Born the son of a wealthy real estate tycoon, Donald J. Trump was gifted with the wealth and privilege necessary to begin his own operations, but he lacked the acumen and talent to succeed.
Trump won the presidency in November of 2016 by targeting disaffected, angry white voters and embattled culture warriors in the evangelical community, promising to “Make America Great Again” and to return the country to some mythical, ill-defined past.
Over the course of his career, he lost unbelievable amounts of money, and his corporation declared bankruptcy multiple times as his mishandling of buildings, casinos, hotels, resorts, and airlines revealed a stunning ineptitude. In fact, at times Trump lost more money than any other taxpayer in America, setting an inglorious standard for personal futility.
Trump did have one talent, which was his understanding of how American media operated and fed off the myth of wealth and meritocracy. Beginning early in his career, he worked harder to promote himself as a success in newspapers, magazines, and television than he did to prosper in business.
Pushed forward by a system of privilege and perception, Trump continued to fail upward. The media’s portrayal of him as the epitome of American success netted him numerous cameos in popular culture that kept his fictional persona aloft until he landed a starring role on the reality television show The Apprentice.
The brainchild of producer Mark Burnett, who created the neoliberalism-in-action, dog-eat-dog contest Survivor, The Apprentice portrayed Trump and his failed business as the television embodiment of high-stakes corporate intrigue, a program only possible in the postmodern, hyper-capitalist era. Over its run, Trump was seen as a presidential figure who picked the winners from the losers.
Even in this, Trump’s persona was a fraud, as he regularly made inexplicable choices and forced hurried post-production efforts to “assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense,” as The New Yorker put it. As the new myth was being authored, members of The Apprentice’s production team noted that Trump presided over a “crumbling empire” marked with “chipped furniture” and a tarnished finish they were entrusted with giving an artificial luster.
That façade held considerable clout though, as the neoliberal system maintained that anyone of wealth and power surely must have earned it if the idea of a meritocracy were to be believed. In this sense, Trump’s character of a wildly successful, golden-touched tycoon became a reality because he was continually presented as such in mass media, lending him credibility and expertise when he was neither credible nor an expert.
Trump’s personal obsession with the media paid unbelievable dividends. Speaking as a candidate in 2016 to Republican voters in the primaries, he destroyed any distance between himself and the propaganda machine. Rather, he became the standard bearer of an alternate reality where the complicated trouble of globalism was replaced with a simplistic conspiracy that shifted blame to vulnerable minorities.
The mainstream media’s cycle of perpetual coverage around Trump earned him upwards of $5 billion in free coverage as the networks and newspapers relied on him for record ratings and traffic that bolstered their profits.
The frenzied disaster that was the Donald Trump campaign created what CNN head Jeff Zucker called “the biggest story we could ever imagine.” CBS president Les Moonves infamously admitted Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” adding, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”
Trump gave the networks and publications the spectacle they so desperately wanted. For those who supported him, he delivered a rebuke of politics and diversity, voicing their anger and frustration. For those who hated him, he fueled and inspired overwhelming anxiety that addicted voters to their newsfeeds and headlines to keep an eye on a rising threat.
Everyone was tuning in and clicking articles, even if it was for wholly different reasons. In this way, Donald Trump, a C-list celebrity and an abject failure for decades, had transformed into an integral fixture in the American imagination.
Trump won the presidency in November of 2016 by targeting disaffected, angry white voters and embattled culture warriors in the evangelical community, promising to “Make America Great Again” and to return the country to some mythical, ill-defined past. He pieced together libertarian and business-minded voters on the right, by employing a war of disinformation and propaganda that was, at the very least, parallel to the efforts by Russian intelligence.
His Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, long the target of conspiracy theories and derision on the right, took the popular vote by 2.8 million. But the Electoral College, engineered by the Founders to advantage slaveholding states against fears of majority rule in the eighteenth century, gave Trump the election.
Trump was the ideal candidate of the time. His inherent understanding of malleable reality and its dependence on perception prepared him to win in the twenty-first century. In a deposition in 2007, he had admitted to a long-rumored charge that his hard-to-nail-down net worth fluctuated, in his own words, “with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings,” laying out an incredible definition of reality as perception and the concept of relativism.
This flexible worldview perhaps rendered the very concept of truth extinct. In speeches, press conferences, and internet missives, Trump lied at an alarming pace, often contradicting himself in the space of seconds. Everything became supple and virtually meaningless.
This spread through his administration, leading adviser Kellyanne Conway to invent the term “alternative facts” and confidant Rudy Giuliani to tell a disbelieving television host, “Truth isn’t truth.” In an Orwellian moment that encapsulated a new state of being in which spin and outright lies threatened to destroy the very concept of objective reality forever, Trump himself told one crowd, “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
What was happening in America in 2016 was eerily reminiscent of what had taken place in Putin’s Russia at the beginning of the century. Just as technologists in Moscow had learned anything was possible when objective reality was obliterated, Trump and his team found that consistent lying and a perpetual attack on the truth took a toll on the American consciousness.
Like Putin, candidate Trump was free to commit any crime and trample any norm as he enjoyed the benefit of a manufactured reality suited to his tastes and advantage, all of it supported by a rightwing media ecosystem that functioned as state-run propaganda. At all times, he maintained a rabid cult dedicated to authoritarianism in the name of recreating past glories and battling ascending populations that might threaten their power.
As he literally hugged and kissed the flag, Trump claimed the role of ambassador of the American Myth, promising white Americans the reality they had lived in their entire lives could be saved from a rising tide of multiculturalism and swiftly changing demographics. The Cult of the Shining City, a nationalistic, white identity, evangelical movement with conspiracy-minded beliefs that bordered on the occult, raised Trump on high like a faulty messiah, and as they lauded him with titles like “chosen one,” his blasphemous word became living gospel.
Trump’s opponents, whether liberals or diplomats or members of the Republican Party, were summarily placed within the paradigm of “the Deep State,” the newest iteration of the New World Order conspiracy theory, and branded as evil criminals determined to destroy the Shining City.
As it became clear that Trump could win the Republican primary, Fox News realized its destiny and embraced him, seeming to audition to be a propaganda organ for a future Trump Administration. Its producers and pundits warped reality at a moment’s notice when Trump contradicted himself, discarding long-held Republican principles and positions to maintain ever-tenuous cohesion. Any pretense of objectivity or respectability disappeared as Democratic and Republican critics of Trump were presented as sinister actors at the helm of a feverish, paranoid conspiracy.
Republican politicians, realizing their party had been taken over by the fringe Tea Partiers and authoritarian Trumpists, did the mental math and reasoned that enabling and empowering Trump would gain them political advantage, room to further their economic reconfiguring, dominance over the nation’s judiciary, and an opportunity to maintain electoral viability despite diminishing popularity. As they did so, the system designed by James Madison, a system that required people to work in the interest of the nation and competition between branches of the government instead of overt cooperation, began to fray in alarming and obvious ways.
What had begun as a great experiment with self-governance and a society grounded in reason had devolved into a mismanaged system of control and profit fortified by myths designed to undermine the power of the people. The question of whether the people would ever fully recognize that power, if they would ever be allowed to self-determine their own destinies, had been in doubt since momentous concepts like government and politics and power had first been invented.
But now, with the very notions of truth and reality troubled to the point of extinction, the question hangs precariously in the balance.
From American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People by Jared Yates Sexton, published September 15 by Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Jared Yates Sexton.