The Politics of Being: Reflections on the President of Unreality

“across the country, in states critical to the outcome of the election, Trump’s ardent supporters defended his actions and followed his lead to blame China. In Luzerne County, a historically Democratic area in eastern Pennsylvania that flipped in 2016 to vote for Trump, Lynette Villano said she thinks the economy is resilient. It started from an extraordinarily high point, she said, and Trump deserves credit for giving the country the economic strength to be able to take the punch. Villano, a billing clerk who wears a rhinestone Trump pin, has chronic lung disease and survived cancer twice. She recognizes she’s among those at highest risk. She says she’s not worried, she deeply trusts the president to look out for her, and she doesn’t think it’s time for political posturing and finger-pointing. ‘If anything, this is going to show him as a strong leader who stepped forward and took every action possible to make things better,’ she said from her home, where she’s waiting out the pandemic”.

(‘Americans see Trump’s virus response through partisan lens’, by Claire Galofaro & Tamara Lush, Associated Press, 23rd March, 2020)

It seems that, for staunch Trump supporters, this President can do no wrong. But that would only be true if, for these supporters, he could get some things right. In fact, these people see neither. But then does it actually make any sense to call such people ‘supporters’ at all? The very notion of getting something right or wrong implies there is a reality against which the difference between these two things might be measured. Reality, however, is precisely what has become doubtful in this case. Something is done, someone acts. But what if there is no reality in which that action occurs? Then nothing can act-ually happen; or, contrawise, things are happening all the time, incessantly and continuously, which is the same as saying that there no action, nothing that happens. In effect, whatever does happen has already always occurred and is always occurring, no matter what does or does not occur. In such a universe, in which Being and Nothingness coincide, the particularity and uniqueness of an act is effaced by all-encompassing plentitude into which each and every particularly existent must vanish.

So this President does not act, partly because he does not need to act and partly because there’s no reality into which any of his acts could be fitted. Rather, he is himself the reality of his actions. So if he does not act, it’s because he is. Trump is an ontological President. What triumphs with him is the Great Neutralism of Being that swallows up nature, history, the lives of individuals and nations. Those who admire him admire something which does not exist and does not need to exist exactly because it exists eternally, without change, as changeless pure Being, a Being in which nothing happens because it is itself a continuous happening of the nothing. Or is it that, in his Presidency, things are always happening, ceaselessly and continuously? But the result is still the same, for in this case, nothing could actually be happening since if all is everywhere in motion then all must everywhere be standing perfectly still.

This President, then, stands for a distinctive form of reality, through which he moves as an Unmoved Mover who is continually acting and therefore never doing anything, perpetually in motion in a motionless way. Is this perhaps why Trump’s supporters really seem quite completely oblivious as to what actually happens in the world? As one may gauge from the above remarks of Lynette Villano, the mind of the Trump supporter is a peculiar kind of mind. It’s a mind that demonstrates, above all, what happens to reality itself when an Ontological President is able to extend the notion of the “relativity of success and failure”[1] to its very limits.

A radical disconnect between mind and reality – which is the clinical definition of psychosis – is perfectly demonstrated by the Trump supporter, Villano, who “no longer believes that reality as such can teach [them] anything”.[2] This is person who has enclosed themselves in an ideological ‘bubble’ so watertight that reality cannot penetrate. Instead of “decoding experience”, their thinking merely “fits events, persons or actions under consideration into prefabricated molds”, as Sartre put it.[3] From this point onwards, they “can be reached neither by experience nor argument”.[4] Absolute and total identification with their leader “seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience”.[5] Sure that the power of Being “can destroy the power of substance”,[6] the Trump supporter has managed to convince themselves that “fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it”.[7] In which case, rather than mediating between inner and outer, mind and reality, thought actively “neutralize[s] confrontation with exteriority and wards off the threat posed to any intellectual system by the random, unspecified aspect of events”.[8]

In one way, the idee fixe of the convinced Trumperite reflects the very nature of ideologies, which interrupt the “incessant movement to-and-fro between concept and experience”.[9] The fact that all of their convictions are impervious to verification through actual experience also explains why they’ve scarcely any interest in how this President, to whom they’ve committed their mind, their heart and their soul, is actually faring in the political arena. Indeed, nothing which actually happens to Trump can possibly affect their convictions. For instance, if he’s successful, this does not require explanation, for it is self-evident that he must succeed. Whereas if obstacles are encountered, or even if he fails miserably, this simply demonstrates that ‘outsiders’ (i.e., those who oppose or are hostile to him) have yet to understand what he wants to achieve, or for malicious reasons, are working to undermine him. In effect, Trump can do no wrong, partly because what he does is never subject to any test of real performance, and partly because for something to be tested presupposes there is a reality upon which the test might be carried out.[10]

It’s no accident, then, that this particular President has always shied away from proposing any “definite, closely determined [political] goals”.[11] Hannah Arendt points out such vagueness with regard to ideological content is less a sign of carelessness and more an acute recognition that “[t]otal loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise”.[12] Moreover, this vagueness has a tactical value, enabling the President to adopt, modify and discard political programs and policies in accordance with strategic needs without jeopardizing the allegiance of his followers. And insofar as the lack of any fixed ideas or principles make it difficult for anyone to truly understand the basis for his political decisions, any kind of criticism, positive or negative, is effectively forestalled.

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [Peng. Ed.], 507.

[2] Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 317, note.

[3] Sartre, quoted in Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation. Reflections on Genocide, 73.

[4] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [Peng. Ed.], 403. As Arendt recognized, the prototype for the ideological unreality of political movements in general is the totalitarian political regime. Thus the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience), and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist” (ibid., 622).

[5] Ibid., 403.

[6] Ibid., 507.

[7] The Origins of Totalitarianism [Harcourt Ed.], 350.

[8] Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation, 43. In this respect, what comes to mind is the ideology of Soviet Communism: “Having ensured that it would remain a utopia even after becoming a state, Communism had to conceal its reality in order to remain an ‘idea’, which is why ideology played such an important role in its propaganda” (Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion. A History of the Communist Idea in the Twentieth Century, 269).

[9] Raymond Aron, Clausewitz. Philosopher of War, 120. Cf. also Karl Popper’s thesis that scientific knowledge is methodology and hypothesis, “an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience” (The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 2, 224-5).

[10] This was Popper’s objection to the scientific pretensions of Marxist political movements, but also Adlerian psychoanalysis: as ‘theories’, insofar as they were effectively ‘immune’ to falsification – no ‘clinical’ or socio-historical result could refute them – they were pseudo-science.

[11] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 259; “Mussolini was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal [party] program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone. Behind this act lay the notion that the actuality of the movement itself was the chief element of inspiration which would only be hampered by a party program (Ibid., Peng. Ed., 425, note 39). Lenin likewise pointed to the utility of maintaining a certain amount of vagueness about specific programs and ideological doctrines in his reflections on political and tactical realism.

[12] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 324.