Context Relapse

Trumpism Cannot Outlast Trump

Blowback. Fallout. Backfire. Racist. Misogynistic. Bigoted. Offensive. 1939. If you were to read yesterday’s headlines, you might conclude that, after nine years, newspapers and magazines and TV stations had finally noticed something rather consistent about the Republican candidate for president.¹

I’m going to make this quick because I don’t think anyone really believes that what happened at Madison Square Garden is going to in any way affect Trump’s chances next week. But this theater of “fallout,” of rote condemnation, illustrates something important, and it’s that Tony Hinchcliffe, who all but recycled Trump’s own material from the last several years, has faced consequences, however minuscule, for his racist, misogynistic, and stupid remarks. Given that Trump himself has often made the same (or worse) remarks without consequences — and without, for years, newspapers willing to even call these racist remarks racist — we face an important question: Why Hinchcliffe and not Trump? And the answer is that Hinchcliffe is not Trump.

He doesn’t really mean what he’s saying. This has been Trump’s defenders’ refrain since he first entered the political mainstream — that the racism is for attention; that the misogyny is meant to shock; that he’s avoiding stodgy Washington clichés. But according to critics, Trump aims to be Hitler. He worships Putin. He’s building a kleptocracy (as if we don’t have one already). He colluded with Russia. He’s going to launch nukes. He’ll abolish democracy and put us all in camps. The speculations go on, from the logical to the ridiculous (and oft disproven). Others obsess over his psychology: What is he really up to? What causes a man to act this way? Who, in essence, hurt Trump?

There’s something religious in the open-endedness of these interpretations, in the lack of consensus over what Trump means when he speaks. I’m thinking of Canetti’s notes on Catholicism:

Communication between worshippers is hindered in several ways. They do not preach to each other; the word of the simple believer has no sanctity whatsoever… He only understands what is explained to him. The sacred word is tendered to him carefully weighed and wrapped up; precisely because of its sanctity it is protected from him… Even the way in which the communion is administered separates each believer from the others who receive it with him, instead of there and then uniting them. The communicant receives a precious treasure for himself.

When Trump speaks, it’s not before a public, nor a nation, but before millions of discrete, isolated individuals. Not all of us, but each of us. This is why Trumpism is surreal: it atomizes politics into oblivion. Whatever he says (or does, for that matter) bears no relation to reality. Trump’s speech and actions, we are invited to believe, are disconnected, dis-related, from all other speech and actions. But unhitched from Trump — away from his cadence, his intonations, his hand gestures, his image, his spell — and affixed to a garden variety racist, the exact same language is suddenly visible, and we see the words for what they mean.

Surrealism applied to economics is, of course, neoliberalism — the atomization of consumers and their total interchangeability based on purchasing power. When surrealism is applied to politics, it becomes fascism. Combine this surreal version of economics and this surreal version of politics, and we get an overwhelmingly powerful totalitarianism. Regardless of what Trump says, this is the movement behind his politics; and, as a political movement, Trumpism requires this incoherence, this detachment from meaning, to continue its momentum. And if Trump is the source of the incoherence, the fact of the matter is that this man is 78 years old, showing obvious signs of dementia, and as far as we know has never eaten a vegetable in his life. Trumpism, as a politics, won’t outlive Trump.²

None of this changes the fact that another Trump presidency would be catastrophic for the entire planet. What I am trying to say — and maybe I’m saying this to inure myself, to acclimate myself to the horror — is that such a catastrophe, despite having long-lasting, far-reaching consequences, would itself have a limited horizon. What Hinchcliffe’s comments demonstrate is that Trumpism is non-transferable, and that, once the spell dissipates, we’ll once again be able to agree, even if only out of politeness or hypocrisy, that what happened was horrific, cruel, stupid, and hateful. But more importantly, it shows that consensus, as a concept, as a goal, hasn’t been completely undone. It shows that, if we can once more agree on what words mean, on what things can or cannot be said in a political forum, we can arrive at what policies and regulations are and are not acceptable for a civil society.

This brief flicker of a return to context is especially crucial, I think, for our nation’s “liberal” party to take into account, given how freely and carelessly its own staggeringly stupid clichés — not to mention policies — have generated cynicism, disillusionment, and distrust of politics itself. Indeed, it’s because of (not despite) the Democratic Party’s three-decade refusal³ to deliver on its promises that someone as banal as Trump can shatter the language of politics altogether. But I’m not sure I’m quite so rosy, just yet, as to think they’ll do anything, if Harris wins (which I truly hope she does), but try to return this country to “normal” and defer this crisis another ten or twenty years. Nonetheless — and here, I think, are the immediate stakes of Tuesday’s election — I prefer to protest in a country where words have meaning than in a country where words have none. Only in the former is politics possible.

1. Even within the party itself, the Trump campaign received its share of “backlash.” Of Tony Hinchcliffe’s portrayal of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” for example, one Florida Republican, María Elvira Salazar, said “this rhetoric does not reflect GOP values.” (This despite Trump’s debasement and abandonment of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017.) It feels disorienting, admittedly, to see a handful of Republicans pretending that they aren’t, openly, the party of hate, exclusion, climate disasters, genocide, and authoritarianism; it feels like being back in 2015, before one candidate stood out from the others precisely because he dispensed, largely, with this kind of hypocrisy.

2. Once again, I need to make it explicitly clear to the eff bee eye that I am not using my extremely small and niche newsletter to advocate any form of violence.

3. I initially wrote “inability,” but I think the accumulation of policy — corporations over citizens, money over society, over and over again — makes the record of choices pretty clear.