As we near the denouement of the 2020 U.S. general election, the actual in-person one-day ballot—which will surely be less decisive this year than previously, due to the relative prevalence of early voting—Donald J. Trump’s presidency looks doomed. Polling resolutely predicts his demise. Of course, pollsters are cautious this year after almost equally decisive predictions in 2016 proved misguided, and indeed there is still reason to think that Trump might nonetheless triumph (see in particular Isaac Lopez’s recent prediction to this effect in this very blog in his “Why Trump Will Win”).
Trump’s defeat would in a way provide a logical end point to a consistent wailing for his blood from the most vocal sectors of the American public sphere, which began well before he became president. The consistency of the discourse against Trump is nothing short of uncanny—indeed, in some ways it seems unchanged, fossilized, left over from when it was intended to prevent the unthinkable election of Trump from ever taking place. We might read in this determined carrying-on of the rhetorical electioneering of 2016 over the entirety of Trump’s term a kind of denial that Trump’s election ever happened. Indeed, Trump’s election was for urbane liberals so unthinkable that their capitalized “Resistance” to Trump has not been so much a political resistance movement as a reaction of psychological resistance to the very existence of his presidency. From such a perspective, Trump’s defeat might seem to offer a return to sanity and normality, one that will allow “Resisters” to pretend his presidency never happened.
It occurs to me, however, that there is something else going on here. For all that Trump’s opponents have refused to accept Trump’s presidency, they have come increasingly, it seems to me, to rely on Trump as the master signifier around which their politics revolves. Trump has come to be a pure monster, a figure of absolute negativity, a “racist” and “fascist” president, who justifies all acts of opposition to him by dint of his sheer nefariousness. I have found myself wondering, increasingly, what mainstream U.S. political opinion will do without Trump. What will liberals do when they are confronted with the fact that almost everything in U.S. society that they have come phantasmically to associate with Trump has been there all along? Is it possible at this point for many of Trump’s opponents to remember or cognize that Black Lives Matter was a movement that emerged in opposition to systemic racism in the second presidential term of Barack Obama, or how ICE was expanded under Obama (and hence under Joe Biden’s vice presidency)?
Trump’s presidency has been marked by nothing so much as—nothing. As I have detailed to some extent in my recent articles in Telos, Trump has done little of substance as president. He has continued to bloviate in the most extraordinary way, to issue thousands of impolitic late-night tweets, to preside over a revolving door administration that was clearly chaotic to its core. Trump is manifestly incompetent and profoundly politically naïve, his talking points often clearly half-remembered from watching Fox News. Trump’s presidency has been marked by a dysfunction and indecisiveness at the center—lashing out occasionally with trade sanctions, but markedly less keen to lash out with deadly force than his two predecessors.
Trump is, in short, an idiot, a childish buffoon, who reliably and constantly plays the part that the Resistance has assigned to him. But there is therefore nothing really there to Resist. They thus do not resist Trump at all. Rather, they scapegoat him. Trump in his idiocy is actually something in the order of an unwitting patsy, though neither he nor his opponents would be willing to acknowledge such a thing—he because of his Dunning-Kruger syndrome, they because they need to believe in his diabolical dangerousness. Here, I am referring in particular to René Girard’s theory of the “scapegoat mechanism” from his Violence and the Sacred.
In this role of scapegoat, Trump hearkens back entirely unintentionally to a deep history of sovereigns being sacrificial victims. By making Trump (and his supporters) into the enemy, we can paper over the deep cleavages in American society, ones between classes, sexes, religions, and races. I think it is no coincidence that this negative organization of politics around a scapegoat is appearing at a moment where the older bases of American collective identity have disappeared, and where Christianity, in particular (which Girard sees as the force that has—through the atoning sacrifice of Christ—singularly historically managed to free societies from violent cycles of revenge-taking and scapegoating), has given way to either inchoate multiculturalism or simply to nihilism.
The end point of this scapegoating could of course take many forms. It might take a fairly literal one, with Trump tried and punished for crimes in office, after he has been unseated. It is hard to feel concerned for the fate of Trump, who in his profound narcissism can surely be fairly said to deserve anything he gets. I worry much more what will happen to America, however, once a sacrifice of Trump has actually been made, even if the sacrifice is only on the altar of electoral annihilation. I wonder whether, paradoxically, a Trump victory might be better for America simply because it will continue to give a plurality of Americans a unifying factor: hating Trump. I wonder even whether, unconsciously, the deep hatred of Trump does not find its necessary corollary, suggested in Freud’s theory of psychological ambivalence, that is, that people who hate Trump love him at a deep level. We might perhaps more precisely say that they love to hate him, so much so even that perhaps that they will not actually unseat him, or at least not prevent him winning, enjoying nothing so much as the deep lamentations they will be able to throw themselves into were he yet again to triumph against all odds.
For more of Mark G. E. Kelly’s writings on current American politics, see “Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neoliberalism,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020), and “Foucault and the Politics of Language Today,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020).
“The end point of this scapegoating could of course take many forms.”
I am much more pessimistic than Mr. Kelly–there is a powerful part of myself that is urging me toward extremes– that even enjoys this recognition of a shared desire to destroy.
I think Girard was most frightened by Clausewitz’s argument that “even the most civilized of peoples can be fired with hatred of each other.”
How exactly do all the rationalists at Telos propose to stop this collective and irrational jump into the abyss?