eJournals REAL 34/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2018
341

Trump: Populist Usurper President

2018
Donald E. Pease
D onalD E. P EasE Trump: Populist Usurper President Trump’s Crisis of Symbolic Investiture: Imposter or Usurper? Donald Trump may be the first President to have entered office with an asterisk by his name� Victorious in the Electoral College, he lost the popular election by more than 3 million votes� From the moment the election results became official, pundits and political opponents deliberated over the most effective stratagems for removing him from office. 1 Impeachment, the most frequently selected instrument for President Trump’s undoing, refers to different but intertwined legal procedures: it can refer to discrediting a witness by showing that he or she is not telling the truth or does not have a reliable basis for their testimony� Impeachment also refers to the constitutional process authorizing the House of Representatives to charge and put the president of the United States on trial in the Senate for illegal acts committed in the performance of public duty� From the Press’s standpoint impeachment in the legal sense began the day Trump announced his intention to run for the president; impeachment in the second sense - the trial of a public official for an illegal act committed in the performance of a public duty - began the day of his inauguration� 2 Pierre Bourdieu coined the phrase “symbolic investiture” to describe the civic rituals through which the social order authorizes the transformations in status whereby individuals acquire the titles and attributes of physician, judge, professor, president� In addition to the performative magic conveyed by the verbal utterance that pronounces an individual a judge or president the investiture ceremony’s social efficacy also involves a corporeal dimension. 1 David Remnick’s and James Fallows’ articles are outstanding examples of the numerous discussions Donald Trump’s election as a shameful turning point in United States history. See David Remnick, “An American Tragedy”, The New Yorker (9 November 2016) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ news/ news-desk/ an-american-tragedy>, James Fallows, “After the Election: ‘What a Pathetic Thing Is Decadence’”, The Atlantic Monthly (14 November 14 2016) <https: / / www�theatlantic�com/ notes/ 2016/ 11/ after-the-election-what-a-pathetic-thing-is-decadence/ 507635/ >� 2 Two thoughtful essays on the possibility and necessity of impeachment were written by Jeffrey Toobin and Kindred Winecoff� See Kindred Winecoff, ‘Trump and the End of Taken-for-Grantedness: When Exception Becomes the Rule’ (13 December 2016) Duck of Minerva Blog <http: / / duckofminerva�com/ 2016/ 12/ wptpn-trumpand-the-end-of-taken-for-grantedness-when-the-exception-becomes-the-rule�html>, Jeffrey Toobin, Will the Fervor for Impeachment Start a Democratic Civil War ? ” The New Yorker (28 May 2018) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 05/ 28/ will-the-fervor-for-impeachment-start-a-democratic-civil-war>� 146 D onalD E. P EasE The inauguration of duly elected U�S� presidents offers a good example of an investiture ceremony in that this ritual of civic liturgy creates the occasion for a national people to witness the transubstantiation of the mortal body of an elected official into the immortal substance of the office of the president. 3 Bourdieu’s canonical description of the effect of rite of symbolic investiture on the body of an officeholder alludes to Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion of the King’s two bodies - the mortal body of the officeholder and the immortalitystructure of the office - as a relevant context: 4 As representatives they (the office-holders) partake of the eternity and ubiquity of the office which they help to make exist as a permanent, omnipresent and transcendent, and which they temporarily incarnate, giving it voice through their mouths and representing it in their bodies, converted into symbols and emblems� 5 Elected officials cannot wholly coincide with the second or sublime body of the office they temporarily inhabit. However, no previous occupant of the oval office has inspired as many commentaries on the incorrigible lack of fit between the office-holder and the office as has Donald J� Trump� Citing the irremediable disparity between Trump’s behavior and the bodily practices and disposition sedimented in the office, Trump’s detractors have described him as an imposter-president who possessed neither the comportment, nor the know-how, nor the character prerequisite to the position� 6 The specter of impeachment that has haunted Trump’s presidency since his inauguration instigated an ongoing crisis in symbolic investiture that highlights the divergence between Donald J. Trump and the office of the president� Bourdieu does not provide an explicit account of an infelicitous performance of the rite of symbolic investiture but his report of the obligation 3 “All groups entrust the body,” as Bourdieu explained this operation, “treated like a kind of memory, with their most precious possessions.” Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans� Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass�: Harvard University Press, 1991), p� 122-23� 4 See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)� The U�S� political theorist Michael Rogin argued that Kantorowicz’s notion of the king’s two bodies can help us understand how and why presidential identities have been the site of a struggle over national identity: “the image of the king’s two bodies could take the chief executive in the opposite direction, not separating physical person from office, but absorbing the office into the officeholder’s personal identity� � �From this perspective, the doctrine of the king’s two bodies offers us a language in which confusion between person, power, office, and state become accessible.” Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) p� 8� 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), p� 244� Bourdieu suggests that the investiture ceremony entwines the candidate’s vital body with what Kantorowicz called the immortal (or second) body of the mandated symbolic identity. The immortal body of the office is composed of the official motives, purposes, and activities inherent in this symbolically mandated social position� The performative dimension of the symbolic investiture enables the individual it initiated into office to incorporate the symbolic actions intrinsic to the office as the bodily habits through which the office’s sublime body is perpetuated. 6 See George Soros, “Trump Is an Imposter”, BBC News (19 January 2017) <https: / / www� bbc�com/ news/ business-38684556>� Trump: Populist Usurper President 147 of the person undergoing the ritual to be wholeheartedly “invested in his investiture” does provide criteria needed to recognize why Trump’s think the inauguration ceremony might not have yielded the normal result: He must be personally invested in his investiture, that is, engage his devotion, his belief, his body, give them as pledges, and manifest, in all his conduct and speech - this is the function of the ritual words of recognition - his faith in the office and in the group which awards it and which confers this great assurance only on the condition that it is fully assured in return� p� 243 Although his unpresidential conduct has made Trump an imposter in the eyes of his detractors, Trump’s populist supporters tend to think of what his critics consider impeachable offenses as evidence of his successful usurpation of the executive power needed to reinstate the sovereign will of what they consider the authentic American people� 7 The terms Bourdieu selects to describe the legal status of the person prior to undergoing a legitimate act of symbolic investiture seem uncannily pertinent to the controversy surrounding Trump’s presidency� With the devotion to precise detail of a canonist, Bourdieu declares that the public ritual of symbolic investiture quite literally secures and legally protects the person undergoing the solemn public ceremony against the accusation that the ritual has validated “the delirious fiction of the imposter, or the arbitrary imposition of the usurper.” This it does by declaring publicly that he is indeed what he claims to be, that he is legitimated to be what he claims, that he is entitled to enter into the function, fiction, or imposture which, being proclaimed before the eyes of all as deserving to be universally recognized, becomes a legitimate imposture, in Austin’s phrase, in other words misrecognized, denied as an imposture by all, not least by the imposter himself� p� 242� Bourdieu’s explanation implies that if the person going through the ceremony is not “personally invested” in the words “symbols and emblems” of the office, the investiture ceremony could misfire in the sense that it would not succeed in turning the imposter or usurper into, in the case of Trump’s inauguration, the President of the United States of America� 8 Trump invited such an interpretation when, in the opening lines of his inaugural address, he openly demonstrated his lack of personal investment in the ceremony’s 7 On the self-representations of Trump’s populist movement, see Peter Beinart, Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt, The Atlantic, (22 August 2018) <https: / / www�theatlantic�com/ ideas/ archive/ 2018/ 08/ what-trumps-supporters-think-ofcorruption/ 568147/ >, Katy Kay, “Why Trump’s Supporters Will Never Abandon Him”, BBC World News (23 August 2017) <https: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ world-uscanada-41028733>, Jonathan Allen, “At Rally, Trump Brings Up “the Impeachment Word” To Embolden Base, NBC News (7 September 2018) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ politics-news/ trump-tags-new-york-times-treason-charge-n907336>� 8 Benjamin Willes and Quinta Jureci argue that the Inauguration ceremony might not have accomplished the transformation of Trump into president because he is constitutionally unable to take an oath� See Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic ‘What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? ’ Lawfare (3 March 2017) <https: / / www� lawfareblog�com/ what-happens-when-we-dont-believe-presidents-oath>� 148 D onalD E. P EasE official symbols and emblems by adding the following description of the inauguration ceremony that significantly altered the event’s established significance: Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning� Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another - but we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People� For too long the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished - but the people did not share in its wealth…That all changes - starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you� It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America� This is your day� This is your celebration� And this, the United States of America, is your country��� What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people� January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again� 9 Instead of accepting the settled understanding of the Inauguration ceremony, Trump has attributed the following “very special meaning” to this public ritual: “Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another - but we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” As the first declaration of the newly inaugurated “president”, this statement designates the American people rather than Trump himself as the actual and final recipient of the power that the inauguration ceremony officially transferred from President Obama’s administration. The ambiguous referent of the pronoun “we” in this passage calls attention to the lack of stable fit between Trump and the office of the president. Rather than wholly inhabiting the office of the president, Trump, at the site of this transferal, personifies the alternate subject positions of Imposter/ President and Usurper/ President. Trump uses the pronoun “We” to reference the subject who performs both activities. However, the “we” that is “not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another” is significantly different to the “we” that is “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you”. The “we” involved in the transposition of power within established locales (presidential administrations, political parties) is “merely” a participant in a pre-existing assemblage of power whose primary role is as stand-in or impersonator of the “another” in the phrases “from one Administration to another” and “from one party to another.” Each “another” indicates the Washington D.C.specific administration and/ or political party onto which power gets handed over� Contrarily, the sole “we” that can be said to possess the singularly exceptional authority to supplant the executive power installed in Washington D�C� and give that power back to the American people is a usurper figure who enacts sovereign power as if the expression of the pre-emptive sovereign will of “We the people”. 9 Donald J. Trump, “The Inaugural Address”, The White House (20 January 2017) <https: / / www.whitehouse.gov/ briefings-statements/ the-inaugural-address/ >. Trump: Populist Usurper President 149 The inauguration did accomplish the official work of legally recognizing Donald J� Trump as the 45 th President of the United States of America� However, the qualifying phrases Trump adds to the inaugural event tethers President Trump to the subject position of the usurper, the President who is not one, whose expression of the sovereign will to restore power to “We the People” requires his transgression of the normative structures of governance in Washington D�C� 10 Following his inauguration, commentators from across the political spectrum who believed in the sovereign power of the office of the president gave expression to the hope that the norms and mores embedded in it would spontaneously alienate President Trump from the reactionary positions the nominee had advocated during his campaign� 11 These commentators needed to believe that Trump’s inauguration to the office would enable Trump the governing president to disavow Trump the campaigner’s irresponsible behavior� This belief rendered them unwilling to countenance the notion that Trump could only “Make America Great Again” by transgressing the norms and breaking the rules of the political institutions that the fact of his election had supplanted� Whereas Trump’s critics focused on the rules and norms sedimented in the office of the president as the basis for the ongoing criticism of the officeholder as an imposter, his populist followers interpret his violation of the political establishment’s rules and norms as proof of his power to usurp the U�S� President’s sovereign power and transfer that power to the members of his ethno-nationalist movement� 12 As it turns out, Trump’s Inauguration Day assertion that “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again” was not merely an instance of Trump the campaigner playing to his movement’s grandiose fantasy� With this declaration as warrant, Trump announced his post-inauguration plan to re-purpose the sites on which he staged his campaign rallies as enclaves of populist rule� In so doing Trump designated the members of his movement as the genuine addressees and referents of the American people he represented� President Trump held the first of these “We the People” assemblies on February 17 one month after his Inauguration in Melbourne, Florida� At last count he has held 56 comparable gatherings� 10 For a cogent description of the various ways in which Trumps has taken on the identity of the Usurper, see Effie Deans, “Trump the Usurper”, The Daily Globe (16August2018) <http: / / www�dailyglobe�co�uk/ comment/ trump-the usurper/ >� 11 Doyle McManus “Why We Should ‘Normalize’ Trump” Los Angele Times (21 December 2018) <https: / / www�latimes�com/ opinion/ op-ed/ la-oe-mcmanus-trump-normalization-20161221-story�html>� Ezra Klein, “Why Barack Obama Thinks His Legacy Will Survive Donald Trump” Vox (19 November 2016) <https: / / www�vox�com/ policy-andpolitics/ 2016/ 11/ 19/ 13675694/ barack-obama-legacy-donald-trump>� For a discussion of the problems Trump poses to the office of president, see Robert Shrum, “The Big Picture: the office of the Presidency”, Public Books, (19 October 2017) <https: / / www� publicbooks.org/ the-big-picture-the-office-of-the-presidency/ >. 12 Brad Todd and Salena Zito The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics (New York: Crown Forum 2018). Robert Lemke, “Letter, Trump, the People’s President, The Herald Tribune (4 February 2018) <https: / / www�theherald-news� com/ 2018/ 01/ 29/ letter-donald-trump-peoples-president/ ar3r5ac/ >� 150 D onalD E. P EasE Trump turned the Florida meeting into the literal enactment of the Inauguration Day promise “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” “This was a truly great movement”, Trump announced to open the proceedings, “and I want to be here with you, and I will always be with you.” With this staging as backdrop, Trump cast activities that had received severe criticism during his first month in office - from the continuation of work in Keystone and the Dakota Access Pipelines and the appointment of the Climate Change denier Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency to the promise to repeal and replace Obamacare and ban Muslim Immigrants - as his execution of the will to rule of the authentic American people� To make this messaging clear, midway through the Florida spectacle, “We the People” officially recognized Trump as the executor of the people’s power when an anonymous member of the assembly stepped up to the podium and announced: Mr� President, thank you sir� We the people, our movement is the reason why our President of the United States is standing here in front of us today� When President Trump during the election promised all these things that he was going to do for us, I knew he was going to do this for us� Thank you so much, sir� 13 By way of such responses, the participants in Trump’s populist assemblies exercise what Trump represents as their sovereign power to restore American greatness by legitimating an ever-expanding list - his ignorance of rudimentary rules of governance, his annulment of multilateral agreements, his separation of immigrant children from their parents, his transgressions of international rules and norms, his justification of assassination, his violation of sundry constitutional laws, his withdrawal from international treaties, his collusion with a foreign power, his moral turpitude, his refusal to accept the findings of United States intelligence agencies, his denial of climate change, his ridiculing of a victim of sexual harassment, his profiteering on the office of president - of his transgressive actions� The disparity between Trump the campaigner and President Donald J� Trump is that the latter figure is supposed to be the representative of all the people of the United States� However, at his rallies Trump makes it clear that his primary loyalties are with this Alternative America dedicated to supplanting the America that superseded it� Trump did not run as a normal presidential candidate, he ran as the delegated voice of a movement whose members felt that they had been set aside by 21st century realities and that elected him to usurp the power to break established treaties and agreements, suspend the rules and alter the norms of the order of things that supplanted them� Following his inauguration, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior has prompted continuous calls for his impeachment; yet the people assembled at the rallies he has held throughout his term of office exercise what Trump represents as their sovereign power to “Make American Great Again! ” by vindicating him of all charges of dereliction of duty. Rather than affirming the consensus opinion that Trump’s transgressive activities proved him unfit 13 https: / / www.vox.com/ 2017/ 2/ 18/ 14659952/ trump-transcript-rally-melbourne-florida Trump: Populist Usurper President 151 to govern, Trump supporters use the rallies to change the rules determining acceptable forms of presidential behavior. Trump’s entire term of office has taken place within an uncannily recursive temporality: not-yet-impeached in the estimation of his critics, Trump is always-already vindicated in the eyes of the “Forgotten Americans” he purports to represent. Throughout the first eight months of the Trump presidency, political pundits joined ranks with the talk show hosts and late-night comics who cast the failure of Trump to follow the rules and carry out the duties conventionally associated with the office of the president as fodder for an ongoing situation comedy� 14 However, after these comedians witnessed in horror the events unfolding on August 11-12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, the satirical skits they had made of Trump’s presidency devolved into what Lauren Berlant has called an encompassing situation tragedy� 15 The ostensible rationale for the “Unite the Right” rally was to lodge a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E� Lee from the Charlottesville historic courthouse district. When Neo-Nazis chanting “blood and soil! ” and “Jews will not take my place! ” combined forces with white nationalists, and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as weapon-carrying members of para-military forces, they retrieved images and events from the most execrable moments U�S� history� After such events, U�S� presidents are typically expected to represent the moral conscience of the nation� In place of a coherent representation of the nation’s ethical norms, however, Donald Trump issued a statement at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey on Aug� 12, 2017 declaring that “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides” He then repeated those three words —“On many sides.” The next day Trump noted “It’s been going on for a long time in our country…Not Donald Trump� Not Barack Obama. It’s been going on for a long, long time.” Then in a news conference at Trump Tower on August 15, President Trump insisted that there 14 The effectiveness of satire as resistance to Trump has been argued eloquently by Sophie A� McClennan Hitting Trump Where It Hurts: The Satire Troops Take Up Comedy Arms against Donald Trump”, Salon (11 February 2017) <https: / / www�salon� com/ 2017/ 02/ 11/ hitting-trump-where-it-hurts-the-satire-troops-take-up-comedyarms-against-donald-trump>� Nancy Loudon Gonzalez uses Bakhtin’s understanding of the social utility of carnival to offer a contrary perspective on Trump’s presidency. She specifically argues that Bakhtin’s analytical paradigm of carnival culture can help explain the successful presidential campaign of President Donald J� Trump� With its opposition to the official procedural discourse, carnival culture features antiestablishment attitudes that defined Trump’s presidential campaign from the start. Nancy Loudon Gonzalez, “Carnival or Campaign? : Locating Robin Hood and the Carnivalesque in the U.S. Presidential Campaign” The Humanist (19 April 2016) <https: / / thehumanist�com/ magazine/ may-june-2016/ features/ carnival-or-campaign>� 15 Lauren Berlant defines “situation tragedy” as a moment when “the subject’s world becomes fragile beyond repair, one gesture away from losing all access to sustaining its fantasies: the situation threatens utter, abject unraveling”. Lauren Berlant , Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p� 6� 152 D onalD E. P EasE was blame on both sides� 16 Trump’s equivocal pronouncements implied a moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them that provoked outrage across the political spectrum� 17 The perceived ambiguity in Trump’s responses rendered starkly visible the investiture crisis disjoining Donald J� Trump the President of all the American People who expected Trump to carry out the moral duties and responsibilities and Donald J� Trump the usurper-agent of a populist movement whose members demanded that he contravene the moral hegemony that consigned them to the wrong side of history. Throughout the first seven month of his presidency, Trump exploited the investiture crisis by convoking “We the People” assemblies at which his supporters re-cast activities that Trump’s detractors called impeachable offenses as fortuitous expressions of their will� Trump followed this protocol when, in the wake of the nearly universal condemnation of his response to the Charlottesville fiasco, Trump announced that he would hold a meeting with his supporters in the Phoenix Convention Center on August 22, 2017� Commentators have interpreted Trump’s address at this rally as a defense of his previous statements about Charlottesville� However in the remarks that follow I intend to show how Trump’s remarks in Phoenix resolved the crisis in symbolic investiture by quite publicly identifying with the figure of Usurper-President for the populist movement assembled there� Rather than defending his previous statements or straightforwardly condemning what had taken place a week earlier, Trump redirected the intolerance and bigotry displayed in the “Unite the Right! ” Charlottesville demonstration at the press and media covering the Phoenix event� In the following multi-pronged explanation of Trump’s role as leader of this populist movement, I will offer 1)� a brief description of the psycho-dynamics of the political processes catalyzing his populist crusade; 2)� an account of the symptomatic role “The Immigrant” plays in Trump’s ethno-nationalist retrotopia; 18 and 3)� a closereading of Trump’s presentation at the Phoenix Convention as the Inaugural address of the Usurper President� 16 <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432523-1/ president-trump-condemns-violencecharlottesville-va>, <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432578-1/ president-trumpcondemns-hate-groups-racism-evil>, <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432633-1/ president-trump-there-blame-sides-violence-charlottesville>� 17 For a representative account of this bi-partisan reaction, see Dartonurro Clark, “Democratic, Republican Lawmakers Decry Trump’s Latest Charlottesville Remarks”, NBC News (16 August 2017) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ white-house/ notmy-president-lawmakers-decry-trump-s-latest-charlottesville-remarks-n793021>� Maya Oppenheim,‘Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Applaud Donald Trump’s Response to Deadly Violence in Virginia’ The Independent (13 August 2017) <http: / / www�independent�co�uk/ news/ world/ americas/ neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia-charlottesville-a7890786�html>� 18 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity 2017) defines a retrotopia as a space that persons who fear the insecurities and anxieties of globalization construct as an imagined past of fulfilled desire. Trump’s rallies add such extraneous spaces to the political order� Trump: Populist Usurper President 153 Donald Trump’s Jouissance and Other Symptoms of Liberal Democracy “I play to people’s fantasies� 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� I call it truthful hyperbole� It’s an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion.” 19 Donald Trump’s presidential campaign began when he lent credence to a fabrication invented by alt-Right ethno-nationalists that Barack Obama was a Kenya-born Muslim who lacked a valid United States birth certificate. Such an assertion would most certainly have abruptly terminated the political career of any other presidential candidate� But Trump would not back away from this racist fantasy no matter how much empirical evidence was gathered to disprove it� Moreover, the enjoyment he took from the anger each repetition provoked in his political antagonists steadily increased his popularity� In proposing that Trump’s populist movement traffics in fantasy, I do not mean that we need only expose its fantasmatic myth to reveal the underlying truth. Following Slavoj Žižek, I would argue that far from offering an escape from reality, such fantasies actively construct social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic dimension� Fantasy does not merely stage the fulfillment of the already constituted subject’s wishes; fantasy constructs the frame enabling us to desire something� It is through fantasy that the objects of desire are given, and it is through fantasy that we learn how to desire� The fantasy frame is constructed so that we experience our world as a wholly consistent and transparently meaningful order� 20 Fantasies produce a figure, the subject who is supposed to believe in them, as the precondition of their credibility� Political theorists who believe they can dismantle the power of collective fantasy by exposing its factual inaccuracies believe that credibility rises and falls with the truth of a factual state of affairs� But the fetishism that lies at the heart of Trump’s base is grounded on the active disavowal of knowledge� Fetishists are interested in the facts as the occasion to display how their fantasies can reorganize the facts� Members of Trump’s base might be described as having rephrased the fetishist’s conventional formulation of “I know this is not true but I believe it nonetheless” as “I know this fantasy isn’t true� But since I cannot otherwise make any sense of this crisis, I need to believe it just the same.” 21 19 Donald J� Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), p�58� 20 Throughout this analysis, Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian reading analysis of fantasy has supplied the interpretive context for my understanding of the role fantasy plays in Trump’s populist movement. See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), especially 43-56� 21 I discuss this paradoxical knowledge-belief attitude more fully in Donald E� Pease, “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama and the Tea Party Movement” in boundary 2 37�2 (2010): 89-105� 154 D onalD E. P EasE After the trauma of the financial collapse, the movement with which Trump affiliated his political ambitions constructed the fantasy of an autonomous political sphere - re-imagined within the representational matrix of the post-Reconstruction South - whose members were organized around a Contract from America� This movement reactivated the politics of fear that the Bush administration had turned into its principle of governance to negotiate economic and political dissatisfactions that the Obama administration was unable to address� Their coalescing fantasy enabled them to interpret the economic setbacks and cultural change from the standpoint of the loss of Real America� 22 Trump and other architects of the “Contract from America” capitalized on the generalized domestic insecurity that emerged after the subprime crisis and directed it onto the belief that President Obama was a Kenyaborn illegal immigrant, involved in a worldwide conspiracy designed first to destroy the U�S� Constitution and subsequently to exploit and imprison “mainstream” U.S. citizens. Reduced to the political demand underwriting it, this fantasy can be restated as a collective desire to secede from President Obama’s polity� 23 Whether or not this collective fantasy is factually true is of little importance, since such fantasies are structured at the site of the impossible demand that participants in Trump rallies act out� Political fantasies are always factually untrue, even as they reveal the truth of the participants’ very real fears� 24 What matters to the participants in Trump’s movement is the way their demands are organized in response to the enframing anxiety over the Obama administration’s imagined threat to the survival of their American way of life� Rather than becoming signatories to Obama’s proposed changes in the social contract, the affordable care act, members of Trump’s base resituated the “subject who is supposed to believe” within the provenance of the Contract from America that Donald would make great again� 22 For excellent essays on the erosion of trust in global institutions and the retreat to nativists and ethno-nationalist affiliations see essays by Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Alain Badiou among others see, The Great Regression (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), ed Henrich Geiselberger� 23 See Newt Gingrich and the Republican National Committee, Contract with America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994)� 24 Theorists of ideology who restrict their focus on cognitive mistakes relative to economic interest fail to recognize how emotional attachments have overridden what should have been seen as economic self-interest on the part of Trump’s working class and lower-income voters� Lauren Berlant has shrewdly remarked that [a]ll [affective] attachments are optimistic� When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us� This cluster of promises could seem embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea-whatever� (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) p� 23� Thomas Frank offers an important corrective to this perspective in What’s The Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2004)� Trump: Populist Usurper President 155 Trump’s signature injunction ”Make American Great Again! ” “offers his base a bellicose fantasy of return and renewal” for America and the American people� 25 Trump’s trafficking in fantasies in part explains why Trump does not need to comply with the norms of political rationality� The affects Trump’s supporters invest in fantasy are stronger than the facts his critics cite to expose his lies, distortions, or failures� A fantasy does not merely represent social reality� It also tries to shape it practically, so as to control the changes that cannot be incorporated within it� But every fantasy has its Real� The election of Obama designated that part of their practical reality that Donald Trump and the members of his movement could not accommodate� They could not acknowledge the reality of Obama’s presidency without undermining the viability of their prior construction of themselves� At the heart’s core of the Trump populist movement there sits a fantasy in which only the restoration to power of white supervisory control of black lives can contain the trauma of its Real - the spectacle of a black man being in charge of the nation� 26 Trump’s base construed the election of Obama as the breach of the white supremacist racial contract that supplied the precondition for their national belonging� Obama’s efforts to produce a new social contract with U�S� citizens, worked at the most intimate levels of the bio-political body� 27 He wanted to change healthcare policies at a conjunctural moment when the US body politic had undergone a frightening depletion of its vital energies, and the white American middle class was undergoing the foreclosure of its customary forms of life� In his presidential campaign, Trump turned President Obama’s changes in the provisions of the social contract related to healthcare into the occasion to repair the breach of the racial contract by promising to repeal and replace Obamacare� Trump’s supporters behave according to the emotional logics saturating what Brian Massumi has described as a “politics of affect” that entangles emotions and cognition in an inextricable knot� 28 The fear and the terror that a race man had penetrated white US citizens most intimate levels of social belonging incited the racist fantasies Trump articulated in mounting his campaign against Obamacare� Trump described the Affordable Care Act as 25 For a splendid analysis of the affective attachments and bonds of affiliation among Trump’s supporters, see Ben Anderson, “’We Will Win again� We Will Win a Lot’: The Affective Styles of Donald Trump” 2016, p.2. (accessed November 11, 2018) <https: / / www�academia�edu/ 30049871/ Donald_Trump_and_Affect�pdf>� 26 In White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998), Ghassan Hage describes the way that white nationals inhabit, experience, and conceive of their nation and of themselves as a fantasy in which they imagine themselves enacting the state’s will� p� 45-46� 27 I elaborate on this observation in Donald E� Pease, “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama versus the Tea Party Movement”, 90 boundary 2, vol�90 (Summer 2010), p�96-98� 28 See Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015)� In ‘Affective Economies’ Social Text� 22(2) 2004,� Sara Ahmed argues that political emotions do things� In concrete and particular ways, they mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective� p� 19� 156 D onalD E. P EasE a conspiracy to produce the financial ruin of the United States perpetrated by a black Muslim immigrant who usurped the most powerful position in the world� If Barack Obama’s election constituted reparation for the wrongs performed against minoritized populations in the historical past, was Obama going to do to white United States citizens what their colonial settler ancestors had done to the populations they had historically oppressed? 29 This question, which underpinned the idiolect at Trump’s rallies could not be answered by fact because it inscribed Obama within an order made in the image of questioners’ real fears� Trump’s quest to ‘Make America Great Again’ is not a political project built on policy, it is an affective and emotional appeal to Americans who feel Obama’s presidency destroyed the economic and social bases for their attachments to America� 30 Voters who show up at a Trump rally are less interested in the ideological content of his political propositions or the accuracy of his assertions than in the obscene transgressive pleasure they take from his vilifying Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug-lords, disparaging women’s bodies, ridiculing rally-goers’ physical disabilities, reveling in his resolve to bring back waterboarding, increase the illegal surveillance of Muslim mosques, and clear the deep state of the scum contaminating its ranks� At his rallies Trump openly expresses the delight he takes in his wealth and fame� Rather than pledging to bring an end to economic inequality, he revels in the power and social dominance his position within the 1% can buy� Trump takes comparable enjoyment in his spectacular transgression of the rules of political correctness� 31 Because the underpaid and exploited among his followers enjoy through Trump, he also gives them permission to express their racism, sexism, and hate� The populist abandon with which his supporters throw themselves into the rally-cries - Lock her up! Build the wall! Drain the swamp! - make it evident that their politics is not a means to a specific policy vision but enjoyment as its own end� 32 Their shared affective experience of enjoyment in being part of a wholly restored people is more important than any ideological content� At once foreordained by virtue of the people’s greatness, yet continually threatened by the hand of an alien and typically racialized agent, the America Trump would make great again stands in as an empty signifier, which, depending upon the affective investments of his addressees, can be made whole again through the cathexis afforded by the re-negotiation of 29 For a consideration of the numerous race-based fantasies in which Obama trafficked, see Donald E� Pease The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) p� 210-217� 30 John Protevi and Christian Helge Peters provide an incisive discussion of this aspect of Trump’s popularity in “Affective Ideology and Trump’s Popularity” p. 7-12 <http: / / www�protevi�com/ john/ TrumpAffect�pdf> (accessed November 1 2018)� 31 See Olivier Jutel, “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017� 32 Olivier Jutel develops this insight in “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017� Trump: Populist Usurper President 157 international trade deals or the fortification of the border or the vilification of media elites or the denial of climate change� Trump’s compulsive repetition of the impossible to realize demand “Make America Great Again! ” activates the perpetually incomplete process of recapturing this primordial wholeness. “The people” populating the America Trump would make great again is a powerful signifier for a political formation that is always negatively defined by an antagonistic enemy, whether cultural elites, or liberal media, or immigrants, or radical Muslim terrorists, or Black Lives Matter, or feminists, or globalists, or the press� The America to be made great again also serves as an encompassing referent for a historical bloc that could include workers in a coal-mining district decapitalized by environmental activists, residents of factory town down-sized by trans-national corporate interests, ethno-nationalists threatened by globalists, white triumphalist enclaves exposed by the black lives matter movement� 33 Trump supporters ‘enjoy’ the failure to recover this wholeness in that it instigates their combative transgression of civic norms in the pursuit of this illusory restoration� I draw my understanding of the relationship between antagonism and enjoyment from Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s psychoanalytic explanation of the populist subject as the psychoanalytic “subject of enjoyment” shaped by irrational drives to recover the fully harmonized America enemies have always already violated or threatened with destruction� 34 They do not consider the populist logics of antagonism and jouissance the pathological outside of liberal democracy but its symptom and repressed causative agency� The libidinal energy suffusing Trump’s populist movement depends on what Laclau calls an affective investment in a “people” whose enjoyment derives from the experience of their primordial antagonism to an enemy that threatens their very existence with compete destruction� If jouissance can be thought of as a libidinal enjoyment that revels in the ecstatic “hugeness” of object loss, it is Trump’s followers’ full libidinal identification with America as a primordially lost object that produces their collective jouissance. The ‘America’ that Trump would make great again can only trigger enjoyment insofar as the nation’s enemies have already violated the precondition for its restored wholeness� 35 However the loss of its achieved wholeness recursively generates an incessant drive and “desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance”. 36 33 It is important to note that shortly after Trump invited his followers to imagine themselves wielding the power of the system against the elite, Trump appointed cabinet members drawn from the highest echelons of the Pentagon and Wall Street whose rise to financial and military power depended on their close ties to the Washington DC political elite 34 See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason� London: Verso, 2005), and Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005)� 35 For a cogent account of stolen enjoyment, see Jason Glynos, and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity� No� 24 (2008), p� 272-274� 36 Glynos, and Stavrakakis, p� 261� 158 D onalD E. P EasE According to Laclau the act of defining the enemy of a particular constituency represents “political logic tout court”. 37 The populisms that emerged during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign re-affirmed what Laclau described as the ontological necessity of antagonism in political formations� The key political role that antagonism - no matter whether experienced in racial, nationalist or economic terms - plays in Trump’s populism might be understood as a response to what Trump considers the emotional bankruptcy of procedural liberal politics� The explosion of emotion and anger emanating from Trump’s populist movement revealed and reveled in their hostility to the politics of consensus, rationalism and technocracy that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton advocated� Indeed Obama’s and Clinton’s liberal politics of principled compromise was structured in the disavowal of the central premise of Trump’s political ethos: namely that political identity is based on antagonism and enjoyment� The enjoyment of the emotional charge in the political antagonisms propelling Trump’s movement is not just a rhetorical strategy or a political style, it is part of the psychological reward structure of Trump’s populism� It is for this reason that Trump’s supporters are invested in him as their ego-ideal who will ‘Make America Great Again’ by licensing jouissance� In his classic study of authoritarianism and crowds, Freud describes the followers of authoritarian leaders as having elevated “the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” 38 But Trump differs from the primordial father in Totem and Taboo who rules a group “that wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” 39 in that he is the ego-ideal of antagonistic enjoyment who unleashes an unrestrained appetite for transgression� 40 The sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who devoted several years of research in southern Louisiana to explore the affective ideology underpinning the right-wing populist “Tea Party” cultural formation that emerged there, has provided a well-documented account of the psycho-political disposition that Laclau and Mouffe have depicted� 41 In Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, the monograph that collates her research, Arlie Hochschild has turned Trump’s rallies into case studies that provide sociological warrant for their insight that antagonism is not just merely political stance but part of the libidinal reward structure of populism� In chapter 15 of Hochschild’s monograph, “Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise,” she describes a typical Trump rally as a ritual occasions at which his supporters undergo a psycho-social transformation from the 37 Laclau, p� 229� 38 Sigmund Freud,� Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, translated James Stratchey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948), p� 80� 39 Freud, p�99� 40 I am indebted Olivier Jutel’s “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017 for this insight� 41 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. A Journey to the Heart of Our Political Divide (New York: Free Press, 2016)� Trump: Populist Usurper President 159 condition of being economic cultural, demographic, and political ”strangers in their own land” 42 into an “affective national community” sustained by the collective enjoyment of their shared antagonism� Portraying Trump as an “emotions candidate” Hochschild contends that the people who attend a Trump rally are less interested in learning about his policies than experiencing an emotional re-orientation� The Trump voters Hochschild examines in her case study earn on average an annual income of $70,000 and are held together by two foundational moral beliefs: that Americans have a moral obligation to struggle to overcome any challenges God may have allotted them and to achieve the prosperity and happiness that the American Dream has promised them� The latter belief inspires his supporters to take genuine delight in Trump’s public enjoyment of the lifestyle his wealth and fame afford him� The former belief motivates them to feel contempt for members of identity groups - blacks, gays and lesbians, feminists, the physically disabled and impoverished - who claim victimhood status for physical and economic problems they should instead struggle to overcome� Trump’s followers are too committed to the ethos of hard work and self-reliance to label themselves victims of the knowledge economy� This moral disposition also causes Trump’s supporters to feel resentment at being rebuked for not empathizing with victim-groups whom they consider no worse off than themselves� Hochschild says their feelings of frustration and hostility mutated into anger-filled indignation when media and political elites criticized the moral institutions of faith, family, hard work upon which they based their refusal to empathize with victims of social oppression as the very racist, sexist and homophobic agencies responsible for the maltreatment of these victims� 43 What made matters worse was the fact that the federal government was helping the victim groups with whom Trump supporters could not identify “cut in line” ahead of them. They felt they were being rebuked not just for their lack of sympathy for others they felt were no worse off than themselves, they also felt berated for their positive valuation of church-going, of “family values”, of heterosexual marriage, of hunting and football, and of hard work and sacrifice. Yet, when they talked about their values, they felt accused of being racist and sexist and homophobic� In short, they felt trapped in an insurmountable double-bind� How could they feel sympathy for people no worse off than themselves who were being unfairly helped ahead of them, and how could they claim victim status without betraying their commitment to hard work, self-reliance, patience, and sacrifice. Unable to express their 42 Hochschild, p� 222� 43 It should be noted that Hochschild explains that her subjects do not find the notion of systemic racism credible� For them “a racist is someone who explicitly uses the “nword” and who actively and consciously hates and works against blacks (primarily), Hispanics, and Asians� The notion that racism need not be active and personal, but might also cover the acceptance of deep beliefs of racial hierarchy, or acceptance of invisible structural racism (racial housing segregation being chalked up to in-group elective affinity rather than, say, the history of federal mortgage programs), was not part of their belief system.”p. 8 160 D onalD E. P EasE exasperation at this dilemma without provoking a more encompassing form of moral censure, Trump supporters shared the experience of being trapped in this double bind� With this explanatory backdrop as warrant, Hochschild claims that the chief attraction of a Trump rally is its activation of interpersonal emotional processes that offer his followers an outlet for the collective expression of their anger-filled ressentiment. A typical Trump rally offers a conversion experience designed to recover the pride-filled identities of Trump’s predominately white, heterosexual, Church-going, gun-carrying, hard-working, middle class followers� To effect this transformation Trump recasts the emotional double-binds in which his rally-goers find themselves trapped within a grand narrative of the decline of a ham-strung nation and the promise of the regeneration of greatness to come� In the story, Americans face bleak prospects: dilapidated infrastructures, bad jobs, the threat of unemployment, immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Mexicans, terrorists, liberal values� Trump attributes primary responsibility for the hobbling of America’s future to the victim groups -Muslims, blacks, gays, Latino/ as, feminists - who jumped the queue� Trump’s ritual scapegoating instigates the transformation of his supporters collective feeling of undeserved shame into pride-filled enjoyment of their shared contempt for the identity groups that political and media elites cast as “victims.” Trump then successfully redirects their ressentiment onto targeted enemies - the “liberal elites” and the media who denounced them for their lack of sympathy with minorities - and identifies immigrants who have jumped the queue and stolen their jobs as those chiefly responsible for this negative valuations. Anxious about their future, Trumps supporters needed to find scapegoats to blame for their problems� Trump proved himself the political leader most suited to carry out this task when he liberated himself from what Hochschild dubs politically correct “feeling rules”. When Trump’s ritualistically defiles politically correct emotional norms, he quite effectively releases rally-goers from the shame that made them feel estranged from their “birthright identities”. His construction of racist and sexist stereotypes supplies supporters the wherewithal for the translation of their free-floating social anxieties into specified fears of Muslims, women, liberals and immigrants. This antagonistic understanding of the world sets “them” (secular humanists, “bureaucrats”, “Washington”, “the establishment”), against “us” (the “normal” and “modest” persons)� Trump’s followers end up hating the weak, the frightened, and the helpless� As Theodor Adorno observed in his 1950 study of the authoritarian personality, this targeted hatred offers Trump supporters the semblance of stability in a time of crisis� 44 Affect studies scholars characterize the political emotions that traverse Trump’s rallies as the agencies primarily responsible for binding its members together as a populist movement rather than contingently-formed assemblages of people� Trump evokes a kind of ecstatic transport in the participants in 44 Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, (New York: Harper, 1950) Trump: Populist Usurper President 161 his rallies at their experience of being among many folks felt to be in agreement The political emotions suffusing Trump’s rallies aim at building to a moment of ecstatic empowerment that Hochschild, after Durkheim, calls a “collective effervescence […] a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected…” 45 Trump’s ability to call upon the hope of his supporters makes the rallies themselves feel like an answer for several of their problems� In the intensely affecting atmosphere of co-presence at a Trump rally where the future seems wide open and changeable, Trump supporters interanimate one another’s emotional transformations, which grow stronger, more normconstituting and norm-enforcing� Indeed the symbolic action that takes place during a Trump rally substitutes a collectively shared emotional uplift for a fulfilling policy solution. This may also explain why the criticism of his arguments, lies, distortions, or failures is not enough to convince his followers to stop vindicating his dubious activities� Uplifted in the collectively shared transport of self-vindication, they would do or say whatever necessary to vindicate their ego-ideal� Inspired by his followers’ approbation, Trump also changed the rules of political discourse� Political speech codes were designed in part to protect figures the racial contract designated as sub-persons from linguistic injury. But at public debates, in interviews, and during his rallies, Trump routinely trafficks in racist slurs against Muslim and Mexican immigrants, vitriolic demeaning of transgender folk and women of color, and heated denunciations of competitors for public office. What the norms of political correctness and state law have ruled unsayable in a public debate, Trump says with impunity� Trump’s promiscuous repetitions of these prohibited speech acts were in part intended to undermine Obama’s social contract: they tacitly invalidated the chief meta-agreement that tethered members of the Tea Party to the social contract (Obamacare) that they otherwise were obligated to share with sub-persons� 46 However, Trump did not limit his public displays of force 45 Hochschild, p�225� Collective effervescence, a sociological concept introduced by Émile Durkheim, describes what happens when a community comes together and simultaneously communicates the same thought and participates in the same action� See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (New York: Macmillan, 1912)� 46 In The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), Charles W. Mills defines the racial contract as that “set of formal or informal or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contract’s validity) between one subset of humans henceforth designated as white and coextensive with the class of full persons, and that categorizes the remaining subset of humans as non white and of a different and inferior moral status, sub-persons” (Ibid.: 11). The “full persons” referenced in this definition are contrapuntal ensembles that require their differentiation from sub-persons to achieve self-identity� In other words, no matter how universal the applicability of this cate-gory, the figure of the person necessarily requires its distinction from the necessary and related category of the sub-person� Although the racial contract that underwrites the modern social contract is constantly being rewritten, it invariably establishes epistemological norms of cognition along racial lines� It 162 D onalD E. P EasE to the violation of rules and norms of political correctness� He customarily bragged that he would reinstate the use of torture, waterboarding, the destruction of a terrorists’ family as well as other measures that openly violated the laws of war� Trump’s speech acts might be described as having emerged from another order of legal rationality that did not merely result in the dissolution of Obama’s bio-political contract� Trump’s enactments also invoked a juridicopolitical realm beyond the state’s jurisdiction� Speaking in the name of this future juridical order, he performed the legality of what did not legally exist in the form of his open violation of the Obama administration’s rules and norms� Speaking and acting from the position of the inconsistency in Barack Obama’s social order, Donald Trump has transmuted the Tea Party’s heterogeneous and inconsistent motives and purposes into a singular fantasy� As the literal personification of an alternative America that will have usurped control of the national government, Trump enacts his followers’ collective desire to defile what remained of Barack Obama’s cosmopolitan imaginary. Donald Trump’s Anti-immigrant Retrotopia Barack Obama characterized hospitality to immigrants as a trait intrinsic to the US national identity� He also associated American uniqueness with the nation’s ability to foster a national identity that transcended tribe and sect� However, in his campaign and throughout his first fifty days in office, Trump has proudly embraced the isolationist “America First” rallying cry from the pre-World War II era� Rather than continuing Obama’s policy of welcoming the foreign-born, Trump channeled his constituency’s anxieties and fears by heightening the suspicion of immigrants� Trump distinguished his strategies of governance from Obama’s in that at his campaign rallies he instructed alienated working class, predominantly white voters, to direct their hostilities against the Immigrant as the figure responsible for the disappearance of their jobs� Identifying immigrants with the economic and social crises effected by globalization whose resolution requires their expulsion, Trump cast immigrant populations as scapegoats within national rites of purification. The illegal immigrant became for Trump’s acolytes the general equivalent for a whole range of socio-economic figures including political correctness, people of color, radical Muslim extremists, feminists Wall Street, and the elite media� Located at the interstices of national consciousness and the state’s repressive apparatuses, the immigrant provides a figure of double-faced otherness through which the nation defines itself as an imagined community and against which the state affirms its sovereign power to secure that community’s threatened borders� The United States democratic imaginary constructs prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, a resilient combination of disavowal and nonknowledge that guarantees that whites “will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.” P. 45. Trump: Populist Usurper President 163 the immigrant as a necessary supplement to national self-representation� This is so because the immigrant is at once the embodiment of the political desire for liberty and equality, and the incarnation of a profound threat to national identity. A self-differentiating figure, the immigrant confirms the nation’s foundational myth as a political asylum for the oppressed; the immigrant also supplies the state with a threatening body upon which it can exercise its unimpeded sovereign power� 47 Nativism constitutes the irreducibly real violence at the core of the nation’s liberal discourse of cultural diversity. The myth of “asylum”, the nation of immigrants, the nation of nations all prove to be an amnesiac form of nationalism—at once neglectful of its own exclusionary tendencies and inattentive to the nativism with which it co-exists� Trump awakened this nativist strain of ethno-nationalist violence when he described the geographical territory over which Obama exercised rule as a retrograde nation� Trump went on to suggest that immigrants share the collective desire to render Obama’s America their homeland because the Kenya born Obama has remade America in the image of a 3 rd World country� 48 Trump’s speechwriter and future security adviser Michael Anton has distilled Trump’s strategy into the proposition that the future president aspires to restore America’s greatness by dismantling Obama’s trans-national imaginary. Describing Obama’s presidency as a “junta” and the rising share of the nonwhite population Obama celebrated as a foreign invasion, Anton asserts that “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty … form a permanent electoral majority.” 49 The comparative literature scholar Ali Behdad supplied a compelling scholarly rationale for Trump’s attitude in his monograph A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, which describes the United States’ ambivalence towards immigrants as the historic basis for shift in America’s status from a colonial settlement to a New World Imperial Republic� 50 Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States Behdad designates this site of transition - where the European colonist became an American citizen - as a prefiguration of the frontier border where the state imposed its immigration policies� When situated at this site, European colonial settlers were split into contradictory 47 I provide a thicker account of the immigrant as a self-differentiatingfigure in “Immigrant Nation/ Nativist State: Remembering against an Archive of Forgetfulness.” boundary 2 35 (1) (2008): 177-95� 48 See Ian Schwartz,”Trump: U.S. A Third World Country in Many Cases, ‘It’s An Embarrassment”, Real Clear Politics (30 March 2018) <https: / / www�realclearpolitics� com/ video/ 2018/ 03/ 30/ trump_us_a_third-world_country_in_many_cases_its_an_ embarrassment�html>� 49 Publius Decius Mus,”The Flight 93 Election” Claremont Review of Books (5 September 5, 2016)� Publius Decius Mus was the pseudonym of Michael Anton, who in January of 2017 left the private sector to serve on the National Security Council� <https: / / www� claremont.org/ crb/ basicpage/ the-flight-93-election/ >. 50 Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)� 164 D onalD E. P EasE identities� The one identity represented the Old World past of the European immigrant as what must be left behind; the other identity supplied European immigrants with the intellectual and practical instruments with which to accomplish this severance� The national geography upon which European immigrants underwent self-division was comparably divided� European settlers represented America as at once a savage wilderness that they struggled to transform into a civilization, and as a prelapsarian utopia in which order, progress and intelligibility “naturally” prevailed. Europeans transformed the savage wilderness by displacing the conditions of hierarchical subjection onto the structure of relations with indigenous populations in America� Their taking possession of already occupied land involved european-americans in the forcible expropriation of indigenous populations and in the exploitation of slave labor� Trump channels this colonial settler mentality at his rallies where he routinely attributes America’s degraded global standing to the immigrant narrative Obama celebrated� A typical Trump rally site hollows a zone of indistinction between the frontier and the normal political order� At a Trump rally, followers collectively participate in the fantasy of their own regression to a state of desublimated rage at a quite literal restoration of a frontier site where these descendants of settler colonists can experience their ancestors’ regeneration through violence� The frontier site a Trump rally opens up is, like the original, the not-yet bounded space on either side of the border, which is beyond clear jurisdiction. This alternative geography figures as a topological rendition of capitalist expansion beyond limits� As the primal scene of capitalist accumulation and contract, the frontier names an as yet uncolonized space upon which the processes by which the proper order of capitalist property and racialized capital gets re-installed through Trump’s contract from this relentlessly nativist America� 51 Trump’s Inauguration as a Populist Usurper-President, Phoenix, Arizona August 22, 2017 Nowhere did the nativist prejudices and frontier settler violence that U�S� history had relegated to the nation’s discredited past seem more visible than in the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville. The perceived inadequacies in Trump’s equivocal responses to the moral catastrophe unfolding in Charlottesville precipitated a generalized crisis in symbolic investiture that had lain dormant since his inauguration� In the three statements that President Trump delivered about Charlottesville between August 12 and August 15, he had not merely violated the rules and norms of presidential correctness; his equivocal pronouncements about the Ku Klux Klan and 51 Angela Mitropoulos discusses these aspects of Trump’s frontier settler capitalism in “Post-Factual Readings of Neoliberalism” Before and after Trump” Society and Space (5 December 2016) http: / / societyandspace�org/ 2016/ 12/ 05/ post-factual-readings-of-neoliberalism-before-and-after-trump/ >� Trump: Populist Usurper President 165 Neo-Nazis had more importantly breached the moral contract that had united the right and left political factions for more than fifty years. 52 Following the August 15 press conference at which he reiterated the phrase “on many sides” from his August 12 declaration “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides - on many sides,” the calls for his impeachment as an imposter utterly unfit to hold the office of president mounted in volume and intensity. 53 It was Trump’s arrogant doubling down on his August 12 declaration that he found “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” that provoked the nearly unanimous moral censure� Moreover, the outrage over his recalcitrance was not restricted to news reporters, pundits, and political opponents� Republican colleagues whom Trump had come to trust were uncharacteristically forthright in their criticism. “We must be clear”, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan cautioned, “White supremacy is repulsive� This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.” To which nostrum Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added another, “There are no good neo-Nazis.” In a widely circulated tweet, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president, offered a useful disambiguation of Trump’s offensive phrase “many sides”: “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” 54 Trump’s political opponents alluded to the remarks of his Republican colleagues when they contemplated impeachment procedures against a man they considered utterly unfit for the presidency. 55 In the midst of this gathering storm, Trump announced that he would hold a meeting with his supporters on August 22 at the Phoenix Convention Center� In traveling to Phoenix, Arizona as the setting for the defense of what he said about Charlottesville, Trump enacted, quite literally, the Inauguration Day promise, “we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” Trump supporters who reassembled in the Phoenix Convention Center on August 22 would soon exercise the sovereign power Trump purported to transfer to them by changing the ideological and moral perspective on his statements about Charlottesville so as to clear him of the 52 Dan Balz, “After Charlottesville, Republicans Remain Stymied over What to do about Trump” The Washington Post (19 August 2017) <https: / / www�washingtonpost�com/ politics/ after-charlottesville-republicans-remain-stymied-over-what-to-do-abouttrump/ 2017/ 08/ 19/ >� 53 Josh Siegel, “Democrats renew calls for Trump impeachment after his Charlottesville response”WashingtonExaminer(15August2017)<https: / / www�washingtonexaminer�com/ democrats-renew-calls-for-trump-impeachment-after-his-charlottesville-response>� 54 Rubio, McConnell and Romney are quoted in Lauren Gambino, “Republicans on Charlottesville: Who’s with Trump and Who’s against him? ” The Guardian (16 August 2017) <https: / / www�theguardian�com/ us-news/ 2017/ aug/ 16/ republicans-charlottesville-trump-response-for-against>� 55 Lesley Clark, “Democrats Drafting Articles of Impeachment against Trump” Miami Herald (17 August 2017) <https: / / www�miamiherald�com/ news/ nation-world/ article167795437�html>� 166 D onalD E. P EasE charge of moral dereliction� However, the power Trump handed back to the Phoenix “We the People” assembly was not limited to the sovereign power to exonerate their leader of all charges of impeachable misconduct� Prior to the August 22 assembly in Phoenix, very few members of the Republican party were willing to defend a president who perceived a moral equivalence between the Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan marchers in Charlottesville and those who protested against them� The consensus opinion that his press statements about Charlottesville had done real damage to the moral authority of the president had all but solidified. However when Trump flew to Phoenix, he changed the venue of the court of public opinion to a city where expressions of white triumphalism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, and frontier violence were not uncommon� Trump had visited the Phoenix Arizona Convention Center shortly after he announced his intention to run for president� On that occasion and throughout his campaign, Trump singled out Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s extra-legal tactics for rounding up and incarcerating immigrants as exemplary stratagems for defending U�S� borders� Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and paramilitary organizations might have seemed anomalies in Charlottesville, Virginia� But Phoenix was in Maricopa County, Arizona, which had been under the provenance of Sheriff Arpaio whose tent city jail erected for undocumented workers had elicited praise from ultra-right and racist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan� 56� Trump supporters in Phoenix, Arizona did not adhere to the rules and norms that the majority the American people presupposed in judging his pronouncements about Charlottesville morally repugnant� Indeed, the people Trump assigned the role of his moral vindicators in Phoenix were the very people he had urged to take intense enjoyment in his transgression of established norms� Trump’s change of venue for the defense of his official statements called attention to the fact that from the day of his inauguration he felt doubly interpellated into non-commensurable figures: the Donald J. Trump who felt enjoined to execute the duties and responsibilities of the President of the United States; and Donald J� Trump, the president who is not one, who could not felicitously carry out those tasks without alienating the members of his populist movement who demanded he show flagrant disregard for the presidential mores that made them feel set aside� In the statements he would deliver during his Phoenix address, Trump made clear his intention to subject the official duties and sovereign responsibilities of office of the President to the will of a segment of the American populace who regarded them with disdain� In his Phoenix address, Trump did not apologize for the moral equivocations in his earlier pronouncements nor explain what he meant to say in his previous utterances� Trump began his remarks about Charlottesville by turning a segment of the offensive sentence (“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides.”) into the following rallying cry for the event “And tonight, this entire arena stands united in forceful condemnation of the thugs who perpetrate hatred and violence.” In a rhetorical tour de force, Trump: Populist Usurper President 167 Trump then proceeds to identify reporters from CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as among the “thugs” worthy of the people’s forceful condemnation: But the very dishonest media, those people right up there with all the cameras� (BOOING) So the - and I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories� They have no sources in many cases� They say “a source says” - there is no such thing. But they don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the White Supremacists, and the KKK� 56 With this opening gambit Trump signals his intention to stage the Arizona meeting as a battle royale setting the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center, who vociferously approve all three of his presidential statements about the Charlottesville event, in an increasingly belligerent relationship with the media covering the meeting. To accomplish this aim, Trump begins his Phoenix address with a verbatim recitation of passages from the official declarations about Charlottesville, which he delivered as the President of the United States of America� His recitations include actionable lines from all three of his official statements beginning with the opening lines of August 12 press conference: So here is my first statement when I heard about Charlottesville� So here’s what I said, really fast, here’s what I said on Saturday: “We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia” - this is me speaking. At the time President Trump delivered these official statements about Charlottesville, they conveyed the sovereign power and authority invested in presidential speech acts. When he recites the president’s official statements verbatim, he turns these sovereign speech acts into a merely formal exercise—what the office required him to say—when Trump repeats these official presidential pronouncements, that is to say, as if an actor rehearsing his lines in front of the genuine author, the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center� Casting himself in the role of representative agent of this people’s will, with each recitation of his presidential pronouncements, Trump divests these official utterances of the sovereign will of the president and declares them speech acts in need of the acclamation and approval of the assembled people for their felicitous uptake and legitimacy� In so doing, he is once again making good on his Inauguration Day promise “we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” In this instance the power he transfers to this specific assemblage of the American people is that of sovereign will responsible for warranting the efficacy of presidential speech acts. Yet the sole “we” that can be said to possess the exceptional authority to supplant the executive power of the 56 For a discussion of these connections, see William Finnegan, “Sheriff Joe: Joe Arpaio is tough on prisoners and undocumented immigrants. What about crime? ” The New Yorker (20 July 2009) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2009/ 07/ 20/ sheriff-joe>� 168 D onalD E. P EasE occupant of the oval office and give that power back to the American people is a usurper figure who enacts sovereign power as if the expression of the pre-emptive sovereign will of “We the people”. Trump indicates the anomalous figure responsible for divesting these speech acts of the president’s sovereign will when he informs his addressees of the true identity of the speaker (“this is me speaking”) who impersonated the president to say “We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.” The indexical phrase “this is me speaking” introduces a distinction between the presidential “We” who is closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia” and the “me speaking” who originally uttered those lines by taking up the persona of the president. With the stipulation “this is me speaking” Trump dis-identifies “this is me” from the figure (the presidential (“We”) obliged to make official pronouncements about Charlottesville� This distinction is important because it calls explicit attention to what I earlier described as Trump’s asymmetrical identifications as Imposter-President and Usurper-President. After registering this self-division, Trump proceeds to the next verbatim recitation: “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” That’s me speaking on Saturday. (APPLAUSE) Right after the event� (APPLAUSE) The persona who says “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” is the figure who was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 and who was summoned on August 12 by the moral responsibility and solemn obligations attendant to the office of the President to condemn the violent and hate-filled action unfolding in Charlottesville”. However, the person who says “That’s me speaking on Saturday. Right after the event” is the Usurper-President (the president that is not one) who cannot identify with the official statement of the president without the loss of identification with the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center� The speech event Trump stages is that of an embattled representative of the people’s will who can express himself only retroactively in and as the distinction between the official statements of the president of the United States and those of the Usurper who divests these speech acts of their sovereign force. But the latter figure can successfully usurp the office of the president only retroactively when the segment of the American people before whom Trump recites these official presidential announcements in the Phoenix Convention Center spontaneously acclaim his power to divest these statements of the sovereign power inherent in the he office of the president so as to reinvest them with this people’s sovereign power. In the complex speech situation Trump staged in Phoenix, he proposes that the official statements he made as president could not acquire the status of felicitous or legitimate speech acts as he initially said them because they Trump: Populist Usurper President 169 were accompanied by an ongoing and simultaneous impeachment from an antagonist who finds them inappropriate responses to what is taking place in Charlottesville: So I’m condemning (sic) the strongest, possible terms, “egregious display,” “hatred, bigotry and violence.” OK, I think I can’t do much better, right? OK. But they didn’t want to put this on� They had it on initially, but then one day he talked (ph) - he didn’t say it fast enough. He didn’t do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist� It took a day� (BOOING) Now it should be noted that the speaker enunciating the utterance “So I’m condemning the strongest, possible terms, ‘egregious display,’ ‘hatred, bigotry and violence’” is different from either the figure of the president or the substance of what “that’s me speaking on Saturday” previously said about Charlottesville when impersonating the office of president. The figure who repeats these lines viva voce before the segment of the American people whose retroactive sovereign will he purports to incarnate is Donald Trump the Usurper� He requires this retroactive approbation because every one of the speech acts Trump uttered as the “this is me speaking” while impersonating the president underwent ongoing and simultaneous impeachment (“he didn’t say it fast enough. He didn’t do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist. It took a day”) as he uttered them and requires this fabulous anteriority of the populist movement whose sovereign power will have retroactively re-appropriated these utterances as expressions of their will� It is important to notice, however, that the phrases-“egregious display,” “hatred, bigotry and violence” - retroactively invested with this segment of the American people’s will are deflected from condemning what took place in Charlottesville and redirected against the members of the media who found them morally inappropriate� Despite Trump’s pretense of verbatim recitation, he quite deliberately omits the equivocal phrase “on many sides, on many sides” that listeners found morally repugnant in the official presidential utterances. Rather than defending himself against the charge of moral ambiguity, he casts himself as the embattled representative of the sovereign will of his populist movement� Then he redirects the charge of bigotry and intolerance onto his accusers and characterizes everyone who hears anything other than unambiguous condemnation into enemies intent on positioning him within moral doublebinds (no matter what he says it’s not specific enough, or belated, or racist) comparable to those Hochschild reported as the shared condition of his supporters� To intensify the assembly’s collective enjoyment of this newfound antagonism, Trump amplifies his righteous indignation at being accused of unambiguous intolerance of bigotry into the pretext for uniting the entire arena in forceful condemnation of the intolerant, bigoted reporters from CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times who have displaced the Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan as more suitable targets for his movement’s condemnation� 170 D onalD E. P EasE In attending to Trump’s strictly formal verbal stratagems, however, we should not fail to recognize that, in adding the media to the parties responsible for what the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence”, Trump’s virtuoso performance has quite literally materialized the phrase “on many sides” that his listeners found universally repugnant. By deflecting attention away from the lethal violence of white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan and redirecting his Phoenix assembly’s condemnation of bigotry and intolerance onto the media as well as anyone else who criticized his moral equivocations, Trump has, in the name of this segment of “We the People”, usurped the moral authority to offer an ethically truthful account of what had taken place in Charlottesville� In his Phoenix address, Trump did indeed recite sentences that served as strictly formal examples of President Trump’s official denunciations of the hatefilled violence enacted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. But he designed this formal stratagem to distract attention from the truly offensive event his Phoenix meeting added to the Charlottesville debacle� The event to which I refer took place when, shortly after Trump completed his formal verbatim recitations, he turned to his constituency and announced his intention to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was then serving time for refusing to obey a court order prohibiting racial profiling of immigrants: By the way, I’m just curious. Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe? (APPLAUSE) So, was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job? That’s why… (APPLAUSE) He should have had a jury, but you know what? I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, OK? (APPLAUSE) When Trump’s rhetoric of condemnation gives way to the substantive and materially efficacious act of promising to pardon a sheriff who personified the bigotry and violence he formally condemned and whose policing tactics had drawn favorable notice from neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, he gives away his intention to affiliate the populist constituency he has assembled in Phoenix with the “many fine people” in the “Unite the Right! ” rally in Charlottesville� 57 Trump thereby accomplished what the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville could not� He has usurped representational control of the America national imaginary from the mainstream media and delivered it to a movement and to an underground media network in which whiteness and white supremacy and frontier settler violence are the ruling norms� The populist spectacle unfolding in Phoenix supplanted the media representation of Charlottesville with this quite literally extraneous scene� The Americans he addresses here inhabit an historically superseded America that is populated by American firsters, isolationists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and that can only become great again when these ignominious 57 https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=bfBNmzL1RE8 Trump: Populist Usurper President 171 constituencies grant Trump’s speech acts the power to represent what took place at Charlottesville from the thoroughly contemptible perspective of this alternative America� By articulating the relations of mutual belonging of the people assembled here, Trump at once stages, represents, and embodies this alternative America� According to legal scholars, usurpation describes a state of affairs generated “whenever the people who make up the federal government, either as individuals, as departments or as branches, exercise power not expressly delegated to them as specified in the Constitution, they are usurping the authority of either the states or the people.” 58 Throughout this discussion I have attempted to demonstrate how Donald Trump’s enactments at the Phoenix convention center constituted a counter-investiture ceremony at which he divested himself of his obligation to carry out the duties and obligations assigned him as president of the United States, and usurped the power and authority of that office to act upon the sovereign will of the people of an alternative American whose condition of emergence involves the undelegated imposition of an ignominious past on the American people� Works Cited Ahmed, Sara, “Affective Economies” Social Text� 22(2), (2004), p� 117-139� Allen, Jonathan, “At Rally, Trump Brings Up “the Impeachment Word” To Embolden Base, NBC News (7 September 2018) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ politics-news/ trump-tags-new-york-times-treason-charge-n907336>� Anderson, Ben “’We Will Win again� We Will Win a Lot’: The Affective Styles of Donald Trump” 2016, p.2. 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