Michael Richardson. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Volume 31, Issue 6. December 2017.
Donald Trump often invokes his own disgust. Of Hillary Clinton taking a bathroom break during a debate with Bernie Sanders, he said, ‘I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk’ (Hurst 2015). He berated a lawyer who needed to take a break in a deposition to pump breast milk as ‘disgusting’ and used the same word to describe former Miss Universe Alicia Muchado when she gained weight (Mallick 2016). While women are frequent targets, they are not alone. Of his primary opponent John Kasich, he said ‘I’ve never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion’, while Marco Rubio’s sweat was ‘disgusting. We need somebody that doesn’t have whatever it is that he’s got’ (Park 2016). A self-proclaimed germaphobe, Trump was famously averse to shaking hands until he began running for President (Amira 2011). Even then, Trump was rarely seen engaged in the normal human contact of campaigning: eating in diners, meeting with citizens, walking rope lines. Bodies, it seems, are what disgust him most: women’s bodies above all, but those of men too. Sweating, seeping, leaking, excreting, lactating, masticating—the body-ness of bodies, the sites and means of the transgression of boundaries, where something passes between one body and another. Elevated above the crowd at his rallies, he was at once among people and separate from them—no bodily contact was possible.
While his rhetoric about other races and religions steers clear of the word ‘disgust’ itself, his imagery evokes the rejection or ejection characteristic of it: deporting illegal immigrants, a wall on the Mexican border, a ban on Muslim travel. Walls and bans are not simply policies of exclusion, but of purity—they are about hardening the lines between one body politic and another, preventing transmission that might change or (to veer into the toxic imagery of ethno-nationalism) infect the homeland. Figuring Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals and Muslims as terrorists is not solely about amplifying fear, but also generating disgust. Draining the swamp of Washington DC, the motif of his campaign’s last days, is an image of purification, of cleaning a fetid and corrupt government out of touch with the needs of its people, of an end to what disgusts about government itself. For Trump, it may well be that it is not the Mexican-ness of illegal immigrants or the Muslim-ness of Muslims, but rather his sense of their difference and thus their capacity to contaminate, to cross over. Yet Trump’s disgust figures not only spatially and physically, but also temporally: this is crucial to the desire to ‘Make America Great Again’. Like all nostalgias, Trump’s depends on an imagined past. His nostalgia is, at least in part, a desire for the removal of that which marks change—an ejection of that which has dirtied the body politic: uppity women, black activism, non-white immigrants. The past for which Trump yearns not only featured subjugation and oppression of such other bodies, but depended on that subjugation and oppression to provide the good life for which he and his supporters yearn. These bodies are, however, not simply markers of unwelcome change, but exactly that which blocks in the present the possibility of a future in which America will be made great again.
Recognizing the centrality of disgust to Trump’s rhetoric and affect is far from original. Writers for various magazines, newspapers and blogs have identified and analysed his frequent evocation of disgust and its relationship to conservatism and more extreme politics of ethno-nationalism. Shortly after his campaign announcement in June 2015, for instance, late night host Jimmy Kimmel even ran a video segment about Trump’s love of the word ‘disgusting’ (Kimmel 2015). With a handful of exceptions, much of this popular commentary lacks detailed investigation of what disgust does, and in particular what it does to the body, and how those bodily effects contributed to the visceral grievance politics that drove Trump to the White House. This essay deploys critical theory to answer these questions and consider what the limits of such a politics of disgust might be.
From the available exit poll and other survey data, the demography and geography of Trump’s victory are clear enough: strong support among white voters, particularly in the upper Midwest, combined with lower turnout among African American and Hispanic voters enabled him to thread the needle of narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan and win the Electoral College. Trump maintained the wealthy whites who voted for Romney and gained support among non-college educated whites, even as he was also able to hold onto white women who were inclined to Obama (Agadjanian 2017; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2017; Tyson and Maniam 2017; Walley 2017). At the same time, some mix of voter suppression, targeted negative messaging from the Trump campaign, and Hillary’s own chequered history on criminal justice helped depress turnout among African Americans (Krogstad and Lopez 2017; Taylor 2016; Toobin 2016). How Trump’s chaotic and unconventional campaign defeated the slick Clinton operation continues to be hotly debated in the political media and among political scientists and professionals. No doubt those debates will continue for years to come given the Sisyphean task of apportioning responsibility between the appeal of ethno-nationalism, racism, voter suppression, economic anxiety, political alienation, media coverage, the errors of the Clinton campaign, the interference of Russian intelligence agencies, and whatever other factors might be argued. Rather than analyse voter data or assign specific causation to particular factors, this essay asks what it was about Trump and his message that resonated in powerful and unexpected ways with what would become and remain an unwavering base of supporters. Understanding these dynamics is increasingly crucial as his presidency unfolds and the fever of Trumpian right-wing populism rises in more democracies around the world. Whatever the proximate and contextual causes of Trump’s success, the affective dynamics of his support require attention. Trump marshalled what Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1964, famously called the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics, ‘the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ that is an ‘old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life’ (Hofstadter 1964, 77). While Trump draws heavily from the wells of the paranoid style, not least in his enthusiasm for conspiracy and sense of permanent persecution, the focus of this essay is not so much generalized paranoia as the bodily affectivity through which Trump galvanized support. While fear and hate—and yes, hope and love—no doubt played an important part, this essay is addressed to the affective force that bound his support together and was central to the politics of grievance: disgust.
Political grievance is more than just real or imagined wrong: it is an affective structuring of the relations between people, institutions, economies and sociocultural norms. It arises from weakness and the perception of lost agency. For many in the United States—and particularly among white working class and rural communities—this loss of agency has accelerated during the transformations of the last 20-odd years, disrupting traditional social and economic hierarchies. At the same time, the world has become simultaneously more complex and more immediate through the intertwined processes of globalization and technological innovation, even as that same complexity has made it feel more inscrutable and intractable. The technocratic tendency of biopolitical governance turned people into populations and in doing so rendered particular experiences as generalized statistics, such that the purpose of government itself became more abstract. Moreover, while the benefits of change via globalization and technology have not been shared equally, concurrent social and cultural change on matters of gender, sexuality, diversity and even language has occurred at what must feel for some like a dizzying rate. As change accelerates, its very speed can induce the sense that control over everyday life is slipping away. Experiencing change itself as a loss of control means experiencing it as a manifestation of weakness, of apparent or potential inferiority. Yet pinning down the abstract and impersonal forces of globalization and technological change proves impossible, so a slippage takes place. Festering resentment is transposed onto readily available others—elites, globalists, immigrants, Muslims—who can be figured as scapegoats and sacrificed to restore order and cohesion (Girard 1987).
But resentment cannot so easily be satiated. The dynamics at play are part and parcel of the affective present, the background condition of life in the developed world today. Resentment arises within what Berlant (2011) calls the cruel optimism of our neoliberal moment, the way in which optimistic attachments to the objects and scenes of a supposed good life become obstacles to personal flourishing. ‘Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’, Berlant writes, such that one fears ‘that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything’ (2011, 24). These attachments to problematic objects (or situations, or contexts) of desire constrain what we perceive as possible, even as they maintain our striving within the existing conditions of life. Cruel optimism animates an affective present in which the good life—whatever that may be—is always both just around the corner and perpetually slipping away. ‘In scenarios of cruel optimism’, argues Berlant, ‘we are forced to suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren’t the problem in the first place’ (2011, 49). Yet if this condition of the affective present is not recognized clearly, then its intensity can amplify. Such a condition of living is not sustainable without frustration and we might give the name ‘grievance’ to what happens in the accumulation of those frustrations: a pooling and congealing of negative affect in the context of material stagnation or decline. For factory towns without a factory, or rural communities riven by opioid addiction, this wounding surely does exceed the pain of frustrated desires, while in the comfortable exurbs of Midwestern city its intensity might stem more from a kind of wounded cultural nostalgia or a perceived shift in social hierarchy than any material loss. Yet how much legitimacy need be granted to this grievance is perhaps a moot point: it exists, it is felt intensely, it shapes political action. Perhaps most crucially, it offers the promise of undoing or escaping the conundrum of cruel optimism. Grievance is not, however, an emotion or affect itself, but rather an architecture or structure composed of co-mingled intensities, bound together by disgust.
In The Anatomy of Disgust, William Miller argues that disgust is an ‘anti-democratic force, subverting the minimal demands of tolerance’ (1998, 206). Yet it frequently bubbles to the surface of democratic politics, whether in the resistance to equal rights for LGBTQI communities or the designation of acts such as 9/11 as disgusting. This potential for disgust to capture the politics of particular bodies, issues or events is made possible by the very tolerance for difference, particularly in speech, that is the normative ground of democracy. Democratic tolerance allows each of us to hold the other in contempt. Contempt is disgust’s close cousin, ‘the emotional complex that articulates and maintains hierarchy, status, rank and respectability’ (1998, 217). Thus, while disgust is more associated with bodily sensations and functions, with secretion and excretion, contempt relates to sociality. ‘Contempt marks social distinctions that are graded ever so finely’, writes Miller, ‘whereas disgust marks boundaries in the large cultural and moral categories that separate pure and impure, good and evil, good taste and bad taste’ (1998, 220). In democracy, to have contempt for the high—to know better than those idiots in charge, to find the cultural preferences of elites absurd, to use language offensive to cosmopolitans—is not only possible, but protected. More, this capacity for contempt is crucial to maintaining class divisions that are sociocultural, as well as economic.
Populism exploits the protection of contempt in democratic politics by directing it at the norms, practices and policies of establishment politics—and the figures emblematic of it. But mere contempt is not enough, because it recognizes rather than rejects social distinctions, even as it critiques them. Thus, contempt for Hillary Clinton would not do; she had to be made a figure of disgust. As the First Lady who refused, in her words, to stay home and bake cookies, who champions abortion rights, who refused to perform her femininity in keeping with traditional norms, Clinton had long been an object of disgust for a certain segment of the American population. Her association with the elite establishment that had allowed objects of disgust to contaminate the body politic amplified and intensified this visceral disgust towards Clinton herself. Trump’s throwaway line—‘nasty woman’—captured that animus perfectly, and in doing so further demarcated the emotional terrain of his supporters from the elite liberal values that Clinton embodied: rejecting Clinton meant ejecting from the body politic the undesired other. After all, while contempt might be mutual and mutually accepted, disgust allows for no such tolerance. That which disgusts must be wiped away, or else it might pollute the body forever, change it in ways that cannot be known but are certainly not to be desired. There is something visceral and primal in that desire, not unlike the rituals of purification identified by Mary Douglas and other anthropologists concerned with the relationship of dirt and the body (see, for example, Douglas 2003; Masquelier 2005).
Disgust works the affective system. It grips and pulls the body before the mind knows: ‘a pulling that feels almost involuntary’, writes Sara Ahmed, ‘as if our bodies were thinking for us, on behalf of us’ (2004, 84). This pulling away might seem to be about ending contact between the body and that which disgusts, but it is in fact an intensifying movement. Stepping in something that oozes and then pulling back, for instance, does not eradicate disgust so much as give it an embodied form. If something of the disgusting substance stays on the skin, then pulling away is also a drawing towards, keeping with the body the very object of disgust. Disgust takes its power from this proximity, from a relationship of touch or contact between surfaces. Yet what disgusts need not be inanimate: people and their bodies, qualities and actions can disgust too. Nor does the proximity necessary for disgust have to be physical. Contact can occur in mediatized form, a product of what Mark Deuze calls ‘a life as lived in, rather than with, media’ (2012, 2). A life lived in media is a life in which media—particularly social media—are more than conduits for the flow of affect but producers, amplifiers and shapers of its intensity (Massumi 2015, 67). Disgust can be felt for the other encountered only fleeting in person yet repeatedly in media. This mediatized production of disgust can be startlingly strong. The strongest anti-immigration sentiments, for example, are found in those American communities with the least physical contact with immigration (Ojeda 2016). In such contexts, the other is encountered almost exclusively in media—and for this very reason may more readily become the object of disgust or fear.
What makes disgust so exploitable within affective politics is its capacity to bind objects together. Because disgust is inextricable from bodily movement, it is intensely performative and this performativity forms a feedback loop: it intensifies disgust itself, entraining the body, capturing it sensorially (Ahmed 2004, 98-100). When Trump performs his disgust—body jerking, pursed lips, face contracting and relaxing in vaudevillian style—this bodily rejection of contact becomes mimetic. Ben Anderson argues that for those attuned to his message, Trump’s performances are of vitality and fun, enactments of fantasy that are affectively styled to amplify and attract support (2016). This attraction runs alongside and augments the pulling away of disgust: away from the disgusting object and towards the fantasy of purity, of ejection and cleansing. A celebration of community enacted in ejection, in shared, if crude, performances of ritual purification. Yet disgust is galvanizing politically precisely because it cannot be cleansed. Or, as Ahmed puts it, ‘the “disgusting events” have “invaded” and “saturated” life itself such that they till resonate in life, even after the attribution of “That’s disgusting!” has been made’ (2004, 96). Other negative emotions are amplified and entangled and ‘the slide between disgust and other emotions is crucial to the binding: the subject may experience hate towards the object, as well as fear of the object, precisely as an affect of how the bad feeling “has got in”’ (2004, 88). To repeatedly recoil becomes a political act that coheres the elements of resentment, that binds them ever more tightly. Performing disgust in train with the desire to Make America Great Again becomes a looping intensification of the desire for a return to the lost body politic.
It is hardly surprising, then, that sensitivity towards disgust maps tightly onto conservative values, while progressives are more motivated by abstract justice, as a significant body of social psychological and neuropsychological research demonstrates (see, for example, Feinberg et al. 2014; Horberg et al. 2009; Toobin 2016). Indicative of this research is the major global study by Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer and Jonathan Haidt, which shows that subjects with a low threshold for disgust are more likely to be conservative in political orientation. Disgust sensitivity, they write, may ‘encourage avoidance of out-groups who are likely to expose individuals to novel pathogens—for example, out-groups who differ in their practices regarding cleanliness, food preparation, and sexual behaviour’ (2012). Disgust thus drives an affective sociality that is socioculturally conservative, but not necessarily fiscally so. Because disgust is bound up with morality, its expression becomes a form of moral judgement (Haidt et al. 1997; Schnall et al. 2008). As Haidt (2012) makes clear in The Righteous Mind, the visceral force of disgust is inextricable from the intensity of religiosity in contemporary American politics. Disgust towards homosexuality, for instance, entangles disgust with Christian values for socially conservative voters, founded on a long history of association between religiosity and cleanliness (Bushman and Bushman 1988). The righteousness of being disgusted at the behaviours of others authorizes its own proliferation. At the same time, the stickiness of disgust means that it passes all too easily from othered body to othered body. George W. Bush and Karl Rove were able to capitalize on this fusion of politics and conservative religiosity, but stopped short of making disgust the animating force of their politics (Westen 2007, 392). Trump, for whom disgust is so ever-present and deeply felt, was more than willing to give disgust free rein and allow its evocation to bind conservatives to his radical agenda of ejection and purification.
Disgust defines itself through difference: it is not just the contact of surfaces but the difference between one surface and another that makes disgust possible. One body impinges upon another, boundaries leak, something of the other sticks to the self. If the economy is sick, if communities are sick, if life is just different now, then it must be because some impurity has crossed over. All too often, this is an impurity embodied by the other who looks, speaks or acts differently. This is why, in its darkest incarnations, the politics of disgust is bound up with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, isolationism and ethno-nationalism. Disgust’s visceral recoil not only pulls the body away from that which disgusts, it transforms the source of disgust into an object—and in the case of the disgusting other, it dehumanizes. Anti-Semitic tropes that figure Jews as rats or cockroaches are not chosen by chance, but precisely because they are carriers of disease, threatening contamination and thus, already objects of disgust. These signs, therefore, work to maintain disgust, reinforcing its intensity via language and image. Yet this evocation of disgust deploys its force to dehumanize, to strip the disgusting object of the markers of shared humanity.
Something like this transformation occurs in the conflation of the sympathetic figure of the refugee with that of the abhorrent terrorist, of the Muslim with the jihadi. Such bodies ‘are constructed as being hateful and sickening only insofar as they have got too close. They are constructed as non-human, as beneath and below the bodies of the disgusted’ (Ahmed 2004, 97). Crucially, this spatial positioning becomes attached to the bodies themselves and legitimizes their abjection. To be disgusted by such bodies becomes not aberrant but normal, not hateful but natural. Difference in the abstract is not disgusting: only difference that draws closer, close enough to touch, to arrive viscerally as lived difference. Trump’s language of ejection and containment—building the wall, banning Muslims, unleashing the police—continually re-inscribes in the body and in speech this disgust towards difference. To be rid of disgust calls not simply for containment of the other, but also a return to a time before the other was so present: a nostalgia that is a pulling away from the present, a disgust response to the world as it is now. The nostalgia for an era of sameness, even or perhaps especially if enforced by segregation and oppression, suggests that disgust is not only spatial but temporal. Pulling away from the other and from the present becomes the same movement. No surprise, then, that Trump repeatedly referred to his campaign as a ‘movement’, as if he grasped instinctively the centrality of bodily movement to the politics of disgust.
To return to the scene of incitement: Trump on stage in front of thousands, crowd at a fever pitch, ready to roar at his direction. ‘Build that wall’, they will chant, and ‘lock her up’, incantations of containment and control. Disgust binds the crowd and embeds its intensity, produced and amplified by its performance in body after body. Crowds are affective formations, Anna Gibbs argues, particularly susceptible to contagion, the leaping of affect from body to body. Contra Gabriel Tarde and others who claim that the malleable crowd has given way to the more sober public, Gibbs suggests that the mimetic transmission of affect shows the continued centrality of the crowd to political affect. Affect ‘binds the crowd to a leader, uniting the mass of individual bodies into a force with its own purpose and direction’ (2008, 133). Harnessing its affectivity, this leader ‘will ultimately confer form on the formlessness of the crowd’ (2008, 134). Trump’s performance of disgust in language, gesture and facial expression works to focalize the energies of his rallies—and the crowds themselves, in mimetic sympathy with Trump, in turn become hypnotic to themselves, vibrating with their own affective resonance. For Teresa Brennan, this entrainment occurs through sound and smell, as well as image, movement and mimesis: this is why ‘the affect in the room is a profoundly social thing’ (2004, 68). Trump’s own repeated reference to the fun of his rallies recognized precisely this shared intensity of the experience in the room, the pleasure of expressing disgust that might otherwise have been verboten in an atmosphere of affective solidarity. This sense of cohesion was surely strengthened, too, by the presence of protesters, who functioned as visible reminders of that which was to be rejected and confirmed the social binding of the affectivity of the crowd.
Yet Trump’s crowds were not only powerful in person. With cable news broadcasting rally after rally, the intensity of what Anderson calls ‘affective atmosphere’ became mediatized (2009). While these live broadcasts constituted billions in ‘free media’ for Trump and boosted ratings for the networks, they also brought the crowd into the private sphere, mediated but not without affect. Indeed, if print media tempered the crowd in the late nineteenth century, then screen media has allowed the crowd in all its visual mimetic force a renewed prominence. This is particularly the case on Twitter where, as Brian Ott has argued in a recent essay on Trump and the politics of debasement, the affordances and dynamics of the medium, its dependence on the ‘affective charge’ its use entails, worked symbiotically with Trump’s politics: ‘Twitter breeds dark, degrading, and dehumanizing discourse; it breeds vitriol and violence; in short it breeds Donald Trump’ (2017, 62). While Ott’s focus is on the strange confluence of Trump’s language with the discursive tendencies of Twitter, his analysis makes clear the entanglement of Trumpian affect and social media crowds. More broadly, social media has disaggregated the wider public into digital crowds, seeking affective affirmation, confirmation and amplification. Social media postings of crowd experiences accumulate as ‘archives of feelings’ that are both dynamic in nature and affirmative of social values (Pybus 2015, 239). These social media archives can attune the bodies towards attitudes and ideas (Gibbs 2001). They grant a certain stickiness to moments of socio-political identification, which ‘sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects’ (Ahmed 2010, 31). This enfolding of the live experience with its capture in broadcast and social media is made possible by the vitality of new media, the capacity for mediation to be ‘life-like’ as well as ‘live’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012, 24, 25). That is, for the life of the crowd to be mediated and in that mediation to be re-experienced and experienced new.
Commentary during the campaign often dismissed Trump’s obsession with the size of his rallies, yet he understood that the crowd—activated and entrained in just the right way—made possible a self-sustaining affective conflagration. Crucial to that affective conflagration was disgust, with its distinct movement of recoil working to legitimate the feeling and acting as a carrier of ideas and attitudes of purification, of ejection of the other. Experienced in person, or even vicariously via cable news, that co-feeling of the crowd could be shared and affirmed in the digital mediations of the crowd that the Clinton campaign, with its micro-targeted and analytically detailed approach, seemed not to grasp. President Trump’s obsession with the size of the crowd at his inauguration, his willingness to lie and attack the media, to demand that people not believe their own eyes, reveals his recognition of the crowd’s power. And the huge protests that have taken place in response to his actions as President reveal both the power of the crowd and the limits of disgust.
From the beginning of his campaign, Trump himself was also an object of disgust. Google ‘trump disgust’ and much of what returns refers to disgust at Trump himself. His cheerleading of birtherism, his claims that Mexican immigrants were rapists, even his too-orange tan and his combover hair, evoked disgust. Then there was his impersonation of a disabled reporter, his fat-shaming and slut-shaming of women, his treatment of people of colour, and more. Most famously of all, disgust was the pervasive response to the Access Hollywood tape released late in the campaign, in which Trump is heard bragging about sexual assault and describing his own use of power: ‘You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything’, he said. ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything’ (Fahrenthold 2016). For a brief time, the tape seemed to have produced a countering wave of disgust, but it didn’t last and failed to sufficiently energize voters, despite the ubiquity of the video on media of all kinds and the certainty with which pundits of all stripes predicted the end of Trump’s candidacy.
If Trump himself was disgusting, along with his words and actions, why didn’t this disgust galvanize support in quite the same way? Hillary Clinton certainly sought to turn the politics of disgust to her advantage by presenting Trump unvarnished, his own words and performance direct towards those in whom a countering outraged disgust might be provoked. This strategy was most evident in the Clinton campaign’s advertising, which consisted of cut-ups of Trump’s own words far more than anything of Clinton herself. Chief among these was the ‘Role Models’ ad, composed of close-ups of small children watching Trump deliver offensive statement after offensive statement (Clinton 2016). Yet at her own rallies and speeches Clinton couldn’t enact disgust towards Trump in quite the same way, she couldn’t give agency to the crowd with the same fervour, or to those she most needed to feel disgusted by Trump. Support for Clinton and antipathy towards Trump was sufficient for her to win the popular vote, but it failed to speak to enough voters in Florida and the Rust Belt to overcome the intensity with which Trump’s supporters felt with their leader and found agency in that mimetic contagion. To be disgusted by Trump was to feel disgust towards what might come to pass, but to be disgusted with him was to feel disgust at what was lost, what was different, what had changed. Because it referred to a nostalgic past rather than a fearful future, because it was bound up with the hope for purification, the disgust Trump gave his supporters offered catharsis and release. Winning election indebted to the politics of disgust, however, demands that the promised release be granted. In part, the early actions of the Trump Administration can be read in just this light. How better to begin to offer the promised purification than to sign Executive Orders to build the wall on the Mexican border and to ban refugees from majority-Muslim countries?
Yet disgust has its limits as a mode of politics, limits that are inherent to its affective dynamics. That desire to break the contact of sticky surfaces is inherently divisive and antagonistic, it demands a feverish passion at odds with democratic normalcy, which, for many voters, obscures its conflict and messiness behind a veneer of routine banality, of business as usual. Stickiness sticks. On the one hand, too much contact with the disgusting object can infect the disgusted body; it too can become an object of disgust. Such is the peril of the outsider, charged with draining the swamp, who finds themselves covered in its muck. And on the other hand, disgust can lose its forcefulness once one becomes accustomed to its textures and qualities. It must always be renewed or else what had felt alien and repellent will slowly become familiar, in the same way that new parents become accustomed to dirty nappies and other excreta. To continually recoil, to remain viscerally disgusted, is exhausting and so its intensity must always be heightened, or else become tedious. Disgusting objects must become more and more so, or new objects must be found that threaten to contaminate the body politic. Can Donald Trump’s disgust maintain such an intensity? And what of the countering movements of those made objects of disgust in his performance—the people of colour, the so-called ‘coastal elites’, the educated liberals? As has been well understood since Mary Douglas and her work on dirt and the sacred, disgust demands rituals of purification. But while this may be a terrifying notion to consider as the Trump era unfolds, it is one that calls attention to the potential limits of Trump’s politics disgust. The burden of maintaining a cycle of disgust, purification and provocation is considerable. Even in the hyper-partisan and febrile politics of the United States today, the endurance of disgust is no guarantee, nor are feverish movements of pulling away and acts of containment the foundation for stable governance. Disgust itself may yet prove President Trump’s undoing. His own disgust might be bottomless, feeding constantly on new targets, producing new objects, demanding new ejections and recoils. But its capacity to cohere the crowd will have its limits, as will the politics of grievance that animate his supporters. Understanding, articulating and exploiting those limits is a task to which critical theory can contribute. It can help expose grievance as an affective structure, as bound up with the dynamic of crowds as well as publics, in digital as well as physical spaces, and as a mode of politics that cannot hope to create the nostalgic utopia of its believers. Facing a wave of right-wing populism and deep fractures in the international order, critical theory can contribute to the hard work of constructing an affective counter-politics that takes grievance seriously but refuses to succumb to the violent intensity of its resentments, or allow the disgust that animates it to define politics or culture.