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A BRIEF GUIDE TO TRUMP AND THE SPECTACLE  
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T.J. Clark
January 17, 2025
London Review of Books
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_ If Trump is what the image-world has now revealed itself to be –
if he’s the ‘society’ we have settled for, looming against us,
cruel and false and ugly and determined to destroy – then what
answer is left but a fight to the finish? _

, The Guardian 17 July 2018

 

‘Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These
words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem
anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast
light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling
word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That’. It knows we know
what it refers to. But maybe, ultimately, even the ‘That’ offers a
glimmer of hope – doesn’t it put us still outside the killing
machine? And the worst horror of the present moment (worst for its
observers, I mean, not for its victims) comes from the suspicion that
any such outside has disappeared – ‘disappeared’ being
the TV deathchamber’s word of choice.

It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the
spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the
image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits
watching for hours each day – rightly understanding that doing so is
doing politics, politics as our society now practises it. Governing?
We leave that to our servants. (What a lovely bygone sound there is to
Michel Foucault’s term of art ‘governmentality’. Only ascendant
powers think the state is for governing. Leaders of empires in decline
look across at Xi Jinping and wonder if he can be serious about
infrastructure and censorship and party discipline and the size of the
army. Wasn’t that yesterday?)

Define the society of the spectacle. Oh, come on – you know what it
is. What do you want, a Helen Levitt street scene opposite a drone
shot of children looking at their iPhones? The question is not what
the spectacle consists of – the spectacle goes on making a spectacle
of its least change of apparatus, the least descent down its ladder of
conformity – but what in the long term it _does_, above all to the
other term in the portmanteau. ‘Society’ – what’s that?

Part of Trump’s genius is that he knows, against much of the tide of
the time, that an apocalyptic answer to the question just posed is
wrong. The pedestrians on their iPhones may look like isolate,
properly subservient individuals, carrying their commodity world with
them, locked into TikTok immediacy. But they aren’t there yet. The
spectacle is always hybrid, partly embroiled in the past – society
lives on in it, feeding it lines, interfering with its vacuum pack.
Look at the faces of the iPhone conversationalists, look at their
hands, their arms. Fragments of face-to-faceness live on in them –
indelibly, redundantly – as they launch their words into virtual
space. They still have expressions. And they’re not even the set
pouts and leers of selfie world. They look like real flowing
unconscious _embodiments_ of whatever’s being said, of what’s
being imagined or anticipated as response. The speakers are still
round the campfire.

Hence Trump’s old-fashionedness: his need for rallies and town
halls, his belief in the importance of crowd sizes, his dance to the
music (that gift to the comics), his tolerance of ‘summits’. Even
the hours spent dreaming in front of Fox are nostalgic – he is
scenting out the reaction of a virtual audience, sitting there in some
ranch house in Grand Rapids or Duluth wondering what ‘woke’ means
and how high you really can get on fentanyl.

It is the time of assassins. Benjie waits in the wood by the
14th green, ghost gun poking through the leaves. He’s listening for
cart wheels and the man calling ‘Caddie, Mr President’. He cries a
little. His curls are combed for the Perp Walk. Aim for the ear.

The spectacle knows itself, after a fashion. It likes to nod and wink
at its subjects, including those in on the joke. The fact that Trump
is absurd is part of his mastery; the fact that he knows he is –
knows what his absurdity is for – another.

Ah, Helsinki in 2018! Only true masters of the medium know how to
perform in front of the cameras like this. Signalling power,
impatience, suspicion, superciliousness – not so much aimed in the
direction of one’s fellow leader (that was part of the scandal),
more at the spectacle itself. ‘We have to do this, but it isn’t
what we _really_ do.’ Spectators need to half believe that
something called politics is happening behind the scenes. Summits are
a nod to the past. But the Trumpers of 2025 – here’s the
difference between 2018 and now – are entirely aware
that _nothing_ is happening, that the scene is all there is. (The
Helsinki summit – how could you have forgotten? – produced zero
results on all the ‘issues’ it was supposed to confront. In
particular, it left Putin, Hizbullah and the Quds Force propping up
Assad in Syria and agreed to disagree about the invasion of Crimea.
Trump used the summit’s closing press conference to denounce
the FBI. Why hadn’t they found Hillary’s lost emails?)

7 December 2024: ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the
United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our
fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!’ 16 December 2024:
‘One of the sides [in Syria] has been essentially wiped out. Nobody
knows who the other side is. But I do. You know who it is? Turkey.
Okay? Turkey is the one behind it. He’s [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] a
very smart guy. They’ve wanted it for thousands of years, and he got
it.’

But I still say, have nothing to do with it. Being ‘behind things’
is what mid-size, old-time powers are capable of. They covet things
and burrow away and do ‘unfriendly takeovers’. Our people, on the
other hand ...

Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump at the G20 Summit in Osaka (June 29,
2019)

When writing about Trump, there’s a question of distance. He gives
every sign of being an odious human being, and he flaunts the
odiousness, knowing that it maddens his opponents and electrifies his
cult. What he did as president last time, and what he promises to do
next, will cause misery for millions of people.

Isn’t writing obliged to answer the loathsomeness and cruelty with
spleen? But isn’t that what Trump-fiction depends on? Go in close,
grapple and smear, and one immediately feels Trump-fiction exulting in
one’s distaste. He rides the late-night laughter. The things they
say about me! His Arnold Palmer swells.

Is the answer analysis, then? A cooler tone. Is it possible to treat
Trump as a political – a historical – occurrence? A
‘formation’, as we used to call it.

Supposing we take the whole form of politics and leadership described
so far, including its ludicrous deficiencies and so far unanswerable
strengths, as a phenomenon, an expression, of an empire in decline. In
particular, of an empire whose immense superiority over its rivals in
terms of military power, control of (most) dependencies, dictatorship
of ‘innovation’, image of the good life, and sheer mind-boggling
wealth, remains unquestioned, but depends now on an economic system
that fails to satisfy its own ordinary middle (read, working) class.
This for reasons that have been analysed to death. Globalisation,
offshoring, the end of manufacturing, techno-feudalism, vast
inequality, the necessity (for growth) of a world of un-tax.

Some of the terms are new here, and certainly the scale and specific
form of overreach and overrefinement. Financialisation, interlinked
derivatives, intricacies of sovereign debt, monopolies of suddenly
indispensable raw materials, the road to the sweatshop in Zhengzhou
ever more vulnerable. Saudi fist bumps. Crumbling borders (or the
claim they are crumbling). ‘The only democracy in the Middle
East.’ But however berserk or bizarre the particulars of decline, it
is easier and easier to look through them to the simple bitterness of
those who once, so recently, were empire’s low-level beneficiaries.
Where did my job go (and with it my health plan)? What are my kids on?
What the hell is racial sensitivity training? (Wasn’t whiteness the
keystone of the whole deal?) You read the words in the mouths of the
mob at the start of _Coriolanus_, and it’s all familiar, the anger
over lost bread and circuses; but you wonder why the Roman saps
haven’t yet seen who their real oppressors are. They need
replacement theory. It’s the elites. Antisemitism. The lab in Wuhan.
Abortion. Marxists. The Pizza Paedophiles. Hollywood. Muslims.
Mexicans. Anthony Fauci. The EPA.

The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the
cruel and the ludicrous. (Ask the Brits.) Nonetheless, the American
case is distinctive, and its special character worth examining, if
we’re to understand the _kind_ of imperial disintegration that
might take place over the next fifty years. We’re at the beginning
of the end of American hegemony. A preponderance so crushing will
resist to the last. The Chinese century will come in along its belts
and roads at dreadful slow-motion speed, swallowing up the Nike slum
worlds with an indifference for human suffering that will make Nafta
and COP29 seem like acts of philanthropy. One power will replace
another in a world system whose integument – military
infrastructure, apparatus of surveillance and repression, shadow world
of non-union factories and plantations, marionette theatres of
‘democracy’ – will make any previous empire’s seem makeshift.
Just think what it will take to dismantle the US’s hundred plus
bases across the continents. Try to imagine the eventual fate of
Israel, its ‘indispensable nation’. Or decipher the depth of
contempt – for one’s subjects, for oneself, for the non-reality
the spectacle has made – evident in every pixel of the image below.
What will leaders like these two do to defeat the enemy?

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping (30 December 2022)

Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition,
only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a
fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great
Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his
audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the
majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or
rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the
hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They
know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is,
everything just described about empire.

The point often made about MAGA voters voting to worsen their own
condition may be correct (for most if not all of them), but it has no
bite when voters are persuaded that the other party has no intention
of bettering it. Shallow state, deep economy.

On Trump’s style. His mixture of insult, _ressentiment_ and
buffoonery is a work of genius. I remember sitting in front of
the TV in 2016, watching the Republican debates unfold, and feeling
my jaw drop. I’m as cynical about politics as the next man, but this
couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t politics at all ... The
country club name-calling. Sleepy This and Little That. The smut about
small hands and penis size. And the complete refusal to let one’s
face – that glowering, hard-done-by Trump mask of contempt – relax
for a moment and signal that really, ultimately, we (we members of the
political class) don’t mean it, we’re in this together.

Only someone who’d spent the previous thirty years supping on the
special unctuousness of American political manners – someone who’d
lived through Ronnie and W. and Bill – could register the depth of
the transgression. That’s why my jaw dropped. What was politics
to _be_ if it was conducted like this? Where were we going? What was
it in the new era that called for – rewarded – this kind of
desublimation? US politics, like most politics, was nothing if not a
love-in with some harmless (ideological) rough stuff thrown in. But I
don’t love you in the least, Trump said, and if I scratch your back
it will hurt. I want subservience, and I’ll laugh in your face when
I get it. ‘The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term,
everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know – my personality
changed or something.’

I want subservience, because I’ve never had it, or had enough of it.
I want you to grovel, because that’s what my voters want. Yeah,
yeah, the prices at the gas station make them cross. But that’s not
it. They had _power_ – the anxious provisional imaginary power
that the sociologists once called status – and they’ve lost it.
Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose. Their aggrievedness
– _my_ aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless:
it’s MAGA’s reason for being.

That Obama ... That time he burst out singing ‘Amazing Grace’!
And singing it well. It’ll take decades – it’ll take a
revolution – to mend the wound in America’s side. But we’ll do
it. Lynching the image: that’s what we’re up to.

_Ressentiment_, Nietzsche taught us, is a _deep_ feeling – a
determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around
hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for
everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll
never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up;
we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the
scapegoat’s blood – but boy! it feels good.

To have made _ressentiment_ the main form of politics, to have made
himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking
of the jowls and ‘It-wasn’t-me-Sir’ stare – that’s Trump’s
achievement. Here I am: rich, bankrupt, fraudulent, criminal,
surrounded by toadies, destroyer of politics, president ... And I
still haven’t been given my due!

A sceptic might say: All this is nasty, yes, but is it anything new?
Especially as an episode in American history. Isn’t Trump just
another Andrew Jackson, another George Wallace or William Jennings
Bryan? ‘The people have a right to make their own mistakes ...’
The people are always looking for a charlatan. Even the spectacle is
nothing new. Demagogues are demagogues, always in love with the latest
technology: newsprint, the back of an endless railroad car, the
billboard, the boob tube.

But all of these previous technics of persuasion spoke or shone down
from a distance. They addressed an audience, they made a totality. Of
course, the demagogue pretended to _identity_ with his demos, but
the technology did not exist to do the complete lying job. The affix
‘-agogue’ admits as much: the demagogue was still a magician, a
mystagogue, a bearer of charisma. And Trump has annihilated the idea
of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in
our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His
rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick is _our_ unconscious, our
aggrievedness, not our aggrievedness transformed.

No other political actor seems to have seen the point of this – seen
why it conquers. They’ll get nowhere until they do.

Luigi Mangione in New York (19 December 2024)

It is a time of assassins – in the case of the UnitedHealthcare
killer, of what looks like a studied revival of ‘propaganda by the
deed’.

What is the world coming to, when a CEO can’t safely leverage the
weakness and pain of his fellow human beings and get rich and enhance
shareholder value? Big Pharma, Hospital and Big Bank CEOs are all sure
to be wondering. It’s just so unfair.

How do people expect anyone to take the US government seriously
after these charges? What about school shootings? What about the
attack in Vegas? The message this is sending is that by killing
Thompson he attacked capitalism, and an attack on capitalism is an
attack on the US. If we weren’t a joke to the rest of the world
already, we’re definitely one now.

The death penalty? US healthcare is a death penalty: you have no
access to the treatment you need, if you did your insurance won’t
pay for it, if your insurance paid it’s for opioids peddled by big
pharma. UnitedHealthcare owns the hospital, the insurance company and
the pharmacy, full vertical integration. We are all sentenced to life
in the American healthcare system.

These aren’t excerpts from an anarchist chat room in Humboldt
County. They’re taken from readers’ responses to columns in
the _New York Times_.

The theory of social change on which propaganda by the deed was
premised in its heyday, when McKinley and Sadi Carnot and Frick and
the empress of Austria took a bullet, was both too pessimistic and
optimistic. Resentment and anger existed in plenty around 1900. But
the idea that a single symbolic gesture, or a campaign of such, could
light disillusion’s touchpaper ... that was fantasy. For a symbol
to set off a social implosion, what was needed was an apparatus – a
means by which the symbol could spread, allowing people to interpret
what had taken place, inviting them to voice their contempt for
official outrage, annulling, regrouping, disobeying, opting out. How
could such a contagion possibly happen in the age of the wall poster
and the back street printing press?

But the apparatus now exists. Capital has made it – to its profit
and its cost. The spectacle has metastasised. It is everywhere, at
everyone’s disposal. (I remember Sebald’s horror at the German
term for the mobile phone: _das Handy_.)

More from the readers of the _NYT_:

Just look at the photo of Mangione’s Perp Walk ... The American
government hardly lifts a finger to improve the lives of everyday
Americans or to shield them from the rapacious avarice of our
plutocrat overlords, but goes into blitzkrieg mode to protect the same
plutocrat class. The mask has really come off: we know whom
the US government values.

These proceedings are turning into an absolute clown show. The man is
already being treated like a martyr and folk hero and their brilliant
idea is escalate his charges to such a comical level? Are the feds
intentionally trying to fan the flames? By treating Mangione’s case
so unfairly, they’re only reinforcing his thesis that the system is
broken and rigged in favour of the billionaire class.

Essentially, at the beginning, the theory of the society of the
spectacle was an effort to understand the disembodiment of human
sociality. It was still possible to be baffled by the process.
Inquisitive, manipulative, contact-hungry _homo sapiens_, that craver
of attention and mutuality, had ended up existing in a world at one
remove. The greatest fear of each individual remained ‘being out of
touch’. But the touch each was taught to take for reality was the
touch of the screen. The screen in one’s hand, the screen under
one’s pillow. The 24-hour REM period.

Spectacle, as a concept, was accompanied by the idea of ‘the
colonisation of everyday life’. That meant several things. Pervasive
surveillance. The monetisation of more and more of the species’
so-called unproductive life. The recruiting of more and more of us to
the task of providing our masters with ‘information’ about our
every doing. The shrinkage of time out. The commodification of play.
But perhaps what the situationist theorists most saw in the
‘everyday’ – most regretted as they saw it vanish – was the
body clock, the lapse of attention, the recalcitrance of the organism,
the idle interest in what someone else was doing, was feeling,
was _like_. Bodies spoke a different language from that of their
leaders. They were a reservoir of insubordination. They looked up at
the pyramid or the Statue of Liberty and shrugged.

Is all that counter-language a thing of the past? Has the spectacle
extinguished it, or managed a life for it on a set of reservations?
Art. Sex. Poetry.

Maybe. It depends on the future. Remember that the perfections of
spectacle I’ve been dwelling on – particularly the perfection
called Trump – are the product of an empire in decline. No doubt
such a decline is first disguised and alleviated by a great flowering
– a _Vierzehnheiligen_ – of untruth. But untruth _consumes
resources_, at least on the scale now necessary. And resources will
grow fewer, be fought for more ruthlessly. You cannot have a society
of the spectacle without a constant increase in the rate of illusion.
Trump’s second term will provide it, no doubt: he’ll keep the
customers happy. Certainly, the weak will be frightened and the
defenceless humiliated – this in particular will have the red hats
coming off. But afterwards? Twenty or thirty years hence? Down the
road to a spectacle without investors. When the app store is frozen,
SpaceX is resting, and there’s no money left for the AI special
friend. Who knows?

Those who first thought seriously about the society of the spectacle
did not imagine it could last. They wrote in a time of upheaval,
believing the world had already grown tired of its reflection.
‘Species-being’ (they were nothing if not devotees of the early
Marx) would reassert itself. They could not anticipate the spell that
would be cast through the following half-century by a speeding up and
miniaturising of the image, putting the spectacle at everyone’s
fingertips, making it a form of life. (Those who lived to see it often
despaired.) The depth of the situationists’ contempt for the mass
production of appearances, read now, can be grating: we have all been
taught to be wary of condescension.

Perhaps it is time to be less circumspect. If Trump is what the
image-world has now revealed itself to be – if he’s the
‘society’ we have settled for, looming against us, cruel and false
and ugly and determined to destroy – then what answer is left but a
fight to the finish? A plan of campaign, with spectacle the enemy. Not
derision but tactics.

_T.J. CLARK taught for many years at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in
the Art of Manet and His Followers; Farewell to an Idea, a history of
modernism; and Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. His
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