Trump ad absurdum
October 6, 2020
I WAKE up and the first thing I do is check on the health of President Donald Trump. He remains alive and in office, and is even back at the White House. Spitting in the face of karma and kicking nemesis up the arse, Trump urges people not to be “afraid” of the coronavirus and claims he might actually be “immune” to it, even though the clips show him standing on the Truman balcony, peeling off his surgical mask and gasping for air like a trout in a bucket.
“Don’t be afraid of it! You’re gonna beat it!” he says.
He is clearly struggling to breathe and pundits repeat the words, “the next few days are crucial.” If he recovers, it is because he has had access to the best possible medical care, his opponents say again and again.
His aides are now spinning his exposure to COVID-19 into some sort of competitive advantage in the November election: “He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual ... Joe Biden doesn’t have that.”
This is the reductio ad absurdum of a type of celebrity politics in which performance is measured entirely by TV spectacle.
More than 210,000 American people are dead and Trump is still embroiled in his own deranged psychodrama, with the entire Presidential staff employed to patch up and reinforce his giant, crumbling ego and pretend he is invincible, even as he spews and splutters and infects them all.
To paraphrase Timothy Snyder in his provocative and profound The Road to Unfreedom, policy has been displaced by propaganda. Substance has given way to appearance. Competence has been replaced by carnival. And instead of having a vision of where the world is going and a plan how to get there, you have a paranoid personality cult telling you who else to blame.
“Perhaps we are slipping from one sense of time to another because we do not see how history makes us, and how we make history,” Snyder wrote. If I can summarise his argument: rapacious variants of capitalism in the United States and elsewhere have left millions of people with no obvious future. New communication technologies have at the same time transformed the way we understand and pass judgment on the world, but instead of offering us new political possibilities, they have been hijacked by cynical political engineers working on the behalf of crooked plutocrats who do not want to share their ill-gotten gains. Hence, Brexit. Hence, Trump.
And instead of offering coherent political platforms, distraction has now become the key tactic when it comes to swaying voters and managing news cycles: they call it throwing “dead cats”, where you provoke a new outrage in order to make the public forget about the last one.
Trump and his ilk have poisoned the well so much that one of the most common responses to his hospitalisation is that he has faked his illness in order to distract attention from his tax returns, or his faltering re-election campaign. When Boris Johnson was infected a few months ago, there were similar murmurings.
Rosenblum and Muirhead’s A Lot of People Are Saying talks about the new “conspiracism” promoted mostly by Trumpist conservatives in the United States. I think they are crediting the perpetrators of this new-style far-right political discourse with rather more good faith than they deserve. The far-right know they are poisoning the well. They know they are dragging their opponents down to their level. And they know they are undermining public trust and making sure that no one, anywhere, has access to any sort of moral high ground.
The “fake news” phenomenon is here described as a belief in “a plot to make up news stories, concoct fictitious intelligence reports, and manufacture data”, but it is no accident that the people who deploy the phrase the most are the kleptocrats in the Kremlin and the would-be kleptocrats in the White House, who have most to fear from a free press. It is a deliberate attempt to obscure all public discourse in a fog of world-weary cynicism. The best defence for Trump, Putin and their ilk is: we are all as bad as each other so you might as well choose me.
Rosenblum and Muirhead also discuss the QAnon conspiracy and say, “Not only does the theory fail to explain anything - it also lacks elementary coherence and defies common sense.” But I think they miss the point. I would be very surprised if more than a handful of people genuinely believe the QAnon claims that Hillary Clinton is somehow and for no very good reason the leader of a global paedophile ring. QAnon is less a coherent political worldview and more a badge of allegiance and a way of saying to your opponents fuck you, we play by different rules.
This is politics by innuendo, by sneering aside. It is the politics of those who know, deep down, that right isn’t on their side, that however slowly the arc of history bends towards justice, they are as sure as hell going to be on the wrong side of it.
