Authentic Trump

Donald Trump managed to shock the world once again. Last week, he actually sank so low that he publicly attacked Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi’s looks. Not that anyone thought he wasn’t the type to say such rude things. He’s made a habit of it for many years.

This excerpt, from a Salon.com piece titled “Horrors of the Trump Doctrine: Inside the GOP Frontrunner’s Terrifying Interview with the NY Times” (Parton 2016), is typical of mainstream news coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, particularly from slightly liberal left-leaning outlets. The photo accompanying the article, like those in so many news stories about Trump, features his florid face framed by similarly glowing orange strawberry-blond hair in a medium close-up shot that brings the reader uncomfortably close. Trump’s expression is invariably angry, mouth open mid-shout, brow furrowed with intensity, eyes squinting, face perspiring, finger or hand waving. Trump is captured in motion, as if he can never be still. He is shown as grotesque, unnatural, and unruly; his behavior articulated as shocking and predictable in its outrageousness; his statements presented as his own doctrine, separate from the “Grand Old Party,” referring to the Republicans (GOP). He is the monster we have always known he was, horrific now that he wants to be president of the United States, a position requiring staid, controlled, and civil behavior, which he cannot master.

We have another candidate in the primaries who is unconventional, Democrat Bernie Sanders, and who expressly disidentifies with his party and with traditional ways of doing politics. Also worth highlighting, right-wing candidate Ted Cruz advocates for policies in line with and sometimes more right-wing than Trump’s. In other words, it is not Trump’s policies that make him remarkable. Neither of these candidates have attracted the same media attention as Trump.

While some news stories and social media memes align Trump with Hitler and Mussolini, Trump is a distinctly contemporary U.S. beast. Prior to his candidacy for the presidency, Trump was known as a mogul and reality TV celebrity, the latter thanks to his role on NBC’s The Apprentice. Inevitably, comparisons are drawn between his candidacy for president and a reality TV show. His popularity in the media forces us to contend with the particular ways in which the current culture of surveillance—reality TV is an aspect—details a vernacular of surveillance, part of what I call an “ethic of surveillance,” which encompasses practices, aesthetics, conventions, and privileged behaviors that arise in contexts of surveillance, but exceed these.

One ethic of the culture of surveillance that emerged in reality TV is the productive tension between privileging authentic-seeming self-expression and curated displays: one appears most authentic when one is unable to stop oneself from breaking the expected conventions of a particular space with strict parameters for behavior. A truism of reality TV is that participants who present as so comfortable on camera that they behave in ways that suggest they forget about the cameras, or who are so overcome with emotion that they cannot contain themselves despite the cameras, are articulated as authentic, no matter how unlikeable. Similarly, displays of consistent behavior (or even hateful behavior) across disparate spaces also establish authenticity (Dubrofsky 2011). Trump presents as the same person on his reality show, in his many public appearances prior to the primaries, and in his bid for the presidency, which works both for and against him: despite conventions for appropriate behavior for presidential candidates, Trump explicitly and seemingly willfully breaks these—appearing bellicose, off-the cuff, and spontaneous—just as the authentic reality star breaks the expectation for curated behavior under the purview of the surveillance camera.

Part of the ethic privileged in a culture of surveillance is emotional transparency, with the implication that authentic emotions are visible on the body. This is a raced ideal—as transparency is most readily achieved by white bodies and problematic for bodies of color, an idea expressed in Rachel Hall’s (2015) work on airport security. Hall describes the privileged traveler performing transparency by making his or her inner self visible on his or her body, hiding nothing. Transparency, Hall demonstrates, is assumed of white bodies, brown bodies being read as opaque, unreadable, required to reveal their hidden recesses. This fits what Simone Browne (2015) calls “racializing surveillance,” when surveillance policies, performances, and practices produce norms about race. Trump embodies this racialized ideal in his emotional displays.

Not only is the crossover from reality TV celebrity to presidential candidate an uneasy transition, it highlights how Trump’s whiteness intersects uncomfortably with his classed behavior. The reality TV genre is seen as trashy, featuring people without class in behavior and often in social and financial status. The presidency, however, is for the elite white upper-middle or upper-class (usually male)—Barack Obama negotiates the politics of respectability to fit this ideal. Popular press articulations of Trump belie the uneasy alliance between elite whiteness and white behavior marked as working class or poor. As Tasha Rennels (2015) argues, a transgression on reality TV occurs when a white body does not perform according to middle- or upper-class expectations for whiteness, creating what Bernadette M. Calafell (2015) might call the “monstrosity of whiteness,” a whiteness infected by otherness—lower-classness in this instance. Trump is infantilized as petulant, unruly, narcissistic, his behavior often compared with that of a child having a tantrum. He needs supervision. Civilizing. The critical implications of this come to light if we look at the Boston Globe’s recent mock front page, an apocalyptic foretelling of a day under President Trump, which speaks of panic about a president unable to exhibit appropriately classed behavior.

The center photo on the mock front page is of Trump, orange-faced, mid-shout as usual, with the byline “Live Now: President Addresses the Nation” and “Breaking News: Trump: Deport illegals ‘So Fast Your Head Will Spin’” across the bottom of the photo. Below are the headlines “US Soldiers Refuse Order to Kill ISIS Families” and “New Libel Law Targets ‘Absolute Scum in the Press’” (direct quotes from Trump), illustrating Trump’s uncouth behavior and bloodlust. Other headlines announce Trump being awarded a Nobel Prize, penning a novel, and having a park named after him, attesting to his narcissism and hubris, qualities unbecoming in a president. This apocalyptic vision is a reactionary call for a return to an imaginary pre-Trump-era of civil politics, when leaders spoke rationally, wars were fought justly, immigration policies were compassionate, and the news media were not owned by the 1 percent aligned with government and big business. This apocalyptic story dangerously elides the larger machinery that is the government and big business, belying a cultural preoccupation with individualism, and obfuscation of the systemic. Taking Trump for the system means we forget that the current machinery produced a string of Trumps: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruz (to name a few) and leaves us longing for the more civil days of Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, when white elite men knew how to speak their hatred in a civil manner. This is deeply troubling.