anti-theatricality + politics (the finale?)

A wise person once said: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” Donald Trump is a clown. Let’s prevent the presidency from becoming his circus.

-  Richie Torres

On the ever darkening bronzer

The more extreme he becomes politically, the more theatrical his public persona must be. The dictator persona is full of obvious artifice: the sunglasses, the macho posturing, etc.

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat

At Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman gets the mea culpa from NBC chief marketing officer producer John Miller about The Apprentice and its role in elevating Trump to world-historical figure

Miller believes that without The Apprentice, Trump would never have been in a position to run for president. “He didn’t have a real company. It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They’d been bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. The Apprentice helped him survive that,” Miller told me. “People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”

.... Initially, we leaned into the idea that it was a show from Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. But when we saw some early takes, we realized Trump was going to be a big character. So we created the title sequence with the theme music of the show, which was For the Love of Money by the O’Jays. We shot the promos with Trump in his limousine, in his helicopter, in his jet, and at Trump Tower. We created the sense of an American royalty. We kept pounding that message over and over again. I called it “ruthless consistency.”

 .... Trump made Mark Burnett rent two floors in the Trump Tower. One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower. So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist. And then another part of that floor was the boardroom that was entirely created to make it look like it was a big, important boardroom. Because Trump’s real boardroom was shabby. You would never think of it as a big-time businessman’s boardroom.

.... When I retired in 2022, I started writing a book called How I Ruined American Culture. 

.... The show aired on Thursday nights and he would often call me on Friday and say, “John, how did we do?” I would just say, “We did very well.” And he would say, “We were the number one show on television!” I’d say, “No, we weren’t but we did very well.” That happened a number of weeks and I kept thinking, Does he just not read the ratings? And I just realized, that’s what he did: He said something he wanted people to believe over and over again, and eventually, it will be true.

 ... We had a wrap party after the third season at Lincoln Center. I was at the bar waiting to get a drink for my wife, and Trump came up to me and said, “John, I’ve got a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.”.... I said, “I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.”

He said, “The ratings would be huge!” 

On 2015 and Trump's entry into the race

I thought, Has there ever been somebody who is less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anybody that’s more telegenic and understands how to manipulate the media more than Trump?

 ... I do think he would like to be a dictator....   This time.... he’ll hire yes-men and he’ll hire loyal people. And so the government, at best, will function badly, and at worst, he will do his best to make it authoritarian. 

 

Live by showbiz, die by showbiz - a snippet about the Madison Square Garden hate-rally from this  fascinating report by Tim Alberta  at the Atlantic behind the scenes of the chaotic Trump campaign

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous.... who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign. In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It turns out to have been the operative who persuaded Vance to go with the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing: 

Alex Bruesewitz. Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves....   colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

Bonus non-Trump bit

Queen Elizabeth II thought Boris Johnson "better suited to the stage" than politics and two days before her death, after he resigned, she told a senior courtier in jest: "At least that idiot won't be organising my funeral" - Tim Footman

post-11/5 nightmareland update:

"Donald Trump won because he offered a majority of Americans what they wanted: anger and drama

In the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.”

- Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. 

- Joseph O'Neil , New York Review of Books

On the cabinet picks so far

"It’s like he’s releasing the casting list for the final season of America" - Keith Edwards

Why are we even participating in this piece of BAD political theater There are remedies that could be utilized even before the votes are certified We are WILLINGLY allowing the complete overthrow of our Constitution and our Government And nobody is doing a thing about it

- Rick Taylor

The Biden show was boring. They want the Trump show back. Americans can handle almost anything except boredom.

- Tom Nichols

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on Trump as The 21st Century’s Greatest, Ghastliest Showman - "Donald Trump has made himself a spectacle—and inescapable" - and cites the 1962 book The  Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the more useful things I read while researching Shock and Awe. 

In early 2017, just after Donald Trump took residency in the White House, the New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo engaged in an experiment. He spent a week doing all he could to ignore the new president. He failed. Whether Manjoo was scrolling through social media or news sites, watching sitcoms or sports—even shopping on Amazon—Trump was there, somehow, in his vision. In those early days of his presidency, Trump had already become so ubiquitous that a studious effort to avoid him was doomed. “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever,” Manjoo observed....

This week, the former president made himself inescapable once more. He will have another four-year term in office, the Trump Show renewed for a second season....

 

Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.

...  Boorstin pointed to Phineas T. Barnum, the famous peddler of spectacular hoaxes and lustrous lies. Barnum was a 19th-century showman with a 21st-century sense of pageantry; he anticipated how reality could evolve from a truth to be accepted into a show to be produced. Barnum turned entertainment into an omen: He understood how much Americans would be willing to give up for the sake of a good show.

....  Barnum, too, converted his fame as a showman into a second life as a politician. While serving in the Connecticut legislature, he crusaded against contraception and abortion, introducing a law that would become infamous for its repressions of both. 

..... Trump is Barnum’s obvious heir—the ultimate realization of Boorstin’s warnings. The difference, of course, is that Barnum was restricted to brick-and-mortar illusions. The deceptions he created were limited to big tops and traveling shows. Trump’s versions go viral. His humbugs scale, becoming the stuff of mass media in an instant. 

... In the introduction to his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the future president includes a quote from a book about the rich—a classic Trumpian boast doubling as an admission. “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world,” it reads, “an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”

When Trump announced his first presidential candidacy, he staged the whole thing in the gilded atrium of the New York City tower emblazoned with his name, a building that was real-estate investment, brand extension, and TV set. Many, at the time, assumed that Trump was running, essentially, for the ratings—that he might try to channel his campaign into an expansion of his power as an entertainer.

.... In 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, HuffPost announced that it would not report on him as part of its political coverage; instead, it would write about his antics in its Entertainment section. “Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” the publication declared. “We won’t take the bait.”

That category confusion explains a lot about Trump’s durability. He defies the old logic that tried to present politics and entertainment as separate phenomena. 

... The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.

“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017... 

....Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.

Some interesting points and some facts I didn't know....

But increasingly it feels like all that could be said and understood about Trump and Trumpism - analytically -  that work had already been done, thoroughly, as far back as 2016. Even before he was elected the first time.

All that eloquence and penetration was for naught - and the endless tsunami of great writing on the subject that continued, wave upon wave, riveting analysis after riveting analysis - all of it ultimately just contributed in its own way to the absolute annexation of consciousness, the attention-economy occupation that was Trump's victory. 

All eyes, all minds, on him.  

The absolute focus, the main-est of main characters.

So as much as I remain still fascinated by the theatrical and anti-theatrical tropes, I think I won't be bothering to read this kind of analysis any more.... 

It doesn't get you anywhere. There are no further insights to be gleaned. 

It doesn't do you any good, it probably does you bad, both in terms of exposure to the toxicity of the personality and the personality cult, and in terms of fooling yourself that it's any kind of way of staying on top of things, keeping ahead of events by keeping abreast of them ... the illusion that knowledge is power, that thinking and analysing is a contribution. 

Just for sanity's sake, I will have to ration the amount of exposure, the bandwidth of awareness, going forward.

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 the director's cut of a Guardian piece from October 14 2016 - eight years ago. 

Glamour, noun – 1. (archaic) visual illusion, a magical haze in the air causing things to appear different from how they really are (as in “cast the glamour”). Etymology: Scottish, variant of Scottish gramayre,  “magic, enchantment, spell”.

 

Trumpery, noun -  1.  worthless nonsense  2/ practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value. 3. (archaic) tawdry finery.  Etymology: Middle English (Scots), trumpery -  deceit or fraud;  from Middle French, tromper – to trick, as in trompe l’oeil.

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.