Trump and Glam

Continuing the short series of pieces about Trump, glam, and fascism written back when he was first seeking election (as opposed to seeking reelection, in 2020). 

This is a Guardian piece from October 14 2016 - eight years ago. 

When I was writing my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I kept running into things that seemed like strange premonitions – eerie previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now.

 In mid-Seventies interviews, David Bowie kept talking - in an unnervingly fixated way -about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the Western World: a charismatic superhero who might possibly emerge not from conventional politics but the entertainment field. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous and fatalistic, as if this scenario was inevitable. At other times, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up the mess made by the permissive society.

 At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States,” or maybe even as ruler of the world. 

  And Tony Defries, who simultaneously masterminded Bowie’s rise to stardom and promoted his own mogul-in-the-making image. Defries left many of his contemporaries convinced that his ultimate ambitions – and destiny – lay in politics.  One boss of a rival management company confessed that “the only thing that’s worried me about Tony is that one day he might be representing a country in which I happen to live. And I might find myself at war, with no control whatsoever!”

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On the surface, Donald Trump and the glam era’s stars and star-makers couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair?  The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus.  Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.

 And yet... there are some unlikely affinities. As signaled by his gilded tower on 5th Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and glam likewise share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its refrain “no time for losers” crystallises his Social Darwinist worldview.

 A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a greater number of losers.  Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, most of the principal characters in Shock and Awe - Bowie, Marc Bolan Alice Cooper, Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, Bryan Ferry –nimbly reinvented themselves and sometimes trampled people on their way up.  They willed their fantasy-self into existence.  This same imperative of “don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by Rocky Horror Show’s Frank N. Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired: it had an imitative quality that had never really been seen before in pop, with audiences dressing up like the star. Responding to the sophistication of Roxy Music’s image and artwork, and to sly winking lyrics like “sure to make the cognoscenti think”, the group’s following costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Ferry recalled how some of their North of England followers would turn up to the shows in full black tie as if attending the Academy Awards ceremony. 

Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is clearly something else going on: an aspirational and admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth and entitlement, who’s free to do and say whatever he wants. Trump is a fantasy figure as much as he’s a mouthpiece for resentment and rancor.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of The Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” Describing this “very effective form of promotion”, he and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. This was a technique that Tony Defries used to break Bowie in America: travelling everywhere in a limo, surrounded with bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t yet, until the world started to take the illusion for reality.

Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. As commentators have noticed, banks see him as a promoter not a CEO: the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t even own as such, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”:  an investment that outperform the market based on an inflated belief in its future growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool. Twitter (Trump’s natural habitat) has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money.  Glamour stocks are self-fulfilling prophecies initially:  magic tricks of confidence, they win because everyone believes they’re going to win. They keep on winning right up until they lose, when the gulf between their perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge. 

Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars like Bowie and Bolan. You can see the same chameleonic flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons.  Years ago he used Birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it as a political liability. Same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about building a Wall. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer  analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps,” just like Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and  showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama. And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics.  The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with a vote for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”

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Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late Sixties, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: the Bowie/Roxy era was supplanted by pub rock and punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the glammy New Romantics, while in America hair metal was displaced by grunge. 

Strangely, you can see similar dynamics at play in contemporary politics.  Hilary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a politician and leader except what the public perversely craves: being an entertainer.  Hilary is the American political equivalent of a value stock – those dowdy companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance in the markets.

The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn.  Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK politics equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris: the presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test, who couldn’t hide his distaste for visually flashy, image-over-substance bands like Roxy Music, Sparks, and New York Dolls. 

Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theater, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House.  Corbyn even tried to change the format and feel of Prime Minister’s Questions, saying that he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQ, Corbyn responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”  

Oratory is not his strong suit: he seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language - cadence, musicality of utterance, metaphor – that sway the listener by bypassing the faculty of reasoned judgement. But as Gary Younge argued recently, Corbyn’s plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his following, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come.... to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics.”

This is how a personality cult has built up around Corbyn, despite his honest and accurate admission that "I'm not a personality.”  It’s very indie, very alt-rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism. And of course it’s also Corbyn’s principled consistency over the long haul that seals the deal: an unyielding integrity that makes him closer to a Neil Young than a Bowie.  

While the classically elegant Bryan Ferry fraternizes with the nobility and admits to having conservative views, Brian Eno – who abandoned the glam image soon after leaving Roxy for casual, artist-in-the-studio wear – can now be found penning columns arguing “Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister? Why not?”. But as with a taste for indie’s lack of showy drama, it takes a refined sensibility to see past the surface appearance. The general public want a leader to look like a leader. The performance of a public image is considered as important as the actual job performance.

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Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications like knowledge and temperament. Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House Correspondents Dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis. Politics without charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz. 

“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggy mania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke with seeming admiration for the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience...  [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.” 

Fingers crossed, the Trump show gets cancelled next month.

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If you consult your copies of K-Punk, the posthumous Mark Fisher anthology, and turn to page 617, you will find "Mannequin Challenge" - the last piece Mark ever wrote, an unfinished essay from October 2016  - it just stops short mid sentence. It's about the Trump campaign versus the Clinton campaign, the libidinal deficit of the latter compared to the former, and in part the essay picks up from this piece I did for my The Guardian. To the end me and Mark were passing the baton back and forth - albeit more sporadically than the blog heyday.