When Trump talks about 100,000 – 200,000 Americans dying of COVID-19, Trump is not describing death, he is pissing and moaning about a ratings number higher than his. A stack of bodies is the coronavirus’ market share and it’s digging into his engagement metrics. He is there while simply not being there, like a thin skin suit over a ravenous black hole of disengagement, apathy, and boredom.
It’s borderline naive to think of Trump as soulless or monstrously callous, this line of thinking indicates Trump has any type of soul to not have, or is even capable of making a choice to be callous. He’s not. There’s nothing in there to choose from. He operates on a type of instinctual reaction; what gets me attention, what focuses all eyes on me?
Trump is the first hyperreal national leader, the copy of a copy that emulates all the aspects of the 1980’s businessman without any of the actual substance. Every nascent fascist in his wake, specifically Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro, have been pale imitations of the Trump Brand like cheap counterfeit knockoffs. They are copies of a copy of a copy, and there is no original anymore. There will be no more Hitlers, no more Pinochets; only a media brand of them.
Coronavirus is an annoying distraction to Trump, getting in the way of his scorched earth campaign against Biden. The pandemic is either a hoax or real but not very serious, or serious but he’s on top of it, or that it’ll be over soon by Easter or that it won’t but they’ll be a quick recovery. He’s doing great numbers, very popular, so all eyes on him. Always watching him, he’s watching himself on TV, like a sexless masturbation session with no orgasm.
Why does he even bother to say anything at all? He doesn’t need to. His press briefings have been a sideshow of self-congratulation, distraction, downplaying, outright lies, and mystification of his own glowing aura. He himself is capable of bodyslamming COVID-19 into the mat, he alone, only he has the strength and capability and smarts to make all the bad stuff go away. You are ungrateful for not praising him all the time, so you must wither and die.
Like a stone skipping off a lake, thoughts flow and ebb from his Adderall brain with little connection to each other. The main throughline is This is actually about me, you know, but what is in there to be about in the first place? Trump is a living brand, a signifier that stands at a podium, says words that adulate himself. Trump is not praising himself, he is praising the idea of himself. It’s a magic trick; pay no attention to the nothing behind the curtain.
The Cult of Trump is in love with this paper cutout because of the afterglow he casts on them. Image is all that matters. They have been fully televised, in that they have become television watching his channel all the time. They love him because they imagine themselves being loved by him. There is no love that is not directed at him, about him, or for him. He’s never genuinely laughed at something that is not about someone else’s pain. I don’t sense an ounce of human caring or compassion in a single molecule of him during this crisis.
200,000 dead Americans being a metric that anyone can accept as a positive outcome looks on the surface to be brutal, inhuman calculus. It is, objectively, a better result that the worst case scenario of doing nothing. The number means little to him, just that it’s less than 2 million, so it’s a good deal. President Deals is getting us a bargain on bodybags! Mass graves means wholesale prices! Hunger, poverty, disease, scarcity: fundamentally alien to his being.
A child’s arithmetic sold to soft-headed superfans who hang on his every word. Those not in the Trump Cult are simply looking for a rhetorical liferaft, they don’t see one in Biden and are actively ignoring Sanders, yet the dumb child on television says everything’s gonna be A-Okay, no big whoop. It’s all gravy, look at the beautiful tests! Just like the perfect call! Those are two things people remember! As long as there is the tiniest connective tissue between two ideas, they are valid to Trump.
The hang-wringing concern from pundits and writers state that “well, we should have expected this.” No, incorrect. What we should have expected is to expect this. Not that we so easily normalized this type of inaction and cruelty from Trump, but that we were surprised that it happened in the first place. What in our recent history since the election of Reagan has proven this otherwise?
Trump is a copy of a copy, our news the simulation of news, our internet the artifice of connection, with all of it bleeding out from a value system of pure transaction, the deadening of social cohesion into a numbers game. The line goes up even if 10 million lose their jobs. The advertising is the product, not the product itself. Trump is not popular or hated, the idea of Trump being popular or hated is popular or hated.
That’s the true failure, is not to see that the totality of media saturation and abstraction in advance, but how we’ve become so faux surprised when the children of advertising and war on television grow up to blank slates imprinted with slogans and memes. We fail to anticipate our own reactions to it. This is what a hyperreal media content landscape does to our minds – it negates self-reflection and the potential for imagining a future or past outside of itself, of creating a mental landscape that is no deeper than the surface.
Everyone might as well be dead already to him, all except those who are truly loyal. We’re all on his chopping block, and he doesn’t even have to do anything. No one is essential to Trump. In fact, doing nothing would be ideal for him: a purge of the poor and ungrateful. A disaster he could claim victory over. The winning is what matters. Either that or a cleansing of those who don’t grovel or beg for his fleeting attention. Only those who are worthy get the tests, the PPE, the federal funding, or at least get the lip service that they’ll get them. All it takes is the appearance of action to convince some people action is in fact taking place.
There’s an image of George W. Bush that I’ve never forgotten: the infamous plane flyover of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
These images are supposed to portray a leader deep in concern, above the horror but firmly in control from on high. The reality is that it’s an image of disconnection and aloof disinterest, a lonely man impassively watching a city drown, unsure of what to do next. He is two years into a war based on a lie that he started that would kill hundreds of thousands. The United States is torturing innocent people and listening to all of our phone calls. Far away, the world economy is in the beginning stages of imploding, a nuclear bomb hidden in a shaky mortgage loan bubble just about to burst.
So much is happening and is about to happen. That is the reality of the world. There is gnawing hunger and bodies piling up. We are rightfully anxious and worried about what tomorrow holds, considering those in charge are not even bothering to wing it. That is real, not hyperreal.
The Trump version of the Bush flyover image is him smirking in confused delight that he is on an aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, with the big strong handsome pilots, that he is President wearing a fancy jacket with his name on it. The name of Gerald R Ford, a president famous for not a single vote being cast in his name and falling flat on his face on television, echoes through history like the most idiotic version of prophecy.
The president is talking about perfect phone calls and sex with models, sputtering about chloroquine because it sounds scientific, deflecting blame, lies upon lies about his lies, promising, complaining to reporters about reporters. He is shuffling through this disaster staring off into the distance at his own expressionless reflection.
His throngs of mindless followers are willing to cough into each other’s mouths to own the libs. This is the core of his cult; a willingness to destroy themselves out of spite or stupid fear, led by a sentient As Seen On TV commercial announcing we’ve won a year’s worth of Cherry Cyanide Flavor Aid.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.