Despite the many efforts to frame
Donald Trump as an entirely unique president, I find myself most often
associating his presidency with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Both
individuals entered the public eye through their work in entertainment, Reagan
as a second tier Hollywood movie star and Donald Trump through his role as
first a headline maker and then in his role as a reality tv star and
controversial interview subject.[1] In that sense, their
affective differences can easily be ascribed to the genres that defined their
acting careers. Reagan’s pleasant geniality is a product of his role as the
hero in a variety of somewhat small Hollywood melodramas. As Reagan aged, he
eased himself into the role of the genial and wise grandfather, reflecting the
roles he probably would have played if he had succeeded in staying in the
industry. Trump on the other hand reflects the generic conventions of reality
tv, a genre that emphasizes getting the audience’s attention at any cost and
creating an aesthetic of spontaneity and authenticity. In this sense, Trump
really isn’t that far from his persona that he and his producers constructed
for his reality tv show, The Apprentice.
Despite these surface level
differences, we can find some deeper continuities. Both figures have been
profoundly successful at avoiding the consequences of their mistakes in policy
and in speech. Reagan was known as the Teflon president because of these
qualities and Donald Trump has been able to weather a long series of mistakes
that would have easily sunk many other politicians’ careers. The two are also
defined by a loose relationship with the truth. It has been largely forgotten,
but Reagan would frequently relay the narratives of his own films as a
representation of an experience of World War II and Trump’s long history of
dishonesty is too lengthy to fully and meaningfully spell out. In this sense,
despite the efforts on the part of the liberal media and the apparatus of the
Democratic Party to frame the presidency of Donald Trump in terms of
discontinuity, a radical shift that marks a deep disturbance in the modes of
liberal governance and a threat to that tradition of governance, Donald Trump
can be seen as in continuity with a series of counter-revolutionary practices
that took center stage with the election of Ronald Reagan and continued through
the presidencies of George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush and even Barack
Obama.
In
effect, the last thirty or so years of official political leadership in the
United States can be understood within the framework that Paolo Virno laid out
in his critique of post-Fordist capitalism in the 1990’s. Virno noted that the
era was increasingly defined the qualities of cynicism, opportunism and fear. He frames this affective shift in
terms of the shifts in the accumulation of capital after the world revolution
in 1968 in his article, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment”: “Marked by
intensified domination, the post-Fordist productive process itself demonstrates
the connection between its own patterns of operation and the sentiments of disenchantment. Opportunism, fear, and cynicism—enter into production, or rather, they
intertwine with the versatility and flexibility of electronic technologies.” (Virno
14) Virno defines the terms as the
willingness to work cynically from rule set to rule set and to
opportunistically choose the rule set that is most advantageous to the subject
in question. In this sense, both politicians play a series of roles, and in
doing so, evade a series of criticisms. They both use a pose of sincere
spontaneity to mask the opportunistic shifts in their positions and as a way of
deflecting the criticism of their often-obvious deception and insincerity.
In
this sense, Trump is not an anomaly, but representative of certain political
trends of the post-68 era. Those qualities may appear to be more immediately
unpleasant than previous examples, but you can create a through line with the
presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent, of Bill Clinton, that easily connects to the
qualities of the Trump presidency. If Donald Trump is a more extreme version of
this model, it’s only because his predecessors have created that possibility. There is also a decay of the legitimizing structures of the bourgeois state that perhaps has its start with the Watergate moment.
That through line also points to the crisis of the post-1968 moment and the
gradual decline of the United States as a world power and the larger crisis in
the world system. All the candidates in different forms offered a return to
former glory and all failed in that effort. Reagan was perhaps able to hold
onto the illusion, but that illusion was broken with the later candidates. In a
certain sense, the failures of the Bush administration might have played a
helpful role for the Trump candidacy. There is no meaningful expectation that
the promises will be fulfilled, and the empty bellicosity is embraced as such. In
that sense, this trend can be understood within the context of the ‘morbid
symptoms’ that Gramsci identifies as the product of a stalled revolution. The
68 movement neither succeeds or fails and we are in a moment stasis.
[1]
This interpretation of Donald Trump reads his self-presentation as a self-made
businessman and entrepreneur as a semi-fictional media construct, created by
himself and the mainstream media.
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