’s marvels of the world in this regard. In his comparison between Trump and Barnum, Ross Rosenfield recounts a story in which Barnum pays a lot of money for the remains of a “giant,” even after a paleontologist had proclaimed that the giant was a hoax. According to Rosesnfield, “he knew it was a fake, but he also knew that people would still pay to see it.” This is the logic of reality television, and Trump was a very successful creator of reality television on The Apprentice, and continues to employ the same logic in his political campaign. In “A Return to Demagoguery: Donald Trump’s Challenge to Democracy,” Paul Johnson explains that “A savvy reader of Trump’s campaign understands at this point that the disjuncture between the ‘true’ context of the image and its use in advertisements is immaterial: Trump’s appeal sustains not because of an account of reality coherent and accountable to external agents” (25-26). His supporters just don’t care if the reality that Trump presents is reality as such. To paraphrase Žižek (quoting Octove Manoni), the logic of reality television is a disavowal: I know very well that reality television is not real, but nevertheless I choose to enjoy its version of reality. Trump supporters employ a similar logic in maintaining support for him: I know very well that Trump does not engage with reality or rational truth in any cogent or coherent way; nevertheless, I support him because I enjoy his version of reality and am moved an interpolated by the version of reality that he presents.

            Many have noted that reality television is not in fact “real,” but the savvy viewer knows that it presents a construction of a different reality. Reality television ostensibly relies upon a gap between reality as such, and the version of reality presented on reality television. Trump employs a similar gap between the performer who spouts profanity, vitriol, and demagoguery, and the real person. Rhetorical scholar Joshua Gunn argues that people would not in fact vote for Trump if they truly believed that he was the racist pompous bloviator that characterizes his campaign. He writes that “what’s characteristically different about Trump’s campaign behaviors is that he resists the confusion of his rhetoric with his person in tone: few of Trump’s supporters would admit to voting for a hater or psychotic. Rather, many of his supporters seem to believe that ‘Trump knows it’s all a joke,’ that his extremist, sexist, and racist remarks are part of a middle-finger prank that they are ‘in’ on, and that almost everything Trump says is delivered with a wink.” Here, Gunn is demonstrating that Trump’s performance of demagoguery is not to be taken seriously, and all of his supporters know it. Just like the reality show performers who say and do ridiculous things to get more airtime, Trump is just performing the part of the crazy demagogue. In this logic, there is still a gap between reality and sincerity and joking.

Gunn then takes the next argument to the next level, suggesting that the gap between the “real” Trump and his persona is non-existent. He argues that “it’s not that Trump is playing a joke, but rather, that he is the punch line of a postmodern phantasmagoria that we have co-created to amuse ourselves.” I think that Gunn is indeed correct here. The perceived distinction between reality and the representation of reality is itself a construct of the mediated environment that constitutes it. As Jean Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulations, “when the real is no longer what it used to be […] there is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true” (6-7). Reality TV circulates within this world in which the real is no longer what it used to be, but it purports to be “real” albeit a version of reality that is distinct from reality as such.

            Presidential candidates have for years worked to construct a version of themselves that is authentic. Roosevelt gave “fireside chats,” Kennedy played football on his compound, Bush cleared brush, etc. People interviewed presidents to find out what they were “really like” when they weren’t on the campaign trail, and a logic based upon rational truth assumed that the ideal president would have few differences between the real person and the persona. To use Goffman’s language, the president’s “back stage” performance should be similar to but not identical to the “front stage” performance. Goffman notes that “a back region or backstage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (112). Gunn begins by insisting that people vote for Trump because despite his bluster, they know that what is “back stage” is quite different from what Trump’s mediated presentation of self. However, the move that Gunn makes at the end of his piece is the more interesting one, in which he contends that “we should insist that Trump is nothing more than his persona, that the persona and his person are one and the same.” The gap between the frontstage and backstage is completely collapsed. For Gunn, , this is a distinctive feature of the Trump campaign. Presumably, the other candidates are still operating in a more reality-based world in which there is a “back stage” to their performances, but the gap between the front stage and back stage is something that politicians should try to gap. However, I think that we can take this logic a step further and suggest that the postmodern phantasmagoria that Gunn ascribes to Trump is true of all candidates in a mediatized world; Trump is just more adept at negotiating this terrain. The logic of the reality show is already the logic of the contemporary presidential campaign, and Trump is just the best at manipulating that logic to his advantage. Trump knows that an affective-inducing performance is the only thing that matters, and he deftly maneuvers through this environment in a way that has vanquished many of his political foes. He is working within a different regime of truth, which is in fact a regime of truth within which all of the candidates, pundits, and media figures are working. However, those other interlocutors point towards rational truth as an ideal or goal. Gunn uses the analogy of Toto pulling open the curtain, and finding no one manipulating the Great and Powerful Oz. Trump is savvy enough to know that all of the campaigns are in fact built upon sheer spectacle, but that he’s the only one who revels in that knowledge. All of the other candidates worry that they will be exposed as nothing more than phantasmagoria and are thus unable to defeat Trump as he continues to emerge as the sole candidate who knows that the society of the spectacle or the era of simulacra is indeed the dominant regime of truth in contemporary media culture.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation.  Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1995. Print.

Duncombe, Stephen. Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York: The New Press, 2007. Print.

Goffmann, Irving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Print.

Gunn, Joshua. “Trump and the Arrival of Political Perversion.” Medium, 18 Mar. 2016. Web. 19 Mar. 2016.

Johnson, Paul. “A Return to Demagoguery: Donald Trump’s Challenge to Democracy.” Academia.edu 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

Rosenfield, Ross. “Trump, The Modern-Day PT Barnum.” The Hill, 15 Mar. 2016. Web. 19 Mar. 2016.

Silverstein, Jason. “Donald Trump Embraces Comparisons to P.T. Barnum, Says America Needs a Cheerleader.” New York Daily News, 11 Jan 2016. Web. 19 Mar. 2016.