Paul Elliott Johnson. Women’s Studies in Communication. Volume 40, Issue 3. 2017.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made the following declarations: Mexicans are mostly rapists; Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly cannot be trusted because “she has blood coming out of her whatever”; Republican Senator John McCain should be ignored because he was captured during the Vietnam War and is therefore a loser; the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “rape” of America; and Trump “will make America great again” (Time Staff; Trump, “Lemon”; Jackson; Trump, “Leadership Summit”). Partly because of—rather than in spite of—these claims, Trump is now the U.S. president. Not even a leaked, decade-old video from Access Hollywood in which Trump brags about grabbing women “by the pussy” derailed his candidacy, reminding us that the national imaginary of the United States often secures and facilitates—rather than undermines—structures of oppression.
Coming very late in the campaign season, the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood video underscored how slowly public critics were to identify toxic masculinity as central to Trump’s appeal, even as they were quick to label Trump a demagogue. Jack Shafer, senior Politico writer, exemplifies this tendency, noting:
Demagogues like Donald Trump exhaust the patience of the political press corps because reporters fundamentally misunderstand the candidates’ appeal. Reporters like to think that logic and reason hold sway, so they believe a demagogue can be easily disarmed by exposing his crimes against logic, his pandering to the uninformed, and his manipulative emotionalism.
Trump’s mockery of McCain represents his general style, which reduces “all politics and policy to single irrefutable talking points” in order to attack the establishment. This is the style of “the standard American demagogue” who, according to Shafer, “relies on anger and resentment to attract supporters.”
Although the press has been willing to label Trump a demagogue, contemporary rhetorical scholars have dismissed or avoided the term, with the exceptions of Patricia Roberts-Miller’s work on demagoguery as the inducement of “in-group” thinking (462), and Josh Gunn’s attention to its psychological aspects (6). Otherwise, rhetoric scholars infrequently invoke demagoguery. Some treat it as a taken-for-granted concept (see I. Allen; Engels; Jones; O’Gorman). J. Michael Hogan and Dave Tell worry that the study of demagoguery enables scholars to smuggle in their political agendas, presenting political/ideological judgments as objective (482-483). That rhetorical studies has lately eschewed studying demagoguery is not for lack of opportunity; figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck offer easy targets. Perhaps political concerns have animated the decision to keep demagoguery at arm’s length. Hogan and Tell’s anxieties about the collapse of scholarly objectivity reflect long-standing worries about politicizing rhetorical studies. Yet it is precisely this gap between rhetoric and politics—and form and content—that Donald Trump’s rhetoric points to and in fact collapses.
Instead of assuming a gap between rhetoric and politics, I return to demagoguery to shed light on Trump’s persuasive capacities and explain how they threaten liberal democracy. To show the relationship between rhetorical form and political effect, this article specifies the characteristics of demagoguery while minding Bernadette Calafell’s suggestion that scholars should continue to raise questions about the “performance of white, middle-class civility both in our departments and in the pages of our journals” (268). Rather than equivocating between all institutionally hostile speech, scholars should define demagoguery in connection with the concepts of risk and personhood, insisting that demagogues not only engage in agitational speech but also figure their audiences’ identity as antecedent to—and therefore shielded from—the undecidable vulnerability of democratic life. Demagogues grind liberal democracy to a halt by encouraging subjects to focus on the felt precarity of their existence rather than their shared connections with others.
In this article, I follow Roberts-Miller’s understanding of demagoguery as a shared pattern of reasoning, while offering two expansions of its definition: one general and one specific to Trump. I emphasize that, generally, demagoguery figures audiences as risk-averse subjects by converting the shared vulnerability characteristic of public life into a feeling of precariousness. Demagogues encourage audiences to self-identify as victims on the basis of felt precarity, encouraging the well-off and privileged to adopt the mantle of victimhood at the expense of those who occupy more objectively fraught positions. Given that scholars have recently turned to precarity as a key term for understanding the instabilities of life lived under late capitalism, Trump’s co-optation of precarity threatens the capacity of a politics theorized on the basis of marginality to achieve progressive aims.
Drawing from this perspective on demagoguery, I argue that Trump’s rhetorical form functions through a toxic, paradoxically abject masculine style whose incoherence is opaque to his critics but meaningful to his adherents, for it helps them imagine themselves as victims of a political tragedy centered around the displacement of “real America” from the political center by a feminized political establishment. Trump’s attacks on one supposed institutional matrix of power—”the Washington establishment”—bolster another power structure: White masculinity. By locating himself outside sites of assumed authority, like Washington, DC, the mainstream media, or the policy consensus, Trump’s rhetorical form performs a positional exteriority to the system he attacks, creating an avenue for identification with audiences who imagines themselves as voiceless on the basis of their subjugation to the power of the political establishment. Erin Rand avers that rhetorical forms “are sites within institutional matrices of power through which discourse becomes intelligible” (300). Pundits who labeled Trump’s arguments incoherent missed the significance of their form, for their seeming incoherence is intrinsic to contemporary White masculinity. The arguments’ unintelligibility to others functions as a sign of White masculinity’s exclusion, and therefore marginal position, which authorizes subjects to deny White masculinity’s central role in structuring society. How, after all, can White masculinity organize a society in which it has no part? Claire Sisco King calls this function “abject hegemony” (“Cuts” 372) for the way in which it (re)secures a privileged position for White masculinity by reveling in scenarios of violence and humiliation as proof of White masculinity’s marginalization. Far from seeming forthrightly illogical, claims of White, masculine victimhood encourage objectively well-off members of society to interpret the presence of difference and uncertainty as threatening the subject with unjust marginalization, coding a “diverse and diffuse range of experiences”—or in the case of Trump, political topoi ranging from immigration to terrorism to trade—as part of a single trauma: the subject’s exile from politics (Washed 5).
This article highlights demagoguery’s tendency to figure public life as a drama about precarity rather than vulnerability and attends specifically to Trump to show how victimized masculinity facilitates demagoguery. Given that Trump had to motivate Republican voters who disagreed with his policy platform, his demagoguery helped audiences submit to—or at least tolerate—his leadership, insofar as they could focus on their felt marginality rather than careful policy analysis. In the following section, I explain how this article contributes to the last major debate in the field about demagoguery. Then, I turn to feminist theory to explain how demagoguery perverts the undecidability inherent in democracy to undermine practices of argument. In the third section of this article, I illustrate Trump’s unique demagoguery through an analysis of representative examples of his campaign rhetoric.
Demagoguery, Politics, and Judgment
Patricia Roberts-Miller argues that rhetorical scholars should renew their study of demagoguery. Focusing on how demagogic audiences interpret the uncertainty inherent to political life as a threat to their personhood, Roberts-Miller clears a pathway to think about the relationships among demagoguery, identity, and risk; because demagogic audiences are invested in the conservation of their personhood, they become both invested in their separation from other members of the polity and risk averse from engagement with perspectives divergent from their own. Defining demagoguery as “polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an in-group to hate and scapegoat some outgroup(s), largely by promising certainty, stability, and … an ‘escape from freedom'” (462), Roberts-Miller draws on political theory that considers freedom as something performed, not possessed. Rather than considering it as a libertarian concept authorizing individuals an infinite exercise of their agency, freedom is tied to owning decisions, such that freedom describes being responsible for a choice one makes, whether it is right or wrong. Demagogic patterns of reasoning presuppose that their audience is separated from other elements of political society, figuring the judgment of others not as a part of a virtuous cycle of democratic life but instead as a threat to personal well-being (Roberts-Miller 465).
This definition of demagoguery emphasizes the risk-laden nature of political existence, a point where two terms, vulnerability and precarity, enable critics to distinguish between productive democratic attitudes that confront or at least acknowledge the complexity of freedom and those that figure democracy as a competitive enterprise defined by Hobbesian threats to the individual. Enumerating the ways in which subjects exist not on an island but are constituted as a result of “the other’s address” which functions “prior to the formation” of the individual will (130), Judith Butler distinguishes between vulnerability, the feeling endemic to life lived with others, whose existence appears as “a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (129), and precarity, in which the subject interprets these addresses as threats to an imagined autonomous self (130).
While vulnerability highlights how certainty and stability are antonyms rather than staples of democratic life, precarity denies vulnerability by positing the self not as something created alongside others but instead as a presocial, phallic, and hermetically sealed entity. Demagoguery’s generic promise of control similarly iterates life through the thematic of precarity. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explicitly connects the denial of “vulnerability, contingency, and mortality” to the “phallic ideology” (21) of an assumptive and universal autonomous subject. In this light, Roberts-Miller’s focus on the escape from freedom also resonates as a critique of the gendered claim of certainty: that demagogic reason claims to know absolutely is centrally problematic.
Not everyone agrees with this framing, however. Hogan and Tell argue that Robert-Miller’s attempt to define demagoguery authorizes scholars to selectively and capriciously label only speech they with which they disagree as demagogic. To make this argument, Hogan and Tell presuppose the existence of clear standards and definitions for ideas of extremism and reasonability, eschewing the complexities of risk to make an argument about inconsistency. They argue that the scholarly refusal to label as demagogues “civil rights activists and other progressive populists who … have been ‘marginalized’ or ‘oppressed,'” risks normalizing “coercion and violence” (482-483). Grouping disparate rhetors including the Yippies, Malcolm X, and George Wallace, they implore critics to oppose “rhetorical zealotry” and the rationalization of “obscenity and threats” as acceptable (479, 481, 485). Ultimately, they worry that politicizing scholarship might inaugurate an era of “ethical relativism” in which scholarly judgment can no longer identify violent extremism because “rhetorically” there is “little to distinguish left-leaning populists from those who lean to the right” (emphasis in original; 485).
Hogan and Tell’s argument assumes that words and slogans mean the same thing in different contexts or when spoken by speakers occupying different social locations. There are, in fact, good reasons to insist that even if they both spoke intensely about separatism, George Wallace and Malcolm X were politically and formally doing very different things. One can observe this both historically and in Hogan and Tell’s tacit alternative to the study of demagoguery, a soft ethic of nonviolent reasonableness. When they muse that “[f]or whatever reason, scholars who praise populist rhetoric in other contexts seem uncomfortable with ‘radical mass politics among poor, uneducated rural folk in the South” (483), they invite the observation that contexts are not incidental but central for the judgment of rhetorical practice.
There is a very clear reason why what Hogan and Tell see as a “double standard” (483) does not represent hypocrisy on the part of rhetorical critics. What appears hypocritical if read through a lens that equivocates between all agitationist rhetoric is condemnable when read in the context of Southern populism’s emergence as an outgrowth of the legal elimination of chattel slavery. In the first half of the 19th century, the legal guarantee of Black inferiority severely constrained the capacity of blackness to claim membership in society. While the 14th Amendment did not comprehensively eliminate slavery, its repeal meant that Southern politicians could no longer rely on formal legal guarantees of Black inhumanity to protect their power base; free Black persons would eventually become Black citizens and Black voters, and they posed a threat to the imagined purity of the White bloodstream through miscegenation. Southern populists relied on architectures of paramilitary violence and rhetorical strategies to manage the threat posed by Black personhood. Martha Hodes notes these politicians relied heavily on the myth of the Black rapist to generate and sustain fears and anxieties about a racially inclusive society (403). That poor White audiences were susceptible to this argument does not make it any less a part of White supremacy, given its assumptions of Black masculinity’s violent nature that worked in concert with the idea of White women as weak and in need of paternal protection.
In addition to this historical issue, Hogan and Tell’s tendency to group wildly dissimilar rhetors under their tacit heading of extremist violence—whose shared characteristics, while not explicitly spelled out, clearly involve invective, obscenity, antagonism, and emotionally charged, angry speech—also presupposes that ideas of reasonability and violence are not only definable but also form the basis of a coherent genre for the analysis of speech. Scholars should be wary about treating genres as universal and given. As Carolyn Miller observes, a genre is a “cultural artefact,” suggesting extremist rhetoric is itself a rhetorical form that “has a particular function that fits into a system of functions” (70). To attempt to identify extremist, violent rhetoric is itself a cultural artifact indexing one possible worldview that is hardly neutral. Lisa Flores notes that “[r]acial violence moves with shape-shifting swiftness, across time and place; its moments may appear disconnected from each other. They are not. This violence shares a fundamental grammar—a rhetorical logic” (17). Scholars should be skeptical of any grammar that encourages critics to imagine that it is the similarities rather than the differences between Malcolm X and David Duke that are salient.
Hogan and Tell’s problematic investment in the idea of extremism as a recognizable rhetorical form reinforces the belief that democratic politics is constituted or defined as the cancelation of violence. Attempts to formulate a properly democratic genre of argument presuppose a distinction between democratic and undemocratic genres on the basis of a universal capacity to recognize violence. As Iris Marion Young argues, delineating between such arguments is difficult because claims to possess the capacity to distinguish between the two may reinforce the narrative that “normal processes of deliberation” are peaceable and universally accessible. In practice, these forums are ones of restricted access precisely because “agents with greater resources, knowledge” and “greater control over the forum” tend to win out (Young 679). Inveighing against extremism does not banish violence from politics but reframes repetitive, historically salient exclusions constitutive of the public sphere as exercises in reasonableness.
If critics follow Roberts-Miller’s lead and define demagoguery by attending to how demagogic reasoning produces risk-averse subjects, we can preserve the term as an analytic that avoids both exercising naked, personal judgment about rhetoric and engaging in the relative idealism involved in positioning the rhetorical critic “against violence.” Violence appears in many forms; practices of exclusion can be discursive, institutional, physical, or even a permutation of all three. Liberal democracy does not so much banish violence as it offers one way of arranging and organizing it that is palatable to its more powerful participants. As Brad Vivian observes, when “Western institutions and their spokespersons” (210)—including critics who separate rhetoric and politics—figure violence as alien to the civilizational present, they risk ignoring that existing political democracy is built on violence rather than reason. In this light, being “against violence” is for rhetorical scholars what “all lives matter” is to the editorial staff at National Review: an empty slogan whose obviousness raises more questions than it answers. There are rhetorical and political stakes in tracing the continuity between Pitchfork Ben Tillman, George Wallace, and Donald Trump that should not affect our rhetorical evaluations of all institutionally hostile rhetoric. The role of the rhetorical critic is to name, identify, and mark rhetorical forms that conceal and enable repetitive exclusions. Demagoguery is one such form.
Indeterminacy, Democracy, and Difference
Demagoguery weaponizes democratic feelings of unfamiliarity and doubt, propagating masculinist fantasies of autonomy that wall off audiences from experiencing democracy as a set of potential-laden, heterogeneous moments. Feminist political theory illuminates how Trump’s use of conventional masculine signifiers like strength and domination encourages his audiences to approach politics as already whole masculine subjects, separate from the political establishment and thereby hostile to difference that threatens the totality of both their nation and their subjectivity. Trump’s hostility toward women and minorities symptomatizes a broader hostility to democracy itself, premised as it is on the play of difference. His reliance on abject themes and imagery encourages his audiences to rehearse their own felt marginality to the political system.
Work in feminist political theory that focuses on the fluidity of political subjectivity considers this fluidity as a resource for political critique that can refine and reform democratic life. For example, Sheldon Wolin’s understanding of democracy as a politics centered “around the unmasking of various disguises of oppression” (23) points to the ways in which a polity capable of routinely posing and answering questions, while revising its self-understanding, constitutes a healthy democracy that distinguishes popular support for a regime from political desirability. Of course, simply posing questions is not enough; these questions must politicize society itself by questioning arguments that claim to know the contours and values of a given society in advance. As Bonnie Honig avers, “[I]t is simply the case that nothing is ontologically protected from politicization, that nothing is necessarily or naturally or ontologically not political” (emphasis in original; 225). Honig emphasizes that even our ideas of ourselves are partial, and she champions “the heterogeneity and discontinuity of political communities” as the reimagination of personhood not as some preexisting totality but instead as resistance “of the self to the normalizing constructions of subjectivity and the imposition of autonomy” (227). The masculinized account of personhood considers the self to exist in a state of hermetic separation from society. As a result, these subjects, who believe fully in their absolute autonomy, misapprehend moments of flux and instability—encounters with difference that constitute the global rhetorical situation of liberal democracy itself—as external assaults on their sovereign selfhood.
Here, community and its relationship to vulnerability and precarity suggest how demagogic fantasies of mastery code the exposure and risk inherent in belonging to a public as an existential threat. It has long been fashionable to describe the fragility of publicness as a good, but converting this fragility into a resource for living together is no simple task. Taking for granted the performative and mutually constitutive relationship between self and public, David Wittenberg avers that to “‘appear in public’ as a potential individual … is by no means automatically coincident with being part of a or the public” (emphasis in original; 477). Wittenberg points out that splitting the self into a private and public version haunts the subject with fears of inadequacy or impotence. The lack of an objective anchor to validate either the public or private persona as the “real” entity creates conditions for existential doubt. Precisely because community membership involves cracking open—even just a bit—a window to one’s self, specters of discomfort and existential dread might sneak in through the window. After all, if one is not alone in the world, one cannot guarantee that one inhabits its center. This fraughtness is evoked by Butler’s discussion of vulnerability, which can be interpreted by the subject as a sign of danger:
Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity, at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (20)
Butler’s use of the word seem suggests that loss is not an inevitable consequence of public belonging but one possible interpretation of the democratic experience, resonating with Honig’s reminder that the subject does not preexist politics. Demagoguery, however, insists that to be a political subject is to have lost one’s self.
Demagoguery’s capacity to code vulnerability as tragic loss poses a serious challenge to liberal democracy because demagoguery converts the indeterminacy that subtends the democratic play of differences into a weight that impedes the functioning of the polity. Ernesto Laclau makes clear the centrality of this indeterminacy to the democratic project, arguing that “there is no beyond the play of differences, no ground which would a priori privilege some elements of the whole over the others” (Populist 69). The capacity of a polity to pose questions—and question these postulations—is captured for Laclau in the play between two tropes: metonymy and metaphor. In metonymy, one figure combines with another to create an associative linkage, while in metaphor the relationship is substitutive, such that one figure replaces another (Rhetorical 59). Over time, a substitution may accumulate associations inaugurating a metaphorical relationship in which the linkages between figures stop seeming forced or contingent and start to feel more like a “natural link” (Laclau, Populist 109).
As an example, take the pink hard hat, a symbol utilized by United Steel Workers’ “Women of Steel” in various protest venues. Historically, the hard hat has a metaphorical relationship with a masculinized conception of blue-collar labor: Those who wear hard hats are presumably men, and this understanding worked historically to render invisible female manual laborers. Women of Steel generate metonymic associations between American blue-collar labor and femininity. Repeated performative associations might make the relationship between femininity and blue-collar labor metaphorical, and subjects might begin to treat it as if it were natural. Of course, critics might then point out that the pink hard hat is a problematic metaphor because it does little to create an association with Black laborers, who are also historically marginalized. This brief example demonstrates how metonymy and metaphor work: Metaphors, by virtue of being able to rely on a natural-seeming association, have a force that metonyms lack. Conversely, when a metaphor becomes calcified, rhetors may articulate different metonymic associations that might become so assumed as to become metaphors.
At its best, the liberal democratic engine is fueled by a balanced interplay between metonymy and metaphor: The former may slow down and brake tendencies toward unity, ensuring that one set of natural-seeming relationships does not become so set in stone that it verges on the authoritarian. Meanwhile, the metaphorical accumulation of associations is a vehicle to resolve problems and articulate shared concerns. However, the balance is important. Too much metonymy and politics grinds to a halt, for associations can no longer sustain and cathect collectivity. Too much metaphor, on the other hand, and interests marginalized by the substitution are left to twist in the wind, their claims ignored because “that’s just how things are.” Returning to the above example, a case of too much metonymy would involve a multiplicity of social actors articulating themselves to hard hats: investment bankers, ranchers, falconers, bloggers, Elon Musk, Republican politicians, baristas, and so forth. In this case, the hard hat’s articulation to almost anything would make it mean nothing, insofar as its unnatural relationship to a number of constituencies would be on display. Conversely, imagining the hard hat as the dominant metaphor of American labor makes some subjects invisible yet no less vulnerable.
The demagogue leans on the undecidability that makes it possible to generate different metonymic associations between figures. Positing this flux as danger encourages audiences to regard difference as threatening, inducing linguistic stasis in the liberal democratic ecology. Precisely because the undecidability that underwrites the play of metaphor and metonymy is the constitutive lack endemic to liberal democracy, the demagogue can encourage subjects to read this indeterminacy as proper apprehensiveness about otherness, and therefore a sign of their marginalization and exclusion from society. King frames this undecidability as the “uncertainty and instability” at “the dark heart of subjectivity” (“Cuts” 372). As King emphasizes, the potential for this uncertainty is not taken as a sign of opportunity to engage otherness but instead represents the threat of exile and marginalization. Demagogic audiences approach the unfamiliar as danger rather than opportunity. Interpreting a disparate set of rhetorical figures—in Trump’s case the Washington establishment, “social justice warriors,” immigrants, and others—as different signs of the same problem, the demagogue traps signifiers that might otherwise accumulate different associations, figuring otherness—and therefore politics itself—as a sign of the subject’s marginality.
Trump’s repeated invocations of disturbing concepts and images, such as death, destruction, humiliation, submission, and rape, appeal to the audience’s fascination with threatened marginalization, or abjection, and figures life itself as intrinsically precarious, tacitly orienting subjects against a feminist openness to change. King draws on Julia Kristeva in defining the abject as that which confounds and challenges the coherence and stability of seemingly existent orders. Disfigured bodies, corpses, borders, and bodily fluids are key “exemplars of the abject” insofar as they function as sublime, terrifying reminders about the socially constructed, finite nature of various concepts, ranging from definitions of the beautiful, to the nation, to the concept of life itself (King, “Abject” 368-69). Read this way, the abject may remind audiences of their vulnerability, serving as an incitement for more ethical living, as its capacity to both “fascinate and repel” subjects (369) may draw in subjects to refashion themselves. However, encounters with the abject do not neatly correlate with the enhanced appreciation of mutual vulnerability. In fact, King demonstrates that abjection can also fuel—rather than critique—White masculine hegemony because subjects may confuse a particular representation of abjection for a universal, and therefore depoliticized, instance of excluding violence. Trump’s reliance on the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of the abject encourages his audience to confuse the supposedly particular marginality of White masculinity for a universal injury to the body politic.
Once enthralled by the sublime threat of abjection, subjects are less hospitable to democratic politics because the indeterminacy of democracy threatens their sense of self. Thomas Farrell defines a rhetorical forum as “a setting which serves as a gathering place for discourse” and provides “a space for multiple positions to encounter one another” (282). These forums are gathering places organized around shared concerns. They might be general vectors of interest, like social justice, or particular policy preferences and proposals. In these forums, identities shift and move, demonstrating that what may seem to be yawning chasms between individual opinions are not so wide. However, demagogic audiences have no place around which they might gather because they are encouraged to focus on their own fraught feelings of nonexistence. The demagogue’s abject narratives pull them away from these forums.
Masculine charisma plays a central role in demagoguery’s resistance to democratic forums because the demagogue’s formal offer of protection from the terror of the abject takes precedence over particular offensive content. Claims of mastery are intrinsically gendered insofar as they place the indeterminacy characteristic of a feminist approach to politics at a distance. Josh Gunn notes that the demagogue’s claim “to bring order to chaos” by “representing strength, resolve, and absolute autonomy” (6) creates a dependent relationship between speaker and audience. The latter’s powerlessness exists in inverse proportion to the claims of mastery of former, who proclaims their own “invincibility, autonomy, and so on” paired with “statements about rescuing the audience” (14). Trump’s talk of Mexican rapists and loser prisoners of war did not a priori sink Trump’s campaign because his simplistic offer of charismatic, masculine control offered to rescue the audience from the messy heterogeneity of democracy itself. As Gunn says, the relationship of demagogue and audience is one of “love for the rhetor, not hatred of a common foe” (10).
The dynamic of a powerless audience and a total, “whole” leader is mirrored in our political imaginary through which the state is often understood as a masculinized protector of a pure but threatened feminine nation (Pettman 49). Nations and their imaginaries are not whole. Instead, they are dynamic and in process, and rhetors figure an idea of a nation as static and fixed. Figuring the nation as already whole disavows the actually existing heterogeneity of democratic life, asserting a known, unpenetrated national body (Phelan 40-42). The demagogue positions a set of rhetorical figures—corrupt political institutions, racial Others, gendered subjects—as threats to national integrity. Even female rhetors may rely on this masculinity, as Sarah Palin did (Gibson and Heyse 251). Trump’s rhetoric uses these generic characteristics, giving them historical specificity to the contemporary political moment.
Trump l’oeil: Inventing Context
In this section, I distinguish Trump’s discourse from past demagoguery, emphasizing how Trump’s reliance on themes of powerlessness and weakness figure national humiliation as the state of play rather than a looming threat. Trump manufactures precarity through four key, interlocking themes: felt powerlessness as a sign of agency, democracy as danger, raced and gendered hostility toward otherness, and charisma as compensatory for lack. These themes challenge society’s capacity to organize a progressive politics around the precariousness of existence by ballooning the constituency that can claim to be excluded, thus exposing difficulties inherent in organizing political resistance around claims of marginality.
Trump’s demagoguery diverges stylistically from past efforts to the extent that he manufactures precarity by hyperbolically figuring the nation itself as weak and powerless. Earlier demagogues traded in objectively plausible, if morally noxious, terrain. E. Culpepper Clark explains that “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman responded to “the aftermath of Reconstruction at which time the unsettling effects of an industrializing nation on a regional and agrarian economy were most keenly felt” (423). The most paradigmatic demagogue of the past fifty years, George Wallace was a heinous defender of segregation, but one could hardly argue with Wallace’s claim that the federal government sought to change the culture of the American South. Rather than defending a way of life, Trump claims a way of life has been destroyed and vanquished.
Three unique constraints, beyond the contextual differences from Southern demagogues, underscore why Trump needed to manufacture precarity in his audience. First, many of his policy views were outside the Republican mainstream. During the campaign, Trump defended government entitlements and critiqued bedrock Republican policy initiatives like the 2003 Iraq War. Second, many of his supporters were well-off socially and economically, so theoretically they had less to fear. Data suggest that in the general election both college-educated White men and college-educated White women voted for Trump by much higher than expected margins. A mammoth Gallup study “revealed that the typical Trump supporter has ‘not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration'” (Sasson). In primaries, “Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median in all 23 states” (Silver). Third, Trump’s campaign had serious national aspirations and could therefore not rely solely on regionally specific biases and stereotypes. Instead of either pivoting to become a more conventional candidate or producing a sunnier message to match some of his constituencies’ socioeconomic situations, Trump constituted a voting bloc out of a shared sense of worry.
The lengths to which Trump has relied on a rhetoric of victimage may confound scholarly discussions of precarity that treat the concept as a key prism for interpreting life in late capitalism. Many scholars offer precarity as a useful lens for understanding life lived in an age of increased income inequality and unreliable opportunities for work. This condition is increasingly descriptive not only of the world of the lower class. As Isabel Lorey observes:
Precarization has become “democratized.” Now those who should be the white middle class experience precarity as if it is new. It is no longer located at the “margins,” related to the non-hegemonic. That precarization has grown to the “center” is the condition for governing through insecurities. (172)
Theoretically, then, shared precarity offers a resource for organizing a more just politics.
Although she mentions Occupy Wall Street, Lorey’s work focuses on Western European concerns about the finite resources of the welfare state which diverge from the American electoral context. In the United States, the relation of individuals to state and society is differently textured; many Americans, especially well-off White Americans, have an antipathy to government that is difficult to disentangle from the ideology of liberal individualism, suggesting that American politicians might co-opt—or even further encourage—precarious feelings in ways that encourage subjects to bunker down in their own identities instead of opening themselves to democratic politics. Trump’s expansion of precarity, which encompasses those who merely feel powerless, encourages many well-off supporters to imagine themselves occupying parallel positions of victimhood to subaltern subjects. In imagining themselves as disrespected or even violated by the political establishment, many supporters disavow their objective, privileged position in the social order by interpreting feelings of discomfort and unease as authoritative evidence of their constitutive exclusion from politics. Trump helps them locate the shared theme of powerlessness among varying political topoi that then demands masculine leadership as the single solution for different problems.
I focus on four representative campaign objects: Trump’s candidacy announcement speech, the first Republican primary debate, his first campaign advertisement, and his Republican National Convention (RNC) speech. Trump’s themes and phrasings rarely vary throughout the campaign. For example, his campaign announcement regarding China is echoed in his major foreign policy speech in April 2016, and also in the January 14, 2016, Republican debate, among others (see Lima; Pfannenstiel; Federal News Service; Post Opinions Staff; Begley; Trump, “Foreign Policy Speech,” “Assault Accusations,” “Westfield”). Likewise, he repeated his infamous statement about rape just days later on CNN, telling Don Lemon “someone’s doing the raping,” and often calling trade deals “rapes” (“St. Clairsville Speech”). Thus, these objects accurately represent his broader demagogic style.
Felt Powerlessness as Agency
Trump constitutes his audience around what Elizabeth Anker calls “felt powerlessness” (254). Subjects organized around this theme conceive of themselves as “self-determining masters of their own destiny.” As a result, they encounter otherness—whether in the form of alien ideas, political institutions, or other people—as a sign of their own “personal failure to achieve freedom” (152). The “felt” element suggests its attractiveness to affluent voters. Despite their inheritances, the privileged can still feel excluded and aggrieved. The demagogic rendering of personal existence as trauma entices subjects to attach to precarious feelings of not belonging and being “outside” politics (Brown 59). Trump’s subject opposes a constituency comprised by the political establishment, the political-correctness police, and menacing foreigners. Presumably, his audiences enjoy their felt powerlessness as a sign of their agency, for their marginalization and disempowerment serve as technologies for them to understand who they are.
Trump’s campaign announcement speech illustrates the importance of outsized feelings of victimization that drove his appeals (Time Staff). In the speech, Trump makes a hyperbolic claim about the economy, noting, “[I]t was announced our gross domestic product—a sign of strength—right? But not for us. It was below zero … it’s never below zero.” Of course, the United States is an economic hegemon; never mind that possessing a negative GDP is almost unheard of. It is beside the point that Trump’s statement is inaccurate, because the exaggerated structure of the claim helps mirror the attitudes of an audience who could vote for Trump.
Trump’s treatment of women in the first GOP primary debate blends these economic difficulties with the problem of political correctness and America’s identity (“August Debate”). When debate moderator Megyn Kelly mentions Trump’s past offensive remarks that denigrated Rosie O’Donnell and labeled women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Trump paints Kelly’s concern as a representative symptom of a culture destroyed by political correctness. Linking the idea of political correctness to the destruction of America’s capacity for judgment, Trump posits that Americans have become so obsessed with pleasing everyone that they have lost their identity. His statement evokes concern that identities are themselves ambiguous and in process. Trump then ties this collapse in judgment to American economic humiliation, repeating the line from his announcement speech that “We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico.” America loses because it cannot define itself.
Trump, on the other hand, knows what America is: a winner. He can also distinguish between harmless humor and real threats as he shrugs off his past statements, saying, “[A]nd frankly, what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding.” Trump indicts public reason at two levels by claiming ownership of the mantle of discernment. Locally, he critiques an imperfection in Kelly’s feminized judgment (and tacitly condemns her femaleness), and he also critiques national public reason as feminized, lacking judgment and decisiveness. Men, on the other hand, know and act, even in the face of disagreement. The more America is uncertain—and feminine—the more it loses.
Trump posits a proportional relationship between an actor’s marginality and the veracity of its claims, conflating the felt powerlessness of his audience with the literal marginal agency of border agents. When the debate moves to immigration, the moderators ask Trump to provide his sources for his earlier campaign claims that immigrants and drugs are pouring across the border. Trump retorts with almost no delay that the source of his information is “the Border Patrol!” and states that he spoke to them personally. Continuing, Trump emphasizes that it is the position of these agents outside the ordinary spaces of establishment politics that empowers them to see the truth, contrasting their keen sense of reality to the fact that “our politicians are stupid.” His data are the simple assertions that those working at the border know the truth. Trump and his supporters have access to the real world, the abject borderland, while his critics and the Washington, DC, establishment live together in a separate bubble. In the debate, Governor John Kasich even affirmed this point, admitting, “Trump is hitting a nerve … people are frustrated. They’re fed up,” validating the argument that the audience members should trust their feelings, not mediated reports from the establishment.
In his RNC address, Trump continued to emphasize America’s powerlessness, drawing on international incidents to help audiences imagine America as helpless (“Acceptance”). Referring to a then-recent capture of an American patrol boat by the Iranian government, Trump describes the event as an American confrontation with “images of our sailors being forced to their knees” (emphasis added). The sexual imagery emphasizes America’s humiliation, which is reinforced as Trump goes on to narrate the consequences of a feminized political apparatus by discussing the time before—and after—Hillary Clinton was in charge at the State Department. Before Hillary Clinton, America could violently humiliate its enemies, as Iran was “choked by sanctions.” After her tenure, Americans at the consulate in Benghazi were “left helpless to die,” with her legacy being “death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness” (emphasis added). The precarity of American forces abroad mirrors the felt precarity of Trump’s audience, who conflate military disaster abroad with personal powerlessness.
Democracy as Danger
Trump also plays on the fact that any democratic citizen can feel excluded from politics, rendering democracy a danger-soaked enterprise. Trump organizes American politics around precarious worries about injury, equating certainty about American identity with the capacity to exercise control over the nation’s borders and population. Heterogeneity, whether in the form of foreign trading partners or immigrants, is an a priori threat to the American people.
For example, Trump’s repeated invocation of trade deals as “rapes” works with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” to curate his audience’s felt precarity as a traumatic symptom of foreign sexual assault. Making America great involves not only exercising military and economic power but also doing so to avenge current humiliation. As Sally Robinson observes:
Remasculinization is not the only strategy used to recoup the losses suffered by white men who feel themselves to be displaced or decentered; claiming the position of wounded victim can also work to manage the crisis in white masculinity, not through a final healing but, instead, through a perpetuation of the crisis. (165)
The lack of variance in Trump’s rhetoric is premised on the repeated, tautological interpretation of difference as danger to connote perpetual crisis. Trump’s RNC speech (“Acceptance”) invokes collective pronouns to portray the world of democracy as a world of threat and decay. Politicians often invoke “we” as a collective term for organizing political action through shared agency, but for Trump “we” points to the victimized, humiliated American nation. Trump defines the “we” through survival as violent struggle, as those who live or die based on whether a “strong” government can protect the weak, feminized population. As Trump notes, “[T]he most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens.” To achieve this goal, he asserts it is crucial to “present the facts plainly and honestly.” His appeal to “plain facts” implicitly derides the pushback he received against his narrative of a fallen America. “Plain facts” oppose a feminized judgment corrupted by political correctness that cannot see the truth. Trump then invokes “law and order,” telling the story of “an innocent young girl named Sarah Root” who was murdered by an immigrant as representative of what openness to difference will earn a nation.
Overall, the RNC speech portrays the experience of American life—and the prospect of public life lived with others—as being in a state of helpless fear. To be a member of the American public is to be at risk. The speech features a 4:1 ratio between terms of danger (terrorism, crisis, war, murder, killed, poverty, and violence) and terms of stability (peace, safety, and prosperity). Trump invokes his leadership qualities, stating, “I am not going to let companies move,” and that his America will not be “subject to the rulings of foreign governments” in trade deals, language that maintains his emphasis on the importance of control and mastery.
Trump defines America’s greatness as its capacity to repel foreign penetration and deport threats to the nation’s purity. Omnipresent danger warrants leadership by dominant mastery. Jessica Prody observes that “a nation’s masculinity is reinforced when its military can protect national territory and citizens. When this ability to protect is threatened (through events such as military loss or terrorist attacks), a national crisis of masculinity can emerge” (442). Trump manufactures this crisis as one general to democracy but also specific to the threat of the other.
Hostility toward Otherness
Trump’s rhetoric helped his audience interpret a number of political and social phenomena as signs of national weakness and decline, rather than as evidence of change urging citizens to adopt cooperative, democratic attitudes. Trump’s repeated scapegoating of racial and gendered figures compensated for growing awareness of the nation’s heterogeneity. Barack Obama’s “blackening” of the White House destabilized White America’s reliable institutional mirror (Coates; Johnson 17-18; Pham 91), and demographic data marking Whites a minority population also threatened the GOP base’s sense of security (Thompson). In addition, a viable female presidential candidate underscored the fragility of White masculinity’s monopolistic claim on politics. The Right’s turn to protests, Tea Parties, and cries of victimhood throughout the Obama era committed American conservatives to a politics of visibility dependent on an investment in the marginality of the figure of the White male (Warner 179).
Trump’s repeated reference to a suffering and struggling nation tacitly displaces these concerns through familiar, masculine tropes, and his campaign’s obsession with sexual assault by racial others further emphasizes the centrality of masculinist themes of dominance and submission to his rhetorical form. Trump’s opening campaign announcement from June 2015 emphasizes that America is “a country … in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore” because the United States is losing to a host of foreign forces, whether economically to Japan, China, and Mexico, the latter of which is “beating us economically … they’re killing us economically” (Time Staff). Invoking physical violence and death figures economic competition as about domination and submission rather than interconnectedness. These economic beatings also stand in for conservative political defeats in the Obama era.
Trump’s treatment of immigration showcases his capacity to translate the indeterminacy of democratic existence into a threat rather than an opportunity, as he figures immigrants not as mirrors in which Americans might see their shared humanity but as threats to their existence. Directly after discussing these trade issues, Trump utters his infamous statement regarding sexual assault:
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. (APPLAUSE) Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Trump elaborates, “[I]t’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening.” The slippage from they to it’s suggests that presumably dangerous others are an entity rather than a group of individuals, objectifying a population and dehumanizing them. His warning about the potential for rape gestures at an attendant fear of miscegenation, drawing on stereotypes about the inherent criminality racial others and stoking White supremacist fantasies.
It is notable that Trump’s labeling of Mexican immigrants as rapists follows his reference to the Mexican economic threat. The “it” coming from Mexico could be a panoply of dangers, physical, economic, or otherwise. The structure of the statement emphasizes that something is being done to America, leveling economic difficulty and sexual assault. Jan Jindy Pettman argues that such statements depoliticize rape as one kind of violation among many, confusing “the rapes of actual women with the outrage of political occupation or defeat, and so appropriate women’s pain for masculinist politics” (49). Trump’s claim that “[t]hey’re not sending you” encourages his audiences to imagine themselves as virtuous and incapable of committing sexual assault. Moreover, if, as Trump claimed in later months, trade deals are “raping” America, then the nation is a powerless victim, besieged by its inability to know its values and take action. This imagery gave Trump voters permission to disavow the Access Hollywood tape, as voting for Trump could be rationalized as an in-kind response to a larger-scale violation.
Moreover, Trump’s invocation of foreign rapists frames the openness of the American political system as a vice rather than a virtue. Locating the risk of sexual violence in the racist Other works not only to migrate suspicions regarding Obama’s foreignness to other national threats; it also trades in ideas of White women as weak and vulnerable and therefore susceptible to foreign violation. Sally Robinson observes that, historically, “the visibility of ‘savage’ male others—whose bodies are marked so that the white male can remain the paradoxical embodiment of the disembodied individual—offered evidence of a dangerous masculinity and enabled white men to practice modes of control” (164). These modes of control appear in other campaign materials, as well.
The Trump campaign’s first advertisement of 2016 fanned racial fears of national violation, linking them to a feminine unwillingness to acknowledge hard truths. Released on January 4, news outlets ranging from the New Yorker to conservative site World Net Daily wrote extensively about the ad. Most online reports embedded it within their stories, giving readers ample opportunity to watch the ad, which aired extensively in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The advertisement opens with an image of Trump standing above and at the center of an audience, emphasizing his separation from the crowd to tacitly champion his superiority before shifting to grim, filtered images of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. A somber voiceover says, “Politicians can pretend it’s something else.” The narrator then differentiates Trump from “politicians” because Trump is willing to name the enemy: “radical Islamic terrorism” (Gass). This statement speaks to a preconstituted audience of far-right conservatives inundated with talking points about the liberal refusal to name terrorism as “Islamic.” As Leah Barkoukis reported in Town Hall, Obama’s refusal to use the term is linked to the fact that “the Muslim community doesn’t want him to,” and to Ted Cruz’s statement “calling President Obama an ‘apologist for radical Islamic terrorists’ over the administration’s rhetoric and approach to ISIS.” This argument represents a common talking point on the White supremacist site Breitbart News and other conservative news sites. By figuring public officials as compromised by their sensitivity and unwillingness to offend, the advertisement links American vulnerability to its indecisive, feminized judgment.
The ad then shows the images of accused ISIS agents of the San Bernardino shooting while the phrase “It’s Radical Islamic Terrorism” appears on screen with background images of the shooting victims being loaded into an ambulance (Gass). The shooters’ faces fade out, replaced by a shot from an airport security line where travelers stand still, emphasizing that going out in public is dangerous. Before the image of the crowd fades out, the narrator’s voice proclaims, “That’s why Trump is calling for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.” The image then shifts to one of masked (presumably) ISIS agents waving a flag with Arabic symbols on it. The visibility and vulnerability of the Americans waiting in line contrasts with the anonymous ISIS agents, paralleling the anxieties of a White America that feels marked and besieged by cultural and social forces of change.
As the ad continues, it crafts a revenge fantasy that figures America’s future destruction of ISIS as a risk-free realization of America’s meaning and purpose. The ad cuts from the ISIS flag to cruiser missiles firing from an ambiguous oceanic location, suggesting that Trump’s “morning in America” will be lit by ordnance. The shot then cuts to an “eye in the sky” targeting reticle above what appear to be industrial facilities as the words “Cut the Head Off of ISIS” appear above the word “TRUMP.” Appearing in all caps, the font communicates Trump’s direct willingness to cut through fluff and politeness. After this point in the ad, unambiguously identified terrorists no longer exist, which implies that the phallic power of Trump has eliminated them, even as the narrator reminds us that “he’ll [Trump] take their oil,” reaffirming that the Islamic Other lives a life of abundance while the United States keeps losing.
Trump’s promise to “cut the head off of ISIS” simultaneously suggests his defense of Western civilization against the rape of Islam while gesturing at a pro-woman—but not feminist—politics; those with premodern attitudes toward women will receive an appropriately premodern beheading. The ad betrays a more systematic fascination with sexual assault that Wendy Hesford, in her work on rape revenge narratives, says “may reproduce the spectacle of violence by casting viewers into voyeuristic roles” (194). According to the ad, the Other not only has its own abundant natural resources but also threatens the West’s reproductive resources. Thus, the advertisement provides an elaborate rape revenge fantasy that also communicates a conservative media ecosystem that often figures Islam’s relationship to women as retrograde paternalism at best and sexual violation at worst.
Articles often paint Western Europe as besieged by a rape epidemic that is part of a Muslim civilizational war, figuring the presence of sexual assault as evidence of foreign evil rather than indexing a broader cultural problem of masculinity. As examples, former Breitbart News correspondent Milo Yiannopoulos declares Islam “the real rape culture” (Nash) while the National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy writes articles with titles like “Islamic Supremacism and Rape.” Trump’s campaign ad externalizes gender violence outside of American society and punishes it with military force. The campaign and advertisement work together toward “the reinscription … of cultural and national fears and fantasies of those in positions of power” (Hesford 209) by imagining war against ISIS as a reprisal for the international rape of the American body politic. Ostensibly, the appropriate response to this manufactured rape epidemic is the exercise of military force.
Charisma and Lack
Of course, crafting an audience that indulges persistently in fantasies of its own powerlessness is not enough; a rhetor must offer a solution. Trump’s dominant charisma is a partial explanation for his stable base of support throughout the primary campaign and during the general election. This charisma offers his supporters refuge from multiple problems, ranging from trade to terrorism, by configuring each of these problems as flowing from the lack of authoritative, masculine leadership. No matter the topic, Trump’s solutions return to his leadership and negotiating savvy which compensated for his lack of policy savvy.
In his campaign announcement speech, Trump narrates Ford Automotive’s efforts to outsource manufacturing in the hypothetical world of a President Trump. In this world, America has not government with Trump but government by Trump. Substituting himself for the government, Trump describes his approach: “I would call up the head of Ford…. ‘Let me give you the bad news. Every car and every truck and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, we’re going to charge you a thirty-five-percent tax, and that tax is going to be paid simultaneously with the transaction.'” Trump then narrates a would-be series of calls and negotiations in which he resists offers of special favors, thus highlighting the autonomy of his decision-making capacity. He envisions the conclusion of his interaction in which the head of Ford says to him, “‘Mr. President, we’ve decided to move the plant back to the United States, and we’re not going to build it in Mexico.'” Trump then asserts to his audiences, “That’s it. They have no choice. They have no choice.” Trump will constrain and coerce America’s competitors.
Trump’s governance will be mean and threatening, appropriate to America’s dire circumstances, as Trump emphasizes in his rehearsal of an exchange with a reporter who said, “Mr. Trump, you’re not a nice person.” Trump leans into the accusation, saying he told the reporter that “[t]his is going to be an election that’s based on competence, because people are tired of these nice people. And they’re tired of being ripped off by everybody in the world…. We’re becoming a Third World country.” Trump concludes by listing issues, including a crumbling infrastructure, debt, an iffy stock market, and poor treatment of veterans, before proclaiming, “[T]he American dream is dead…. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.” For Trump, circumstances mandate harsh responses. If America’s status as wounded and humiliated is the defining circumstance of Trump’s campaign, then his odious statements and unsubtle rhetorical are warrants for his candidacy rather than demerits against it.
This campaign advertisement similarly posits Trump’s negotiating power as a solution to a problem. The second to last shot of the ad features individuals crossing a border, while a banner reading “STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION” flashes (Gass). News reports quickly pointed out these were images from Morocco. For Trump’s supporters, the disjuncture between the actual context of the image and its use in the advertisement is immaterial; what matters is that there is some kind of threat to America and that Trump will protect against it. Over this image the narrator says, “He’ll [Trump] stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for” (emphasis in original).
The audience cannot negotiate with Ford; they cannot outcompete Japan’s economy; and they cannot secure the border. Certainly, they cannot afford a wall. Trump’s power and deal-making savvy will do these things for the audience by substituting his decisive charisma for every problem facing America. He will not be nice; he will dominate others in negotiations; and he will tell them how it is, mastering the uncertainty of the moment through his paternalistic protection.
Conclusion
This article offers a series of implications for citizens and scholars committed to democratic modes of civic engagement. First, defining demagoguery as curated risk avoidance affirms the critic’s role as that of marking repetitive exclusionary patterns that constitute a polity. That demagoguery makes audiences hostile to other perspectives—and relies on calcified sociopolitical power structures to do so—must bear on our capacity to define the term. Critical mindfulness about the unequally distributed character of risk in society helps to distinguish between politics structured around legitimate grievances and those that are tautological, while giving critics a lens to understand the rhetoric of demagogues beyond Trump. As Danielle Allen has argued, democracy requires taking risks, but risks are often taken disproportionately by society’s most vulnerable (185). Yet citizens may claim to feel at risk and advance an argument about their constitutive exclusion no matter their level of access to power and resources. If critics presuppose that all such claims constitute a shared rhetorical form, they risk equivocating between legitimate and fraudulent claims of constitutive exclusion and confusing vulnerability with precarity. Focusing on risk resolves this issue, as critics can acknowledge its inequitable distribution. Malcolm X, for example, took risks just by speaking in a way that Trump does not. Feeling at risk and being in existential danger are not the same thing and must not be conflated.
Furthermore, there are real and potentially disastrous consequences to inflexibly grouping all institutionally hostile rhetorical performances. The Trump era will see extensive resistance to White supremacy. Media and commentators will doubtlessly equivocate between Trump’s tactics and those of protestors and agitators and apportion blame for political and social catastrophe on the shoulders of “both sides.” Rhetorical critics must be empowered to refuse and rebut these equivalences.
Second, Trump’s rhetoric works by circulating gendered and raced accounts of American national identity. While this seems obvious, my analysis suggests the argumentative appeal of toxic masculinity circulates beyond stereotypical audiences like the Men’s Rights movement. Take, for example, public commentators who framed Trump’s campaign as just “telling it like it is” (see Brewer; J. Kelly; Markovits). Even these attempts to critique Trump remained within what Shane Phelan observes is a gendered economy of reason in which political narrators often assume that “[m]en, guided, by inner imperatives and directed by reason, find their goals and way without deviating,” while critics often feminize certain actors as overly emotional (42). In tacitly anchoring Trump’s appeal in an objective account of reality, these accounts figure Trump’s emotionality as reasonable, perhaps explaining the willingness of his audiences to entertain Trump’s regular use of rhetorical fallacies like ad populum, ad hominem, and ad baculum (Mercieca). A second example is the pundit class’s postelectoral circulation of the figure of the “White working class” in electoral autopsies. A search of the ProQuest newspaper database since November 8, 2016, reveals 533 articles invoking the phrase. These electoral postscripts locate masculine, blue-collar labor in an authentic properly “American” social position that is parallel to Trump’s campaign ethos. Whether or not the mythical White working class voted for Trump is only part of the story. The other part is how Trump’s campaign enabled well-off supporters to imagine themselves as victimized and powerless, converting their anxieties—worries that could have signaled legitimate feelings of unease about the unequitable distribution of resources in the American polity—into investments in a specific, masculinized, and White idea of a precarious America, sentiments that masquerade as aggressive solidarity with the downtrodden. Voting for Trump validated their feelings of anger as empathy while also legitimating their own personal sense of victimhood.
Such a politics represents continuity with the politics of the New Right, though less effectively sublimated. Jamelle Bouie details how this conversion of worry into a politically useful emotion connects further back on another “demagogue who fed on fear and anxiety”: George Wallace. In suggesting that Trump’s campaign has much in common with Wallace, Bouie underscores that misogynistic performances of national pride may be perfectly intelligible, even desirable, to many Americans, for what these performances express is not understood as odious nationalism but instead a natural, apolitical patriotism.
Third, Trump’s rhetorical form presents a constitutive challenge to liberal democracy by converting the undecidability inherent to politics into an apparent threat to individual personhood. Constituting subjectivity around a mimetic relationship between a lack ascribed to politics and a lack inherent to self-stylized, wounded masculinity, Trump generates a negative feedback loop characterized by a grievance politics that cannot be subdued by any existing political establishment. Trump’s seeming incoherence is a feature, not a bug, because this incoherence signals his audience’s constitutive exclusion from democracy itself, and this felt powerlessness crafts feelings of marginality as evidence of authentic political grievance. Such an affective regime threatens liberal democracy precisely because of liberal democracy’s reliance on the play of tension between substitutive and associational linguistic relationships. Where democratic indeterminacy feels like danger, there are few places where argument can occur. How we might stylize politics in ways that organize around mutual vulnerability rather than grievance is an ongoing and pressing problem.
Finally, this article suggests that the global significance of demagoguery enjoins the critic to engage in culturally specific analysis before declaring the existence of some uniform global populist wave. It is striking that, in America, Trump’s rise accompanied increased extremism in American politics, while in France, Marine Le Pen’s—admittedly partial, given the 2017 election results—success in mainstreaming the French National Front accompanied a purge of “old-school diehards” and moves to bar “skinheads in Nazi garb from rallies” (Alduy). While late capitalism’s destruction of collective institutions and identifications might be the shared context for intensifications and (re)emergences of demagoguery in the Western context, the specific conditions of such emergence deserve study on their own culturally specific terms.