Donald the Terrible Show

Liberals are clueless about Trump and they will likely wake up with their hand in a chamber pot on November 5, 2020.  They see Trump as a fanatical right winger, Hitler incarnate, and believe that this will drive voters to a reasonable centrist technocrat, like Biden, Buttigieg or even Warren.  My bet is that Trump will win in 2020 unless liberal Democrats do the unthinkable – embrace Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate.

I make this bet not because I am a strong Bernie’s supporter who is attracted to his program and makes regular $27 contributions to his campaign.  In fact, I have no illusions that his signature initiatives, M4A and GND, will be signed into law in the foreseeable future.  I even doubt whether M4A and GND are what most Americans really want.  But this is precisely why I believe that only Bernie has a real chance of beating Trump in 2020. 

If this sounds absurd to liberal pundits and their audiences, it is because they are looking at Trump through a wrong set of lenses.  Theirs are the lenses of a conventional political popularity contest, whose goal is to attract voters by appealing to their lowest common denominator, or views that are shared by most and detested by fewest. Ideas like patriotism, motherhood, professionalism, folksiness, and conventional likeability.  In the view projected by these lenses, the most liked and least detested candidate wins.  Hence the constant polling trying to gauge how candidates score on likeability scales.

Pondering whether such lenses are useful for predicting winners of elections is generally a wild goose chase, because such predictions are either self-fulfilling prophecies or tautologies.  Pundits have no way of knowing who the public likes or dislikes.  They can either turn their opinions on that matter into self-fulfilling prophecies by bamboozling the public into liking or disliking candidates through media appeals, or into a tautology – a candidate who won must have been the one who was most liked and least disliked.  Such views are true by definition or convention, and it is nearly impossible to disprove them.

The 2016 provided a unique opportunity to disprove this conventional wisdom, because the most disliked candidate, Donald Trump, won the election instead of losing it, as pundits said he would.  To a critical thinker, this should be a sign that conventional wisdom is either altogether wrong or at least does not apply to Trump.  Yet the liberal pundits missed that clue by a mile and doubled down on the conventional wisdom.

I realized that Trump is a different kind of a player than a conventional American politician during his first debate with Hillary Clinton.  “Debate” is a misnomer here.  These events are theatrical spectacles in which the performers adhere to strictly scripted roles projecting über-conventional images of a successful American politician – patriotic, folksy, honest, good-natured, poised, fair, quick witted but not too brainy, and physically fit. Trump ostensibly broke this character – he was physically menacing, threatening, crafty, cunning, mean, arrogant and very un-gentleman like.  Despite the punditry almost unanimously proclaiming him a “loser” I realized that this guy was playing a very different game, one appealing not to pundits but directly to the segment of the public that his “most qualified ever” opponent labeled “deplorables” in her infinite wisdom.  And since pundits are few and deplorables are many, I thought it was Trump who actually won that debate. 

This connection between Trump’s “debate” role and the intended audience was prompted by a video clip I saw earlier on the Facebook, showing Trump treacherously sucker-punching from behind his opponent at a professional wrestling show.  The obvious intention of the clip was to discredit Trump, portray him as an unrefined brute and a clown unfit for the dignified role of the President of the United States.  It was an obvious smear effort launched by Trump’s opponents, akin to many such campaigns launched by Republican operatives against Democratic candidates (Willie Horton, Gary Hart on Monkey Business, Swift Boat Captains, etc.).  But why would Trump willingly embrace such ostensibly unfavorable character himself during the “debate?”

Like most members of the American literati class, I do not watch professional wrestling shows.  My knowledge of the genre comes mainly from my interest in cognitive sociology, specifically the seminal book by French literary theorist Roland Barthes “Mythologies” published in 1957, in which he explores social aspects of communication.  The central concept of Barthes’ analysis is “myth” or a communicative device that consists of two layers of meaning, the concrete meaning grounded in the sensual perception of physical attributes of objects, and abstract meaning grounded in the perception of social significance of that object.  For example, an article of clothing is perceived at the first, concrete, level as an object with various, physical attributes, such shape, color, pattern, etc. On the second, abstract, level the same garment also symbolizes the “dress code” i.e. social circumstance and social status of the person who wears it.  In a well-constructed myth, the physical attributes of the object embody the abstract social meaning – the very shape, color and pattern of the garment clearly signal the social occasion and the status of the person who wears it, eg. blue collar vs. white collar worker, guests vs. servers or ushers, physicians vs. medics, vs. patients, business professional vs. service worker etc.

One of the popular myth systems explored by Barthes was wrestling, known as “professional wrestling” in the US.  Professional wrestling is a spectacle of staged fights between two cartoonish characters representing moral virtues of good and evil.  The key to a successful wrestling spectacle is that the physical features and gestures of the actors must clearly and unambiguously embody the moral virtue they play. Thus, to quote Barthes (p.17):

“[…] each physical type expresses to excel the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Tahuvin, a fifty year old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nickname, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of salaud, the ‘bastard’ (the key concept of any wrestling match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of sign: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but I addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter […].

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest.  I know from the start that all Thauvin’s actions, his treacheries, cruelties, acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard –octopus.  Wrestlers therefore have a physique peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’ Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts, just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor […]”

After watching the video clip posted on Facebook by his detractors, and watching his performance in his “debate” with Clinton, it dawned on me that Trump plays a very different character than one that the pundit class expects of a conventional politician – the  “bastard” character from a professional wrestling show instead of one of the “most electable” American politician.  It is rather obvious for anyone willing to open his eyes and see that no person, no matter how tone deaf, can inadvertently commit so many obvious blunders as Trump did during his presidential campaign.  There must be a method to this madness, and this method is turning a trite and boring spectacle of staged presidential “debates” into a professional wrestling show.  I am of course not the only one who made this observation.  Matt Taibbi devotes an entire chapter of his book “Hate, Inc.” to draw an analogy between Trump’s behavior and professional wrestling shows.

However, most of the liberal echo chamber missed this rather obvious conclusion by a mile.  They still think that it is the most electable American politician show and double down on bombarding the public with a barrage of examples how horrible a character Trump is.  The Democratic party establishment, never a thought leader and always sheepishly following conventional wisdom, followed the suit by starting impeachment proceeding against Trump for alleged treason, knowing darn well that the chances of him being actually removed from office are smaller than passing a M4A law. 

All those “character assassination” attempts play right into the role of Trump playing the “bastard” in a professional wrestling show.  Far from hurting Trump, they reinforce public perceptions that Trump is well in character of the “bastard” and will reward him for good performance with four more years in office.  On the surface, this sounds paradoxical.  Why would the audience reward a vile and despised character? Do not they expect the good guy beating the bad guy at the end?

They do, but only if the good guy enters the stage and joins the fray.  So far, however, no good guy is on the stage.  The audience rooted for Trump in 2016 because he was the bastard beating up even bigger villains, “Crooked Hillary” and Washington “swamp critters.”  They did it, because they had nothing to lose, but they could score a symbolic victory against those who, in their view, spat in their faces for too long – the political establishment. American politics ceased to have any meaningful relationship to the lives of ordinary people long time ago and instead became a theatrical spectacle and a farce of democracy.  It is not that political decisions do not affect lives of ordinary people, but that they are handed down by technocratic elites as done deals and, in the words of the German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, ‘elections change nothing.’  In the United States, elections, especially national elections, became a trite and boring theatrical spectacle of “electability.”  Sending a villain from a professional wrestling show to Washington was the American public’s way of throwing rotten tomatoes at bad actors in a bad show.  It is not that it would change anything, but seeing the despised critters run at least offered the spectators a sense of schadenfreude.

Trump has not broken the bastard character while in office.  This is particularly evident in his treatment of immigration.  The Obama administration implemented massive deportations program that reported nearly 3 million people, earning Obama the title “The deporter in chief.”  Trump’s administration deported far fewer people in total and on a per year basis. .  However, while the Obama administration deported people quietly, without much publicity, Trump brought deportations to the center of public attention, which flooded the media with images of countless adults and children suffering in the US custody.

Why would the president deliberately bring such negative publicity to his administration?  A president concerned with maintaining a “nice guy” image, like Obama, certainly would not, but Trump plays the role of the bastard from a professional wrestling spectacle, and public inflicting of suffering is in character.  Here is Roland Barthes again (p. 19)

“What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice.  Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks.  The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by intolerable affliction {…} This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular {…} Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood {…} suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers.  What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one’s mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering.  The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions […]”

That this is a spectacle for public consumption becomes evident when we juxtapose it with Trump’s decision to call off air strikes on Iranian radar facilities in retaliation for drowning an American drone.  The justification Trump gave for his decision was excessive number casualties such attack would produce.  This shows Trump willingness to orchestrate a show of pain and suffering, but backing off actions actually inflicting new pain and suffering. 

This, of course does not imply that the suffering of people detained and deported is not real, but that such suffering is merely a byproduct of the normal functioning of the American state and its cherished institutions rather than a sadistic act of the president or other government officials.  America incarcerates, detains and deports more people than only other country in the world and created a vast prison-industrial complex to perform this task thoroughly and efficiently.  This process is designed to punish, that is, inflict suffering on the incarcerated persons, but by extension, on their families and communities.  No government official, including the President, can alleviate this suffering without dismantling the institutional apparatus that produces this suffering.  All he can do is to either cover this suffering up or expose it to public view.  By contrast, ordering a military strike rests solely within the purview of presidential discretion, so the suffering such an action may produce hinges on presidential fiat.  Trump showed no hesitation to publicly reveal suffering already inflicted by the American carceral state, but stopped short of actually inflicting new suffering by the means of discretionary military action.

This apparent paradox reveals the true nature of Trump’s presidency – it is all about a spectacle portraying him as the meanest ass-kicking bastard in town, rather than about the business of governing.  He is an entertainer, a mountebank, a con artist if you will, not a politician in any conventional sense, let alone an incarnation of Hitler. Here is Roland Barthes (p.20):

“But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography.  It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.”

Trump perfected the mean ass-kicking bastard role in his television shows and expertly plays it in the circus spectacle that has become of the American presidential elections.  It is all spectacle because ‘elections change nothing’, but it is a very different kind of spectacle than that delivered by the American political establishment.  Instead of a spectacle in which cartoonish characters mull bromides signaling their “likeability” and “electability”, Trump’s spectacle is the one in which the prize goes to the meanest ass-kicking bastard in town.

Without doubt, the professional managerial class and media pundits are disgusted with Trump’s spectacle and are anxious to return to business as usual: technocrats handing down political decisions benefiting corporations, and elections limited to bromide slogans parroted by hand-picked by political party bosses politicians.  However, the managed classes, the “deplorables” seem to enjoy the Trumps’ spectacle, if only to see the pundit class and the “liberal elite” royally pissed.  This is what the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson called politics of total retribution of people who have been relegated to the sewers of society and whose only chance of getting respect is to poop on the party of the elites.  To quote SusanMcWilliams (The Nation, December 15, 2016)

“rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, [they] stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal. You might not beat him, but you can make him pay attention to you. You can haunt him, make him worry that you’re going to steal into his daughter’s bedroom in the darkest night and have your way with her—and that she might actually like it.”

The “bastard in the White House” game is sticking up the middle finger at the Washington establishment and it is likely to continue into 2020.  The only way to beat that bastard is to play the same game he is playing, the professional wrestling spectacle, and remain true to its character.  Who among the Democratic prospects will best play this role without breaking the character?

It is hard to imagine wonky Buttigieg playing the role of a mean badass taking on Trump. He may impress limousine liberals and NPR types, but he has zero appeal to the minorities and the left behind managed classes, especially those enjoying Trump’s spectacle.  Neither does speaking on both sides of his mouth Joe Biden who promises to cut deals with the other team behind your back but cannot refrain from tripping over his own shoelaces in public appearances.  Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for everything, but the clout to change nothing, which poorly suits her for the hero role in the presidential wrestling spectacle.  Like Buttigieg, she may impress policy wonks and professional managerial classes, but not the managed classes whose support is essential for winning the election.

 

The only candidate who may successfully take on the meanest ass-kicking bastard inside the beltway is Bernie Sanders. Unlike most Democratic Party apparatchiks, Sanders is a straight shooting never wavering character from the myth of politics as it ought to be (but never was). His promise to beat the crap out of billionaires who stole or democracy and bring back good things to life, M4A, free college and good union jobs, is well suited for the genre.  It promises a titanic struggle against evil forces, and rewards when the struggle is over.  The rewards are akin to the 70 virgins awaiting jihadists in heaven, enticing but elusive, so each warrior can fill that promise in with details of his desire. 

And this is precisely Sanders’ strength.  He promises a quest, not a laundry list of “achievable” goals cooked up by political consultants and DNC hacks.  Unlike Warren’s plans, whose details provide ammunition to the detractors to undermine them, Sanders’ proposal can only be accepted or rejected as a whole, thus further signaling the inevitability of the titanic battle that it promises.  Either way, Sanders’ message is reinforced and made even more appealing to the mobs of spectators enjoying the Trump’s show. This kind of spectacle may be repulsive to the professional managerial class, but they better hold their refined noses and embrace it or else they will wake up to four more years of Trumps’ meanest bastard in the beltway show.