TRUMP AT MACDONALD'S; FAST FOOD ASSASSINATION MELODIES/MEMORIES
TRUMP AT MACDONALD'S; FAST FOOD ASSASSINATION MELODIES/MEMORIES
What happened when I word-searched 'assassination' on the archive of this blog. Pictures of the exhibition of an extinction scene, ongoing. Freedom fries behind a large glass in a gallery in 2022-24.
God has now spared my life. Not once but twice.—Trump, Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, 19 September 2024
The Dreyfus case had passed, Anatole France remained.—Proust, The Captive
As the purifying hurricane speeds ahead of the thunder and lightning, God’s fury roars through history in the storm of forgiveness . . .—Benjamin, Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe1
I once noted that the recent past always presents itself as if it had been destroyed by catastrophes.—Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 2-4 August 19352
A strong example is Adorno’s memo to Benjamin that the recent past remains the most repressed time zone that lurches back into the present catastrophically as pre-history (2-4 August 1935).—Rickels, ‘Wish Upon A Star’
Yeah, I wish I’d made him an actual martyr.—Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, July 20243
Like the survivor of so many police films, Plato was set off by the murder of his partner.—Ronell, Loser Sons
Has Trump Been Killed Yet?
As I write this, the internet is buzzing—as they say—with footage—and by now memes—of Trump conversing with ‘ordinary people’ via a McDonald’s drive-thru window in suburban Pennsylvania. In one clip an Indian guy pulls up and the Indian guy’s wife leans across and says, ‘thank you for taking a bullet for us’.
Rumors of the President’s assassination have been simultaneously under- and overestimated for nearly a decade, especially perhaps this last year when Trump had his van Gogh moment, escaping certain death only by moving his head at the last-minute—missing a sniper’s bullet by a nip in the ear.
This proximity (last-minute, near-miss, close call—doubled failed attempts, in Butler and then at his golf course in Florida) only served to mark Trump out as someone who has essentially already been assassinated or rather been kept alive to be killed over and over again, and that scene, the scene of a repeated slow-mo or drive-by assassination (twice-survived), is not as historically unusual as Trump thinks when he claims—or used to claim—that he is the greatest scapegoat of all time (G(S)OAT): which may in fact, notwithstanding Christ, be entirely true.
Trump’s assassination is hard to understand because it exists somewhere between the already-done, the serial attack of a killer state (Socrates,4 RFK Jr.’s brain worms, Bushian legal theory, Obama’s ‘Kill List’, soul murder, Plato’s Laws, Kathy Griffin’s severed head, Ye’s ‘digital lynching’ and deadnaming, don’t make him an actual martyr, and so on), and the to-come: it could happen any day and yet was already the case. We fear—desire—to hear that news delivered, like the massive meteorological storm of the Last Judgment Benjamin has down as forgiveness in his lesser-known Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe. But Trump’s actual death would also be the end of an era,5 like the moment the music of the Russian ballet arrives in Paris and replaces the decade-long Dreyfus affair in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Nobody has really understood Trump yet as a sign, and here he is making a sign. This is Trump waving out of the nearside drive-by window of a McDonald’s during a 2024 election season that doesn’t seem to be potentially conclusive in a way that would matter—as still seemed to be the case even in the election of 2020.6 Trump is not dead yet, but he’s making some kind of sign. The whole thing isn’t dead yet and here Trump is making a sign from inside the Golden Arches, their spatially near Window. The signs quickly took hold, for this day or so, but not like the CNN meme war of 2017. Instead a steady stream of photographic signs that make the wave continue into something else, picking up where an extinction protest sign leaves off, Phoebe Plummer doing van Gogh who then haunted the President who leaves while in place.
The proximity of Trump to death in 2024 was part of this remote-assassination waving and drowning signature-effect we make some hasty notes about below. Either touching a wall or cutting off an ear, or remaining behind a glass (at a rally or in a gallery), a raised -fist or -hand beckons to something. Thank you, President, for being absurdly Christ-like in Homer’s Springfield with all the extinct cats of an AI-remake of Korine’s Gummo playing inside your dreams.
So I took to the archive again, my archive I mean, like Adorno reminding Benjamin in a letter of 1935—in the static zone—that only the recent past matters, only the just-passed has dynamite strapped to its side. What had assassination meant, just now? Which was the bullet discussed when Trump staffed the fry station in a moment already gone? On 5 February 2021, I wrote:
More and more, I am convinced that the only real word that describes the last four years in American world-transmission is assassination. The truth is that Trump was assassinated again and again from day one . . . and he was assassinated out of the realm of reading, and it’s only now that this is entirely clear—which it also still fails to be. Such is automated unreading.
Since JFK-style takedowns aren’t possible anymore because of the internet and a conspiracy-savvy Generation Z that would know all too well and quickly the truth, what is viable is four years of extreme slander on the Chinese model. It was self-evident that Trump was not Hitler, and yet for four years Trump, like the Dalai Lama, was Hitler, and the result of this has been an increase in the Less Interesting Powers of the Fake.
A footnote at the end of the first line here links to the following Emma Cline passage from the short story ‘White Noise’, published on 1 June 2020:
All it took, it turned out, was total annihilation. Attempted annihilation, he corrected himself, the threat of annihilation. . . . ‘There’s been an assassination attempt’, he heard in his head, as if from a news announcer, ‘an attempt on the President’s life’. This had been a recurring thought lately: an assassination attempt, an assassination attempt. He had survived an assassination attempt. Because how else could you describe what they were trying to do to him?
This passage from Cline is useful since it gives us the accurate blur between annihilation (extinction) and assassination. For a while now one predominant effect of what Lil Internet has called ‘online physics’7 has been that cancellation, assassination, removal, negativity and extinction (not just but also death) are entangled as a matter of principle and electronic matter. The rumor and image of expected assassination are one and the same, for example on a day when we can read the phrase ‘like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok’. The matter of online physics has meant that there has been a kind of individuated and ongoing online extinction assassination effect. In fact, anyone who wishes to point out the matter of online extinction physics will by that very statement have been torqued out of existence, and so the president’s assassination takes place in this short story as open cipher, premature assassination (assassination is what happens beforehand, before itself)—near-miss, ‘attempted’, the nick, the clip, the nip, not the thing itself, but even so. Trump is already dead. R.I.P..8
When the Indian dude’s wife leans over and says thank you for taking a bullet for us, she is also kind of saying thanks, President Trump, for taking one for the species. Trump has been already killed and yes, you will also see it again and again on the internet, soon. Death wish and extinction wish here entangle automatically, flatlining the Internet itself into a kind of open crime scene of extinction writing and signs. The desire for Trump to be more-than-removed from the public square he is still the unconscious center of exposes the death drive to us as extinction: assassination isn’t enough anymore. We have to more than fuck ourselves, more than kill ourselves. The extinction drive says, to everyone now: take one for the species.
ONCE UPON A TIME . . . ON THE INTERNET
I want a president who will just assassinate themself. I want a president with 0 followers, a president who has stood in line outside Pinkberry during Corona, on DMT, on the EDD website, and has been self-employed and K-holed and called out and deplatformed and cancelled.—source: the internet (historical)
she posted photos of him on instagram
she said she was in love with me
she wanted to talk on the phone
why is kurt cobain still dead
she hates alcoholics anonymous
she only cares about herself
i texted her two weeks ago
and she didn’t respond
i said ‘i miss you.’
i fucking hate my old roommates
Sources connected to Amanda tell us
she was visibly high all day,
talking to herself and
complaining about her life.
the guy who quotes proust at AA meetings is cool i think—source: the internet (historical)
The Dakota Fanning character (Lynette Fromme) in Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood later on, after the sequence of Tarantino’s film was done, made a ‘fake’ assassination attempt on president Ford with an empty M1911 pistol for ecological reasons. ‘It wouldn’t go off’, she protested in the moment. She was given life in prison. Another Manson girl, Sandra Good, got life for mailing death threats to corporate officials in the same style of protest. In 1985, calling herself ‘Blue’, she refused ‘good time’ release, staying inside to abide in thoughts of ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, Animals), the ‘thought of life’. This is a good example of what de Man called in his essay on Pascal’s zeroes an ‘excessive rigor’: ‘We all need ATWA to survive. So, you can see that the killings were done in self-defense. Manson is ATWA.’
Manson is here translocated as the principle of life that would, in theory, justify any assassination attempt at all. Near-misses seem everything. Trump is more assassinated precisely because he did not take a bullet for us, but missed it. It would be better to say, thank you for not quite dodging a bullet for us. In 1971 Fromme served 90 days in jail for attempting to feed, yes, a hamburger laced with the psychedelic drug LSD to Barbara Hoyt, a witness to the Tate murder, to keep Hoyt from testifying in the murder trial. Again, attempted assassination seems more active, like the van Gogh sunflowers attacked in London and yet always safe behind a shield.
There is no lack of snuff movies even though we pretend not to have seen them. Some claim the 1 min Zapruder was the first and only of the kind. The assassination of a president on film, and then of the generational ‘patsy’ on live television, all of this was perhaps a new obscene. What did American death and extinction mean after that?
By the time of De Palma’s Blow Out in 1981, the death film containing the killing of the vice president has to be reconstituted from a sound recording and flicker book separately, and yet the parts fail to sync. The film can’t be delivered, and America remains asleep as Nancy Allen dies on the roof as if only to make the right muted scream.
I once asked the Hitchcock scholar and extinction semiotician Tom Cohen how one might make the Shoah of the present, and he replied that the everyday stream of online physics (what he in fact calls the telepolis) was indeed already that and there was therefore no need to make it. The image of extinction in the present remains, invisibly, as the image of an ear, clipped in the ‘attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania’. Trump’s van Gogh moment in 2024 was the image of extinction sublimated. A serial fossil.9 Trump hasn’t been himself for some time of course. This is largely because the image of his assassination is the image of an extinction that just keeps happening to and displacing us. As Cline almost says, This had been a recurring thought lately: an extinction attempt, an extinction attempt. He had survived an extinction attempt. It’s like the final moments of Tao Lin’s Taipei, in which the main character says, I can’t believe we overdosed. The present is made of this hidden belief, a delicate structure of suspended disbelief. The only image we catch of ongoing extinction is an indirect one, an ear. Something spooled back together, as in De Palma, but still of no use.
On 17 July 2021 I wrote of how ‘it isn’t just that Guardian America still campaigns against Donald Trump every day on its homepage even beyond his metaphorical assassination’, thereby introducing again this distinction and tension between metaphoric and literal assassination. The extinction assassination scene is actually something that can happen to a non-living being. We may always spare a thought for wounds inflicted on the dead and for how sometimes we keep the (living) dead alive in us, and for us, just to be able to hound them, as if the zombie Trump, restricted to Truth Social even though he has been let back on to X, were to be kept alive just enough to hear the evil that is said or thought about them (CNN, basically). This rumor scene, which is really the scene of the entire internet as a machine of memory abuse and molestation, is also an extinction scene. It is really—also—the future extinct that are kept alive in us, and this is what attunes the distant softness of Trump’s image—never to be explained by most of what is said of him. It may well be that the alleged fascistic element of his image, wildly exaggerated, is just the obscenity of the future extinct at the feast of online physics. There is in fact something called physics envy. The online future extinct envy us and we envy them. They seethe in us, as us, and we free ourselves from them only though a specific and missed dream of assassination.
There is no such thing as a post-Trump moment. Trump will, short of assassination (but even then), continue as the main focus of an interpassive, delegated, objective hatred machine that is now all but indestructible in needing some kind of ‘Trump’ as an icon and avatar. This is why we have allowed him to guide arguments for these years, and ceded to the idea that modern media has now become more than what Godard called ‘the poor cinema of the news’. As the libretto to John Adam’s Nixon in China once put it, ‘news has a kind of mystery’. The news we have now is the plasticity of what artificial formalization makes possible. Since the spectacle of others hating or being wrong is even more addictive (and deliciously intractable) than hate itself, ‘Trump’ will survive.
‘Trump’ has survived, then. He survived his real assassination attempt, looking up at the angels, smiling behind a large glass or in a drive-thru, inevitably. Inevitably because the Trump-function is an excess of—in excess of—the lived moment over and after the extinction scene the internet creates and baits—creates through a surplus of spite. ‘Instantly, bait everywhere.’ Bait no longer baits anything specific. Abstract bait works to maneuver the online physics of an extinction scene out of sight. The only real feature to have updated the dark thermal glamour of Godard’s Histoire(s) is the broad presence of the Internet in our lives everyday.10 It is only really on the Internet, daily, that we see this extinction scene arrive (the assassination is taking place now, inside the arches, watch this motherfucker drive by and shoot). Bait is piquant and relevant only because it baits us, extinction drive-thru all the way, into this scene.
As indicated, this has been going on for a while now, and in a sense we can only keep covering the scene, finger-searching our own tracks. Online extinction physics is like that and is often felt best as return, Adorno’s primal recent rewind.11 July 2017: the moment at which the fantasy of Trump (not) being president was replaced by the fantasy of his assassination or nano decimation. In other words, in that moment the fantasy of Trump being president was not enough, there was now the fantasy of him being dead. First there was the fantasy of Trump as president. Then the fantasy of Trump as being announced dead. Nothing, it seemed, would stop at nothing. Death would have to become more than it had been. All it took, it turned out, was total annihilation. Attempted annihilation, we corrected ourselves, the threat of total annihilation.
Preceding Trump in the early days in Florida, then achronically spreading all the way from X’s assassination to the quattracento nugaze of Tennessee-based experimental collective Reptilian Club Boyz, SoundCloud rap went beyond generic diversity. It was a problem birthed, and transcendentally concluded, in 2017.1, in such a way that ‘2017.1’ became, like the transcendental deduction itself, a musico-political eternity.
XXXTentacion’s murder here steps in to take up where Trump is leaving or was left off. The whole thing stretches through music (in general, i.e. not the golden days and architectonic of SoundCloud), an assassination patch that also seemed to take out SoundCloud beauty itself, R.I.P Music, except for Carti’s unreleased MUSIC. As in Proust, like the ballet again which is the only thing that can shut down the endless rumor of racism in early-century France, eventually all that blocking gets too much, and the Russians are here, Stravinsky, a 2hollis fit pic at Treblinka. If we had been living through a barbaric Dreyfus affair of super paranoid signs, an online masterpiece of what Tom Cohen has already called mass ressentimentalization, as recounted to us by Proust and Carti and a few others, then what is the Russian Ballet that always comes after when everything is forgotten? In The Guermantes Way it’s like this,
Then, as life resumes its normal course after even the most sensational happenings, those who had emerged from the sea of fog began to order whatever they wanted to eat or drink . . .
The Affair, said Proust in a letter to Mme Geneviève Strauss, ‘once so Balzacian . . . has become Shakespearean with the accumulation of its rapid denouements’.12 Trump’s slow-motion assassination will have worked in the same way, to be suspended so that an extinction scene between the human race and itself at least remains invisible.
See Derrida, Perjury and Forgiveness, Volume 2, 22-24, 36-37, 39, 144, on Benjamin’s posthumous fragment. Derrida reads the fragment in terms of a ‘forgiveness without reconciliation’, which is ‘another time, the time, the time of the storm of forgiveness, the tempestuous and untimely storm of forgiveness’, a time that takes the form of a violence that ‘puts an end to time within time’: ‘There is an eschatology or an apocalypse of work in all the discourses on globalization as the end of work, and on the end of work as endless end of the world’. On forgiveness and end of the world, see 144-45.
Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume 1: ‘But it wasn’t only this media war that stayed tuned to receptions that were decontextualized and haunting precisely to the extent that, according to Theodor Adorno’s reckoning, they referred to the recent past, the past that always flashes back as primal; on another channel, we found ourselves watching the old programs or pogroms that were rerunning all over Europe following the end of the divide between the two Germanys. Television was not the “liberator” of the Eastern European countries (which we had last visited, while they were still safely behind the Iron Curtain, in Shoah).’
See Reid’s long X post on the subject of assassination: ‘First and everything: There is no place for political violence in our society. Assassination is not only categorically wrong, but is also the assassination of democracy.’
In Loser Sons, in a part of the book loosely threaded around the idea that Plato invented hell in response to Socrates’ assassination, Avital Ronell writes for example: ‘For Arendt, the problem of authority arises early, close to the origin of Western civilization, when Plato has to bury Socrates in writing. We’ll get to the heart of the story shortly, when we attach to the micrological blips in her argument, which show without saying so how Plato struggled. After the execution of his mentor he was bent on conveying the authority of philosophy in an effort both to memorialize and to exact revenge for the passing of the martyred philosopher.’
Near/rear/era . . .
On 24 October @dee561989 writes that ‘the energy isn’t here this election... maybe because both the left and the right are upset their respective candidates are slaves to a genocidal foreign country’. Elections are reduced in their energy in moments of one-off genocidal momentum.
Also called platform physics. See for example where we read the following: ‘Platform Physics: The ways in which a medium’s design (UI) and its limitations/affordances determines a piece of content’s nature, its “natural motion” through a network, its recipient’s response, as well as various nth order effects. Caroline Busta and Lil Internet.’
See, generally speaking, this passage, whose source on the internet I cannot find: ‘In 1934, a Yugoslavian prince was assassinated on camera. Lee Harvey Oswald was shot live on TV. Anytime there’s a violent NASCAR death. I don’t think I need to mention the name of Abraham Zapruder or his infamous film reel of JFK’s assassination, probably the most famous death film ever shot. And, yes, the World Trade Center towers collapsed on film. One of the most shocking on-screen deaths was probably the suicide of the Pennsylvania Senator Budd Dwyer who called a press conference in 1987 only to kill himself, on live TV, in front of thousands. Yes, you can find that clip online. No, I’m not going to link to it.’
‘Vro’s voice is an arche-fossil.’—DJ Kirsten Angel Dust (historical)
Really we would need to pair what Masha Tupitysn calls deep politics with what Curtis Yarvin calls dark WW2 to understand the main thesis of Godard’s epic: that cinema is over, yes, but not because of an issue accessible to the aesthetic ideologues of cinematic practice itself, but because cinema around that time chose entertainment over the deployment of its own documentary powers to portray the camps. Cinema is over—Hegel would specify a thing of the past for us—because it cannot show us our own extinction, has not shown to us our own extinction. Cinema is over because it cannot show us the second passive holocaust to come. The strongest argument for a ‘post-cinema’ is to be found here.
See for example, Rickels, Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3: ‘Thinking about Europe and that means German history and Kultur, Delany composed within the borderlands of fantasy and science fiction an allegory of the East Coast’s recent past as the future curse upon the universe.’
It would be possible to think about these denouements in terms of the ‘climaxes’ (his word) that mark the phased activity of Jordan Wolfson’s Body Sculpture (2023).