Abstract
This paper argues that President Donald Trump may be understood as ruling through carnival. The theatrical reversal of conventional standards and rules, his carnivalesque incivility, is key to his political persona. It performs his claim to be an outsider, attacking and subverting the Washington DC establishment. But Trump’s carnivalesque performance, far from undermining the dominant order, reflects it. What Trump represents is carnivalized capital, a financialized and globalized form of capital that has broken free of the social and legal restraints of the nation state. The carnivalesque chaos of Trump’s presidency reflects the chaos of financialized capitalism.
Highlights
Trump reflects back and uses the narcissism of a decadent bourgeois class that, propagated through mass media and advertising in a context in which global financialized capital has corroded social bonds, increasingly diffuses through, and pervades, the broader culture
The Carnival KingBrookings Institute writers Susan Hennessy and Benjamin Wittes complain that, while in the past, Presidents were expected to show certain standards of virtue and decency, Donald Trump’s life and candidacy were an ongoing rejection of civic virtue
With his business dealings in real estate and casinos, frequently operating in a grey zone between legitimate business and organized crime (Johnston, 2017), Trump is the embodiment of the new bubble economy, based on finance, insurance, and real estate, or FIRE
Summary
Trump reflects back and uses the narcissism of a decadent bourgeois class that, propagated through mass media and advertising in a context in which global financialized capital has corroded social bonds, increasingly diffuses through, and pervades, the broader culture. This transgression does not undermine or even oppose the dominant social order: “the carnival character may well find agency and fulfillment, but any ‘repudiation’ of dominant power structures of capital in its global moment is at best a specious one” (Langman and Ryan, 2009: 490).
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