Nothing new to say on Trump

From Brexit to terrorist massacres to the deaths of globally beloved musicians, 2016 has been a dispiriting year, and nothing about it has felt more dispiriting than the obligation to pay attention to the supremely asinine ramblings of Donald J. Trump. Through the vehicle of his unlikely presidential run, Manhattan’s most insecure billionaire has finally found a way to force the silent majority — those who would rather eat glass than watch his TV show — to pay attention.

In 1997, for the purposes of a “New Yorker” profile, the writer Mark Singer was forced to pay attention to Trump for an extended period of time. As David Remnick, the magazine’s current editor, makes clear in his wry introduction to the lightly expanded version of this piece, issued in a nice-looking hardcover as “Trump and Me”, Singer would rather have been doing something else.

This is understandable, but luckily for us, he endured and produced a viciously entertaining demolition of the branding savant with the peach pompadour who was to become the Republican party nominee for the most powerful elected office in the world.

Twenty years ago, Singer discovered what we have all been struggling with throughout this election cycle: the fact that on some fundamental level there is nothing to say about Trump. This is true mainly in the sense that he is a relentlessly hard-working salesman for himself, and has been so extensively covered by the media that there is nothing new to add. But Singer’s conclusion has deeper implications: he found his subject to be “a fellow with universal recognition but ... a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience”.

The profile-writer seeks, on the whole, to solicit revelations, but back then Trump appeared, as he does now, to be a man whose hidden depths are all shallows. He likes money. He plays golf. He tells lies, lightly and without shame. The price of his ubiquity seems to have been a sort of self-negation, his reduction to a persona — that of the cartoon millionaire, or as Singer puts it “an opera-buffa parody of wealth”.

Introspection would be fatal to this fragile psychological projection. It would kill the brand.

Trump’s lying (not to mention his racism, his misogyny and his placid ignorance of more or less everything) ought to disqualify him as a presidential candidate. As Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor of New York, put it: “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarised.”

His obvious personal flaws make him unsuited to be commander-in-chief, and his past dealings and obscure personal finances suggest that he does not have what the primmer sections of the US establishment term “the moral character” for high office. But Trump does not seek the good opinion of whiners and losers. It is often forgotten that he is a lifelong student of the power of positive thinking, a disciple from childhood of Norman Vincent Peale. Peale officiated at Trump’s first marriage. The funeral service for Trump’s father was conducted at Peale’s church. As far as the candidate is concerned, he just needs to envision the presidency and it will come. He is drawing it towards him.

When the energy at his rowdy rallies dips, Trump admits that all he has to do is shout “build the wall” and “they go nuts”. His promise to erect this chimerical construction on the US’s southern border has now been repeated so frequently that the edge of its ridiculousness has been blunted. Objectively, “the wall” is financially and technically unworkable. It is an absurd policy that has no reality except as a piece of positioning — a wall of the mind.

Trump is a proud nativist: a century ago he would have been screaming about Catholics and communists as well as the Chinese. We see this man who looks as if he has been sculpted out of a block of Gouda cheese, and we hear the roar of acclaim, and the truth becomes somehow a secondary thing, an appendage, the chimera’s vestigial tail. Certainly truth, understood in a minimal way as a shared public standard for authentication, something that can be checked and agreed on, is irrelevant to Trump, and to the forces for which he provides a mask or figurehead. Belief, ideology — the whole intellectual apparatus of public politics — can now be bypassed. Trump himself has no politics in the traditional sense. His candidacy is a repudiation of politics, an assault on politics as a public practice.

His basic claim is that he is a big man who can make deals with the other big men who run the world: America’s CEO, butting heads and getting crazy low prices from Putin and China. After all, who’s sharper than a New York real estate guy, am I right?

He inaugurates a possible future in which the public realm disappears entirely into the underground world of the Deal. Trump stands for a world in which the de facto holders of power negotiate with each other, without reference to any “public” at all, deals that the makers do not recognise as even having the character of politics. Just business. Just private transactions.

If by calling Trump some leftish insult — “racist” or “fascist” or whatever — your intention is to shame him, to reduce his power as a credible voice within the democratic public sphere, you should, at this point, probably save your breath. He sees you moving your mouth, but he does not recognise your right to a seat at the table, and that is all that counts. To his supporters in the heartland, you are merely indulging in some weird coastal liberal public-shaming ritual, which has no purchase if the shamee doesn’t rely on the goodwill of coastal liberals to make things happen in the world.

Trump speaks in an artificially restricted English. An academic analysis of his speeches suggests that their vocabulary is “at sixth-grade level”. What he sacrifices in nuance, he gains in range. It is how an AI would choose to speak if it wanted to communicate to the maximum number of humans. There is a sense in which networked technologies and financial markets are pushing in the direction of a Trumpian world of the Deal. The libertarian oligarchs of Silicon Valley would like nothing better than to disintermediate the governance market. To certain thinkers on the right, Trump opens giddying possibilities. He is the blockchain to the Fiat currency of participatory democracy, a terminal end-run around the post-1789 era.

So this is not an issue of one man’s moral fitness to lead. Nothing so human. Indeed Trump’s personality, in all its fluorescence, its garish dishonesty, is essentially a version of that trick where someone says “you have something on your shirt” and then flicks your nose. You look down and there he is, a little Cheeto-coloured pop-up, graphical enough to be legible on a mobile phone screen. Trump. The Donald. Dumb but fun. Shiny. Then comes the flick.

At the time of writing, Trump’s polling negatives are unprecedented, his campaign is broke, and his chances of beating Hillary Clinton in a general election seem slim. But even if he does not become the president of the United States, he points the way towards a future that looks very bleak indeed. The possibility of a collapse of democratic politics, or at least a hiatus, a temporary suspension of certain inconveniences such as transparency, accountability and the rule of law, has hung in the air since 9/11. Now it has been given shape as never before. This US election (and other similar currents around the world) has the potential to open the way for someone or something entirely unanticipated.

–Guardian News & Media Ltd