An appliance can become art, like Duchamp’s urinal did. But to do that it must give up being an appliance. A gallows installed on the National Mall on January 6, with a sign on it that read, “THIS IS ART,” did the reverse. It pretended to be art so that it could be an appliance, the one used by the MAGA rioters to hang Mike Pence. In the series American Fascism, hosted by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, Marylin Ivy’s excellent post, “This Is (Not) a Gallows,” discusses how fascism, to conceal its intent, often appears ridiculous. She writes, “Learning to take the ridiculous seriously—deadly seriously—is one of the soul-crushing demands of fascism.”
This oscillation between the absurd and serious has been a feature of both the MAGA movement and its führer. Like all cult leaders and malignant narcissists, Trump shifts from illusory to real, symbolic to literal, fake to authentic, chaotic to organized, false to veritable and humorous to serious as the situation allows. In this sense, his shapeshifting is more Pennywise than politician: “I’m not real enough for you?” His 2016 campaign of lies, disinformation, blame reversals, false incriminations and bluster was exactly what you’d expect of a reality-television bozo who is massively unprepared to hold political office. Yet his electoral victory was real and attended with all the pomp of a real presidency.
When the bozo took office, everyone but his followers hoped that he would become a real president, or at least “presidential.” But the blunders, assaults on democratic institutions, abuses of presidential authority and authoritarian-ass kissing came at a pace that the press and pundits could hardly keep up with and members of Congress were at a loss to check. Many wrote it off as the flubbery of a newb and few called its design: usurpation by upset. By the time the republican führer was punching holes in the Constitution and extorting loyalty from the legislative and judiciary branches, it was too late. As in Jaws, the authorities had told the beachgoers that it was safe to go back in the water.
Trump’s first term was not his first banquet at the table of American gullibility. He had a long history of showing Americans what a pretentious asshole could get away with. He pretended to be a successful businessman, when in reality he was a prodigal son who declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2001. He pretended to be a connoisseur of female beauty, when in reality he was a chauvinist whom twenty-six women accused of sexual misconduct, including one who was thirteen years old when he allegedly raped her at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s parties. He pretended to be the founder of a university, when, in reality, he was a fraud whom a federal judge convicted of using Trump University for “swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars.” In the Apprentice, he pretended to be an authority on business skills, which is to say, he pretended to be what he pretended to be. In that media meta-unreality it looked as if he’d found his calling. But in 2015, NBC fired him for exposing his true calling: to be the president whose bedtime reading was the speeches of Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s style of governance, though more farcical than real, issues from the same unreality that the narcissist himself inhabits. His lies and outright denial of commonly held truths and facts seem unreal. His blame reversals, turning victims into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims, seem unreal. His impudence and impunity (“I could shoot somebody and not lose voters”) seem unreal. Yet this very unreality, like a cult leader’s charisma, cements his followers’ loyalty and gives him a power that, in effect, is quite real.
While any of Trump’s lies, crimes and cons would disqualify a real person from holding office in the real world, in the unreal realm of the malignant narcissist they present an opportunity to turn the tables and reverse the charges. Tax fraud, withholding payment from employees and contractors, falsifying documents, loan defaults, hush money, inciting insurrection, attempting to overturn an election, coveting classified documents, launching an eponymous crypto currency and accepting bribes from tech billionaires belong to a world in which political and legal consequences do not exist. It is a world impervious to justice; a world that glorifies the winner/perpetrator and incriminates the loser/victim; a world in which lies, insults, name-calling, false promises and self-contradiction are used to “crush the best defenses of logic and ordinary morality,” as Raoul de Roussy de Sales put it his assessment of Hitler’s speeches (My New Order A Collection of Speeches by Adolph Hitler).
Like Hitler, Trump is a “master of throwing up verbal smoke screens to conceal his intended moves.” He enamels himself in unrelenting denial and counter-attacks, and never apologizes or admits error. He fawns on dictators and strongmen who are hostile to the U.S.—Putin, Xi, Kim, Maduro, Erdogan, Bolsonaro—without political fallout. The title of his book, Save America, is an inversion: by “save” he means to destroy international alliances, agencies of soft power, trade agreements, checks and balances, democratic norms, the separation of church and state, and the separation of wealth and state. His ostensible support for the working and lower-middle classes amounts to blocking the funding allocated by Congress to assist them and cutting taxes for billionaires. Like Hitler, Trump is a broken record of broken promises.
In an 1819 letter John Adams said, “abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” Trump’s abuse of words has been the instrument by which he has chicaned and divided the American public, flouted the country’s democratic institutions and committed the crimes by which he has enriched himself. However ludicrous his words may seem—“drain the swamp,” turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” proclaim January 6 as “a day of love,” “take back” the Panama Canal, “we’re going to have“ Greenland, “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring to it,”—we must take them seriously, because they become deeds.
Marylin Ivy quotes Theodore Adorno: “In order to allow narcissistic identification, the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic. . . . Even the fascist leader’s startling symptoms of inferiority, his resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths, is thus anticipated.” As the clownish narcissist moves ahead with his mad agenda in real time, having like Hitler and Mussolini risen to power through legitimate means, why are we still wondering whether we should take him seriously? Last week he blamed Zelensky for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The week before he joked about running for a third term. Will he hand Ukraine over to Putin? Will he overturn the Twenty-Second Amendment? Of course he will. Because those suggestions evoke the same response that the “THIS IS ART” sign on the gallows did: “Is he fucking serious?”