An Empty Man: The Hyperreality of Donald Trump

On July 21st, 2016, a hologram of a person accepted the GOP nomination for the Presidency. The GOP had long since been descending into a mass of right-wing racist revanchism, all its euphemisms and coded language no longer needed, now turbocharged, supersized, in giant golden letters draped in a hundred fucking flags. This hollow man then gave the darkest, most malevolent speech in American political convention history: a litany of a grim world that, in his own words, only he could save and probably paint gold or some shit. The next two years have been a horror show and glimpse into the wind-swept mind of a truly empty man: a construction so vile and repulsive only the cultural dumpster of America could produce him.

He didn’t mean a single word of it. He never means anything he says, because he is incapable of meaning. The world exists to him as a hologram of his own reflection: a man with no interior life reflecting the image of himself. I’ve never seen the man genuinely laugh or smile when it wasn’t connected to some act of childish cruelty. He seems to have no joy or love. He is the copy of a copy with no original, a hyperreal shell reacting to pure stimuli. There is no real Donald Trump to uncover because there never was in the first place. Pull back the curtain, and there’s no Wizard, just an empty, gaudy chair.

At an indistinct moment in time, the expression of much of American politics crossed over an invisible border, ceasing to be any sort of lived thing in many people’s lives. The concept of politics transmogrified, almost in lockstep with the advancement of cable news, into simple media to be consumed. Just like cartoons or sports, “politics” is a brand of entertainment eager to push our anxieties to the maximum, like cliffhangers before a commercial break or a sensational headline aching to be clicked. Very little of it feels real because it is so omnipresent, exhausting, and so clearly resembles entertainment we know to be illusion. This media environment feels like a dark, endless dream.

Fueling most of this nightmarish mental environment is the smirking crinkly dullard cosplaying as President. Like he knows what is happening around him. Like he’s not always out of his depth.

Trump’s entire brand is illusion. He now builds nothing, sells nothing he makes, licensing his name and self-constructed image more than anything else to the tune of $560 million. He, of course, lies and says it’s $3.5 billion, but it might as well be $750 gajillion in Trump’s brain. Buildings with his name on them are just them: named after him. A gold-plated name slapped with a brand of tacky luxury and glamour, earned from the act of being himself. Note the logo is gold-plated, but not solid.

A Tomb

His “fortune” was inherited from his father and resulted mostly from buying crumbling buildings and extensively renovating them into ugly eyesores, which is assumed how he feels about his new management of America. A labyrinth of tax scheme fraud ensured money went into their pockets anyway it could. He is, in fact, taking a hollow structure and slapping a fresh coat of paint on it. Ignore the rotting smell, just step over the vagrants. Don’t make eye contact. Tell them to “get a job” and then refuse to hire them.

It makes perfect sense that the Trump Taj Mahal Casino, one of his largest failed real estate ventures, is named after what is literally a gigantic tomb for an emperor’s wife. I find no better representation of the interior of his soul. Emblematic of his vacuousness, the Taj Mahal Casino is an expensive, cartoonish copy of an ancient architectural wonder, built to encourage drunken morons and crooks to give him their money. On brand as ever, in 2013 the casino also had an in-house strip club called “Scores”.

The venture imploded in the one business, other than fast food, that should be almost guaranteed to succeed in this country. Trump’s finances have long been a labyrinth of shuffling cash from one business to the other to keep each other afloat. The Trump Taj Mahal, in addition to being a casino, hotel, and titty joint, was also a laundromat that broke money-laundering rules a staggering 106 times in its first 18 months of operation, most likely for Brooklyn Russian mobsters who frequented the casino. That means once every 5 days, someone cashed out more than $10,000 worth of chips without any documentation.

Russian mobsters, Trump’s propensity for sex workers, money laundering, financial difficulty, and private rooms: the ingredients for the President’s most infamous urban legend are all there. And just like Trump’s own fortune or personal history, urban legend and hearsay is often the best we can do.

Now the Taj Mahal is owned by Hard Rock International, and by extension, the Seminole Tribe of Florida (who made their fortune on, you guessed it, casinos). They reopened the distinctly non-Trump retrofit in June of this year, and what better brand to take over from fake reality TV wealth than doughy middle managers pretending to be rockstars while eating a 1300 calorie hamburger.

The Taj Mahal Casino is so perfectly representational of the Trump brand: a cheap but expensive simulacrum of something better, but filled with fake dreams and watered-down booze. His business image is the emulation of the media depiction of a successful businessman. With little irony, many Hollywood depictions have satirized Trump, not realized they were, in fact, satirizing something that was itself a type of unintended satire of capitalist excess, an excess they themselves helped to popularize. The mind reels.

He ran a real estate company, a fact that is incidental, considering it was something he never really wanted in the first place. That would involve a lot of actual, you know, work. This is a man addicted to cable news and his phone, writing in “Executive Time” on his calendar like it’s a playdate by Mommy. What he wanted was the image of being successful, just the image, regardless if that success was real or bankrupt six times over.

Off Base

The writhing mass of oily tentacles known as the Trump base doesn’t care about who he is or what he says, but only how it makes them feel. The economy is stronger (whatever that means), crime is down, America is respected because they feel it to be. Trump fandom is a state of wind, impervious to any sliver of reality. Living in the world of the unreal, a media depiction of the world (which is now totally self-reinforcing), all that concerns his most ardent base is how the Trump Train makes them *feel*. A very emotional bunch, lots of feelings.

For a group of people endlessly mocking “liberal snowflakes” for emotional instability, I’ve rarely seen a group of people so clearly blind to their entitled cultural resentment. Their pain is empty and nameless, and Trump’s pathological lying and narcissism allows them to lie to themselves, to feel empowered to do something, anything but continue to exist in this netherworld corporate and alienated cultural dead end.

He creates a consistent narrative of a world that is constantly under siege by insidious forces, making a hard turn into racist, fascist rhetoric by placing the blame almost universally on the undocumented immigrants, Muslims, LGBT people, and urban black Americans. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, what matters is that it makes white Americans feel centered and empowered after a generation of change that didn’t always include them. It’s a world that has been “stolen” from them, clearly summarizing the resentment they feel that white Americans can no longer act with impunity.

They desperately want to recenter themselves. But recenter themselves in what, exactly? It’s never clear.

Hyperreality TV

His catchphrase “Make America Great Again” is attempting to return America to a fantasy version of America generated by the television and advertising depictions. Ask a diehard Trump supporter *when* America was great, and they can’t nail down a specific year, instead offering up a vague time period after WWII. I wonder what happened from, say, 1954 to 1968 to make them so upset. They wish to return to a white America was depicted in popular culture as safe, clean, comfortable, male-centered, and undisturbed. The stagnant and calm tableau of American prosperity brought to you by GE: the decade of consumerism for its own sake in the branding vision of Levittown. Time is illusory for them, experienced between commercials, Trump speeches, and status updates, in the space between the world they imagine and the world they’re told to imagine.

Trump re-emerged after the Taj Mahal fiasco into the new medium of reality TV. Initially despising reality TV, he soon grew to embrace its artificiality, structure, and all-encompassing branding because it allowed him to pretend to be a successful businessman with a glamorous lifestyle, the dream he always lusted for.

He got to fire people on TV, which must have been an orgasmic experience for someone so singularly dedicated to the image of a businessman who does whatever he want to whomever he wants whenever he wants. Trump’s slavish drive for absolute personal power comes against the reality he is too stupid to live, impossibly lazy, and is loathed by the actually powerful for his crass, boorish lifestyle.

Television is the whole being of his existence, the conduit for which he experiences the world and understands it. His mind flips channels in rapid fire, his attention span is about the length of a commercial break, he absorbs and reflects what is depicted to him: an utterly vaporous depiction of the world he was never a willing part of. His brain broke after the Taj Mahal failed and he has been living in a time warp, forever stuck in 1992.

He called reality TV for the “bottom feeders”, which is perplexing because he engorges himself on what many actually super-rich people would consider low class trash entertainment: strip clubs, casinos, cable news, pro wrestling, appearing in ads, and shameless self-promotion through cheap licensing deals. His campaign in 2016 was treated like a reality TV show, with multiple contestants and one big prize, which every cable news channel running the Donald Trump Show to the tune of $3 billion in free advertising. Conscious or not, he tapped into that narrative structure and was greeted by a media too eager to enjoy record ratings for his stunts, depicting more air time to empty Trump podiums waiting for his dumb fucking face to appear than on the subject of poverty.

It was a surreal news year, with Trump breaking down nearly every barrier of media acceptability for political candidates, juxtaposed against their advertising-funded model that pushes views at all cost. They were woefully unprepared for the world of reality TV to smash into their own, ironically, since they were already busy adopting that Fox News model of political personality and narrative. Perhaps it was too fast. Perhaps it was his incitement of near riots against mainstream media outlets. But perhaps they just got a taste of their own medicine and now they all want to play Edward R. Murrow as the noble media speaking truth to power.

The only people who really believe that are themselves.

Thank You Send Tweet

Social media is a perfect hyperreality machine: one can pick and choose their environment, existing completely in that digital space, requiring few gatekeeping authorities or editorial review to be seen and heard as powerfully as celebrities or elected leaders.

You can send a picture of a pig pooping on its own balls to the official Twitter account of the Israeli Defense Force. I know, because I have.

It’s a pseudo-democratizing force, levelling a publishing and communications playing field, yet still completely privately owned, its algorithms relatively hidden from view, creating an insulating and reinforcing feedback loop. Social media anxieties are not about the world, instead of the social media image of the world. Fears are now transmitted globally in a globe most people never get a chance to travel around, anger at people they’ve never met, ideas they’ve never examined, in a churning soup of algorithm not even social media engineers can fully understand.

It’s no wonder Trump thrives in such a manufactured, privatized environment. He’s the ideal product: sensationalized, driving traffic, and constantly online. Every Tweet is an event unto itself, spawning at least a dozen articles about his most recent destruction of Presidential norms. Norms of discourse themselves a type of privileged illusion, traditions typically to uphold a lie that unjust actions initiated by respectable-looking political actors should be excused.

Trump “becomes Presidential” when he approximates not being a low class cretin, such as his sycophantic love of military might and forced public adoration of dictators. When his brain is not melting, he engages in pageantry. The widows of dead soldiers on TV. The NRA death cult. Defense of the national anthem and the troops that no one is actually protesting against. The glorification of racial stormtroopers in ICE. The border wall.

These things are more bipartisan that we care to admit and every now and then, he’ll align with them. It’s holographic, because deep inside this man, very little is going on. His interior life must be an abyss of greed and disgust, mechanically activated by media triggers real or false.

Donald J. Trump is an empty man, totally surface, with no emotional, political, or spiritual depth. He is the ideal representation of the America cul-de-sac in which our minivan drives around in circles. He represents a world that is always in a hurry but always bored, unable to distinguish between the real and fictional world. In our political space, these are one and the same. We’re inside the TV looking out.

An Empty Man

Trump is a vacuous person whose lack of substance is directly caused by the immersion of pop culture meaninglessness. The nihilism of Trump is spectacular to behold. The dark truth, simmering under all this analysis and media handwringing, is that he may in fact be more mainstream that people care to admit. He’s your racist Facebook uncle. He’s the slovenly clod with his ass glued to the TV chair. He is the real version of King Ralph, the low-class schlub who suddenly is thrust into a position of power and authority. Typically, this trope follows a working class person, with little to no political opinions except a folksy “real talk” type of reactionary masculinity, not a gaudy billionaire child who was constantly on TV.

America’s noosphere is a hologram of reality. There are various shades and fleeting realities that mesh, coalesce with each other in a digital swamp we’re all sinking into. Now that we are waist deep, with no Vine to grab onto. There’s a man looking down at us: pooched anus lips, permanently pissed-off expression, speaking endlessly in a joyless tone of mocking contempt. A walking cartoon, a man assembled by the decades of grotesque pop culture smashed into the violent reactionary politics of suburban whites. He looks past us sinking deeper into the muck. He looks at nothing in particular. We feel his foot on the top of our heads and he steps over the quicksand, talking endlessly to no one.

It’s equally pointless to cast him as a Machiavellian Game-of-Thrones political hawk or a Russian puppet.

He is neither, because nothing is in there.

He is the hollow man, the stuffed man, headpiece filled with straw. It’s all surface, and much like the skin of a sidewalk puddle, easily rippled with a slight breeze. A half-inflated balloon that blows wherever the wind goes: filled with warm helium, colorful and bright, somehow miraculously able to float barely above. The horror is that he has real power with devastating consequences.

The world is filled with empty men and women: that’s the terror we often don’t want to face. That’s why the #resistance liberals won’t “win”, because they see it as a beauty pageant of good takes and clapbacks, not grappling with the crushing truth of the disposability and transience of most American culture. It’s the K-Cup world now, where politics are brands and just as interchangeably fluid. It’s why George W. Bush can be championed by liberals for simply talking about civility and currently isn’t rotting in a windowless cell.

There are Trumps everywhere: vacant mouthpieces who spew hateful garbage, moving from one topic to another in a freeform vomitorium of grievances. As long as they can tangentially relate two topics by the superficial similarities, they will at great length. The world is a series of continually flipping channels, timeline refreshes, a procession of content that increases in speed and flattens as thin as possible.

A man consumed with petty media grudges and ratings is in charge of nuclear submarines and the most powerful military in the history of mankind. He could end life on Earth as we know it. He is your next door neighbor with the annoying dog and big SUV. He is the physical embodiment of the infomercial. He is the dark reflection of America, and if you disagree, you are insulated by your own wealth and privilege. You are part of the problem.

The production line of blank, smiling faces, yammering about imaginary enemies both foreign and domestic, producing generations of violent toddlers with guns is not surprising. This was inevitable.

There is no discernable ideology now except greed and vengeful rage that can force people into action. The roaring emptiness of the dying mall spit out one last clearance sale mannequin, cheered by idiots as artificial and hollow as him, stumbling into a history he cannot understand.