Trump's Star May Finally Be Fading
Donald Trump, our criminally-indicted former president who recruited The National Enquirer in an attempt to secure his 2016 election, took to Truth Social to incite the troops last Tuesday before his trial session. “RALLY BEHIND MAGA,” he exhorted. And then. . .Well, according to NBC’s Vaughn Hilliard, what happened then was about ten people showed up outside the courthouse to support Trump’s cause – his cause being himself – a turnout the size of which Trump later attributed to the public being prevented from approaching the building. But this, like every word out of Trump’s mouth, was a lie, according to reporters who averred that anyone who wanted to could walk right up to the courthouse door. No one stormed the Bastille – not because they couldn’t but because they didn’t want to.
You would think that Trump would have enough MAGA fanatics to parade outside and wave their placards with Trump’s face atop Jesus’s body, if only to buck up his flagging spirits. Where was “pillow man” Mike Lindell, for instance? But the paucity of his crowd suggested something truly promising for a change in this morbid political season - that maybe, finally, at long, long last, Donald Trump’s show was wearing out its welcome, and that it might even be about to close. We may not be quite at the end yet. But it looks, at least, as if we’re at the discounted tickets stage.
I call it a “show” because that is exactly what it has been these past seven years. Donald Trump was never a politician. In fact, as we know, that has always been his main selling point. He wasn’t like the rest of the presidential would-be’s – the Jeb Bushes and the Ted Cruzes and the Marco Rubios. He resisted the typical political platitudes for the platitudes of far-right extremism. He wasn’t a Washington insider. He didn’t talk policy. He didn’t even talk sense. He talked drinking bleach and shining ultraviolet light inside your body to kill the covid virus. He wasn’t surrounded by experts. He winged it. And he got away with it, in part because he did upset the political traditions and challenged the politesse that his supporters abhorred, albeit the very things that allowed our politics to function and our democracy to survive; and in a much larger part, I think, because he was a celebrity, which placed him in an entirely different valence than anyone against whom he was running – in fact, against anyone who had ever run for the presidency.
Donald Trump’s celebrity has been his protection.
Trump had a certain political acuity. He realized the extent to which white men, especially uneducated white men, felt threatened and even demeaned by growing pluralism – by feminism, racial advancement, the tolerance of gays and the legalization of gay marriage, immigration – and he knew how to provoke those discontents and win white men’s allegiance by promising the resurgence of white supremacy, the good old days for which those whites had a deep nostalgia.
But others had made similar appeals – George Wallace, most prominently, and Pat Buchanan – while largely being marginalized. It was Trump’s aptitude for celebrity that was the critical difference between Trump and the demagogues who preceded him. It was his celebrity, and his understanding of the power of celebrity, that conferred a kind of acceptability on his excesses; it was his celebrity that not only differentiated him from every other politician but that also elevated him above them. Politicians are scorned. Celebrities in America are worshipped.
Trump certainly knew that celebrities are held to different standards than politicians. They don’t have to make sense. They don’t have to demonstrate competence. (Toward what would they demonstrate that competence?) They don’t have to be civil or kind. They don’t have to wear a demotic pose. They can do anything they damn well please.
That is why the “Hollywood Access” tape, in which Trump boasted that he could grab a woman’s genitals with impunity, was a political watershed. For a day or two, a few establishment Republicans tut-tutted and feigned that they were appalled by Trump’s comments, and several even advocated dumping him from the ticket. But then, suddenly, all was forgiven – because even if politicians can’t say things like that, celebrities can, and do (“just so-and-so being so-and-so” is the typical exculpation), and Trump, after all, was first and foremost a celebrity. Trump got away scot free. In the matter of a few days, our political discourse was forever sullied, and so was the Republican Party.
But if celebrities have few restrictions, they do have one obligation, one job, if they are to remain celebrities. It is the obligation that separates them from the merely famous – those people who are well-known. Celebrities have to maintain public interest. They have to keep reinventing themselves. That’s because celebrity isn’t a status, as fame is. It isn’t something bestowed upon one and upon which one can then rest. It is more akin to a narrative form – a kind of art written in the medium of life itself. You have to keep working at it. Celebrity almost always begins in a story, but it is sustained by subsequent stories. Some of these stories, usually the initial ones, deal with professional success – the rise to stardom or, as in Trump’s case, just the rise to notoriety gained through gossip columns.
But then come the romances, the marriages, the divorces, the transgressions, the drugs, the fights, the lawsuits, even the illnesses – all of which are tabloid and magazine fodder and all of which serve to keep the person-within-the-narrative in the public eye and mind. So long as there is narrative, there is celebrity. Celebrity only evanesces – and it usually evanesces, not just vanishes – when there is no more story, nothing more to hold our attention. The people you no longer hear about are the people whose lives have become repetitive or boring – a David Hasselhoff or a Pauly Shore or a Lindsay Lohan or a Paris Hilton. All of which, in effect, makes celebrity an ongoing entertainment, not all that different from movies or TV shows or books.
One has to acknowledge that pre-presidential Trump managed to keep his narrative going for an awfully long time, especially given that all he was was a real estate developer with a terrible comb over and a paunch. He stoked it, sometimes, we now know, by phoning newspapers and magazines, pretending to be someone else, only to plant stories about himself. And he managed to turn the celebrity itself into a part of the story – a post-modernist, tautological twist on celebrity: You are a celebrity because you are a celebrity. Trump truly fulfilled historian Daniel Boorstin’s famous definition of a celebrity as someone “who is known for being well-known,” but he not only fulfilled his celebrity; he curated it, and turned himself into a kind of über celebrity.
How much he curated it is a matter of conjecture. When he publicly flaunted his romance with actress Marla Maples, even as he was married to former Czech ice skater, Ivana, it seemed like curation. When he dumped Maples and then later squired Melania before he married her, it seemed like curation. When he announced grand projects with the pomposity of Hitler architect Albert Speer announcing monuments to the 1000-year Reich, it seemed like curation. When he launched “The Apprentice” TV show, it was curation. The show certainly made him money, but one suspects that wasn’t the prime motive, even for this stingiest, most Silas Marner-like of men who tossed around nickels like manhole covers. The prime motive was adding a new act to the Donald Trump celebrity show, lest it sputter into oblivion.
But the biggest curation, perhaps the biggest celebrity curation ever, was his run for the presidency. And that is exactly how one should think of it because that is how he thinks of it – as a way of refreshing his stale narrative. Trump had no political reason to run for president. He had no policies he wanted to pursue, no vision of America he wanted to realize, no constituency he wanted to serve, no legacy he wanted to burnish. All he wanted was to keep his celebrity alive as he aged, as his TV show sunk in the ratings, as his affairs and his bloviations no longer drew much attention.
Aiming for the presidency was audacious, even though he had flirted with the idea years before he actually took the plunge or the escalator. Using a presidential campaign as a traveling carnival was equally audacious. Each day on the campaign trail, each idiotic pronouncement, generated new stories and more celebrity. This wasn’t a campaign like any other because it wasn’t essentially political. It was puffery – empty puffery for Trump. The campaign cheapened our politics by discarding them. Only time would tell how much it cheapened them.
But that was just the campaign. The astonishment, one Trump himself didn’t seem to anticipate, is that this celebrity gambit actually worked. He won. What we learned in 2016 is that a society besotted with celebrity, a society which valued celebrity above nearly all other values, a society in which the Kardashians would become among the most celebrated people in the world, would actually be willing to toss aside the American experiment, even 250 years of American democracy, to be entertained by the hijinx of a celebrity whose main ambition was keeping his celebrity alive. All Trump needed was the collusion of the public. He got it. Tired of politics themselves, Americans decided to replace them with celebrity, just as Trump himself had.
And Trump did not only sustain his celebrity; he also launched it to new heights. How could he not? No celebrity had ever had a stage like Trump’s. No celebrity could ever recharge his celebrity as Trump could. The attention of the world was focused on him, and he delivered with an endless string of new tales. He was the Celebrity-in-Chief.
And it must be said that the media, to their great discredit, played along. The media never judged him as a leader governing the most powerful nation in the world. It judged him as a celebrity, occasionally gibing him or guffawing at some of his outrages, but seldom underscoring the Kafkaesque absurdity of having the nation ruled by an imbecile whose primary (only?) gift was accruing attention by providing daily chaos. Ronald Reagan, a onetime movie star, understood how the contours of governance could resemble the contours of the movies. His 1984 campaign ad, “It’s Morning in America,” played upon that resemblance. It turned America into a Frank Capra film. But for Trump, the movie wasn’t “Morning in America,” it was “The Joker.”
You can, obviously, get a fair amount of mileage by unspooling new celebrity episodes. Just look at Madonna or Britney Spears or the Kardashians. But sometimes the novelty begins to wear off. A major contribution to Trump’s loss in 2020, I think, is that four years of his antics proved tiresome, particularly in light of real crises – to wit, covid - for which celebrity wasn’t a diversion; it was a disaster. The 2020 election seemed a needed corrective: normalcy. Reality has a way of conforming itself to art, and if ever there was an antidote to Trump, it was good old reliable boring Joe Biden. No one may have had fewer trappings of celebrity than he had. No one may have had fewer narrative installments.
And that is where it might have ended – Trump dispatched to his Elba in Florida to stew, while Biden lowered the nation’s political temperature. Except it didn’t. And it didn’t not because the public was clamoring for more Trump, though I do think some Americans still preferred entertainment to governance, but because Trump had another big narrative to spring.
Most of us think of January 6, as Trump’s last-gasp effort to retain the presidency, even in light of the clear evidence that he had lost the election overwhelmingly. But there is another way to look at it: as Trump’s last-gasp attempt to keep his celebrity going. Imagine if Trump had done what every single exiting president in American history had done, which is hand over the governmental reins to his successor. Had he done so, Trump almost certainly would have disappeared from the national scene. He would be another fat old golfer.
But Trump, that virtuoso of celebrity, had another card up his sleeve: another chapter. He would contest the election and keep contesting it and confect a cockamamie story that the election had been stolen from him and that he and his supporters needed to right that wrong, needed to keep not only his presidency but his celebrity.
In effect, January 6, then, was a show to be followed by yet another sequel: this year’s campaign and election.
Whether Trump curated them, too, or not, the trials were sure to follow, given Trump’s casual disregard of the law and his confidence that he could never be brought to justice, and those peccadilloes have provided more episodes to the celebrity narrative. For any other politician, it is almost a certainty that these sorts of legal entanglements would have crushed electoral hopes. But not Trump’s – both because Trump is a celebrity, and these infractions are seen as narrative adventures by a good deal of the public and the press, and because, as we well know, celebrity has absolutely no moral component, so that the content of the story is basically irrelevant.
You can be an anti-Semite and racist, as Mel Gibson is, and still get work in Hollywood. You can abuse your staff, as Jimmy Fallon has been accused of doing, and suffer no consequences. You can, if one report is to be believed, call the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax, as, again reportedly, Aaron Rodgers did, and still be cheered by fans, in New York no less. You can use the “N” word as Morgan Wallen did, and be even more popular after doing so. And if it hadn’t been for the Me-Too movement, you could do just about anything you wanted to do to women and not only get away with it, but get the acclamation of white males for doing it. But even after Me-Too, you can be found guilty of rape, “as many people commonly understand the word,” according to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, and be leading the race for the presidency.
With morality exorcised, I fully expected that the trial(s) would boost Trump’s electoral prospects, make him a MAGA martyr, add new and novel chapters to the story, keep him on the front pages, even if he manages to avoid justice, as I suspect he will. In short, I fully expected him to amplify his celebrity. But let me repeat: It only works if you are skillful enough to keep the celebrity going.
Trump is clever. Nevertheless, he is old, and his show is growing whiskers. He hasn’t been able to reinvent himself. He is like the comedian who keeps telling the same jokes again and again or the rock band that has an old catalogue and no new songs. There may be a certain appeal to this – to hear Trump call Joe Biden “sleepy” or “crooked” for the thousandth time, or rail against a “witch hunt” for the millionth time, or to insist the system is “rigged” for the five millionth time, but it’s the appeal of nostalgia for longtime fans who wear MAGA hats and T-shirts. Among everyone else, the non-true-believers, you can feel his celebrity waning. And as he sits in the courtroom, alternately scowling and nodding off, you can feel that the celebrity aura isn’t what it used to be either. He’s diminished. He even looks smaller.
(It should be added here that it says a great deal about America and its values today – nothing positive - that Trump’s potential criminality seems immaterial to most Americans – Trump being Trump – while it is his flagging celebrity that may actually capsize him.)
Perhaps this is all wishful thinking. The entertainment press, after all, have a whole universe of celebrities about whom to write, so they can dispose of old celebrities easily and find new ones. The political press has only Trump, and they hang on to him for dear life. But at some point, I think and hope that they too will feel what I’m feeling because it just seems so obvious – that Trump is a has-been, that he has run out of material, that he should be selling insurance to seniors on late-night TV rather than sitting in the White House, that he is a political David Hasselhoff, and, most important of all, that the American people may finally have had enough of him.
Notes
“Deadline: White House,” MSNBC, April 23, 2024
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/12/mel-gibson-anti-semitism/620873/
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/14/aaron-rodgers-denies-claims-sandy-hook-shootings
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/12/06/morgan-wallen-says-theres-no-excuse-for-using-racial-slur/?sh=18eb067211f7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
A Few Words About Kristi Noem: As a fearsome dog lover – as I write this, my 14 year-old white lab Lola is at my feet – and just as a reasonably normal human being, I was repelled by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s admission that she shot her 14-month-old pup after shoving her into a gravel pit. “Admission” is probably the wrong word. “Boast” is a better one. Noem was obviously trying to curry favor with Trump in her bid to become his vice-presidential nominee and curry favor with Trumpistas who, she calculated, would love the idea of a woman having the guts to kill her dog and a goat to boot. (She shot the goat twice, just to make sure he was dead.)
And that is what makes this story so unconscionable – not just that this maniac did this to a defenseless pup, whom she said she “hated,” but because she clearly believed that Trump and his supporters would be impressed.
It is long past the time for us to ask, What is wrong with these people? When did they lose their sanity? How did America devolve to this? But it is not past the point to ask why anyone – any single voter other than the most reprehensible – would give the nation over to these hideous, fiendish, amoral, bloodthirsty monsters? Why?
Remember: this is on the ballot too in November.
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