Abstract
Mired in inconsistency, contradiction, and scandal, Donald J. Trump’s presidency appears to be anything but normal. This has prompted a great deal of searching among social scientists and journalists to understand what exactly is behind Trump’s erratic governing style. These narratives center the new normal of American presidential politics on the extreme form of Trump’s narcissistic behavior and his flagrant commitment to ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal practices. However, because these narratives rely on traditional political strategies and theories, they do not fully capture the most novel aspects of the Trump mode of governance. What is “not normal” about President Donald Trump is that his governing style is irreducible to conventional statecraft and political goals because Trump is not just a celebrity/businessman-turned-politician. Rather, Trump the person is inherently tied to Trump the personal brand, and the governing style of President Trump follows the market-oriented logic of personal brands, which is primarily oriented towards maximizing symbolic capital. Rather than position Trump’s governing style as motivated to achieve self-adulation, white supremacy, an authoritarian state, or neoliberal utopia, we reconsider Trump’s governing style as an attempt to capture the attention of the collective consciousness and focus it on Trump as a personal brand.
Highlights
Conventional interpretations characterize President Trump’s ‘not normal’ governing style as one or a combination of the following traits—narcissistic, ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal. These governing styles are seen as means to achieve four distinct but overlapping ends—self-adulation, white supremacy, an authoritarian state, and a neoliberal utopia. While these goals do not necessarily deviate from the Republican political playbook, what is not normal is that Trump is so open and extreme in advancing these goals while holding no pretense to care about democratic decorum
The novelty of Trump is that he appears to be unencumbered by the weight of the office, which constrained past presidents to hide their intentions beneath a veneer of democratic decorum
While other presidents have certainly developed political brands with symbolic exchange value that are associated with their name and image, such as Obama with the iconic Hope poster by Shepard Fairey, the political brand is distinct from the personal brand in that the personal brand is a free-floating signifier that is not tethered to the signified content of a specific cultural sphere
Summary
One common way mainstream accounts explain President Trump’s governing style is to view it as a function of his deranged mental state. When reports emerged that the death toll rose to an estimated 5,000, he visited FEMA on June 6, 2018 to speak about hurricane preparedness in the United States, but he only briefly mentioned Puerto Rico or hurricane response at all Instead, he digressed into a speech about how much money he saved negotiating airline prices for Air Force One, how his endorsements helped candidates win their primary elections, and how well the economy is doing thanks to his actions (Holmes, 2018). A cursory glance at Trump’s cabinet and administration, which is overwhelmingly white and male (Lowrey and Johnson, 2018), lends additional empirical support for this ideal type, which holds that Trump’s supreme goal in office is to solidify the white and patriarchal supremacy of structural racism and sexism in American national policy Regarding this mode of Trumpian governance, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) argued in The Atlantic that “[i]t is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”. Obama’s presidency, which means that withdrawing from them achieved for Trump both a move towards his vision of nationalism and multiple feathers in his cap for rebuking Obama’s legacy
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