A Portrait of Donald Trump

I start with two propositions that give you an idea of what this portrait will look like:

1.    Life under Trump is the realization that Life under Trump is better than life under capitalism and that life under capitalism is better than any other life and that there is literally no communism.

2.    You hate Trump because you can’t stand how beautiful the contemporary world is.

Trump’s Beauty

I can contemplate great evil when it is combined with energy, vision and self-risk. Hitler, say. Hitler is moving. As Harmony Korine used to say, Hitler had shit going on.

There are pictures of Hitler playing with butterflies and babies. They appear to see in him some kind of mirror. His great evil was played out at the risk of his own life and the damnation of his soul forever.

Imagine how Hitler felt when he committed suicide, on 30 April 1945. He was at least energized, part of history’s spine. Mitchell Heisman understood this well, saying that what Hitler dared to do was to disprove Marxism in the ovens of Auschwitz.¹ Simone Weil recognized it too:

People talk about punishing Hitler. But he cannot be punished. He desired one thing alone, and he has it: to play a part in History. He can be killed, tortured, imprisoned, humiliated, History will always be there to shield his spirit from all the ravages of suffering and death. What we inflict on him will be, inevitably, an historical death, an historical suffering — in fact, History.

Weil writes this in her hymn to an alternative patriotism, The Need for Roots, written in 1943 but published posthumously in 1949. We can connect what Weil says elsewhere — that the entire universe (the heavens) is her only country — to her notion that patriotism is ‘one thing for which it is necessary to face everything’. In truth, Simone Weil is a heaven-nationalist. She was an alt-right mystic avant la lettre.

Weil also writes that ‘patriotism can only become a single idea of this sort in a regime of the Hitlerian type’. She adds that ‘those whose inward lives depend entirely on one idea are the only ones capable of resisting’. That is, the acme of resistance is Hitlerian. One may wish to take note of this in the future, wherein ‘resistance’ becomes impossibilized by the day. God, then, is a form of extreme nationalism. A final point of resistance.

What is perhaps even more or equally unthinkwithable is the passive, wildly presumptuous, incremental, creeping and empty evil of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Biden imperium, its manipulation of money and motive behind our backs. I would rather die in the open air of a ghetto than be sent mad by their non-disclosure of the question. The Biden family, for all its humanity and relatable weaknesses, represents something about passive evil which is rarely if ever productive.

As Kanye recognized, Joe Biden has very little political ‘specialness’. Steve Bannon captures him perfectly well as the ‘mail drop or post office box for globalist corporations’. In contrast to our contemporary scene in which only one side laughs or cries at a time, going through winning and losing like a game of tag, Weil describes in The Need For Roots angels who laugh or cry simultaneously at the idea we can detach a ruined idea of our greatness from the ruined idea of all greatness (the greatness of Trump, we are saying). The angels laugh or cry when we laugh and then cry because we have beaten or won with Trump, secretly the great figure of greatness, ‘if there happen to be angels who interest themselves in our propaganda’.

Trump is a Hitler without any of Hitler’s actions. He is Hitler without Hitler. Trump is too kind to ever contemplate anything like Hitler did. He is a thousand times funnier than any other politician. Nothing can ever change the fact that America is the country that nominated Donald Trump as its president. As a young man, Trump had beautiful eyes and was effeminate, like his son Barron now (who loves English football). In 2016 Trump was expected to enforce actual fascism, and it never came. He deserves the victory that he seemed in the middle of on the night of 3 November 2020. All the signs are that he got it, save for some silent combination of Operation Scorecard, Delian, British Intelligence and Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) flipware. It is insulting to our intelligence and to intelligence itself to be told otherwise.

As for his censored beauty, think of the William Coupon photo of Trump with a dove in his hands in New York in 1983. The lips are almost sumptuous (again he looks like Barron). Can it be that Trump has been hated for four years primarily because he was secretly pegged as a woman?

My Rinpoche says that whenever we hate someone, we might try imagining the pain in their heart. The pain is always identical. An experience I had in rehab was spending a month detesting someone but then, after I heard their life story in group session, who they were made absolute sense. From then on, I was convinced that if I were anyone, I would be them. If I were Donald Trump, I would be Donald Trump. As Jean Genet said in his text on Rembrandt, every person has the same value as me.

Trump’s Genius

Trump’s infinitely plastic persona insists in the foreground to all ongoing predictable judgements, and it floats among us as a libidinal shape that we seem to have an endless need to repeat and eject. If once was not enough, we need to ask ourselves why. If the media is even now shaped by a need for and of Trump, as it has admitted, then this is our question, and hardly just a predicament of bigotry to be met with a civilizational bill of attainder.

Resistance, after all, has to learn to read too. That is one of the meanings of history, from the rejection of the rights of English kings to the counter-coup tactics of Nancy Pelosi to the misdirection hermeneutics of QAnon. Resistance cannot be sovereign.

As William Mazzarell puts it in his important essay, ‘Brand(ish)ing The Name, or, Why Is Trump So Enjoyable?’,

What emerges here is the need for a different kind of attentiveness: an ethics of patiency rather than an ethics of agency. Less ‘what is to be done?’; more yielding to the symptom — to the play of enjoyment — so as to become better attuned to the shape of a problem that has not yet found its language.

Trump is here the ‘problem’ that has yet to find its language. So quickly was it assumed and known that he is a problem (it was immediate) and how he should be hated, that the problem of his enjoyment that self-evidently remains, this surfeit, the source of his enjoyment itself, the enjoyment of him, the essence of Trumpism, troubles and constitutes every effort to resist, and indeed the reaching of a ‘second term’.

In this sense Trump’s supposed ‘refusal to concede’ was not his fault, it was ours. And what Trump means is that there is no second term, there is only One, his own.

What cannot be normalized calls for its own repetition. In a way, this is simple: if we can admit that hate-reading is connected in part to jouissance, then we can admit that our attention to Trump partakes of a mad jouissance we don’t even know how to get used to. We can even admit to a love of Trump, and on all sides.

Hate Without Love

To think that our well-earned knowledge of the complicity of love and hate would not apply here, in this one singular case, would itself be something remarkable. Is it possible, in the case of Donald Trump, as if for the first time in history, that there would be hate without love? If so, then putting aside the object for a moment (‘Donald Trump’), perhaps the real threat is hate-without-love and not its projected cause.

Hate without love is not a space of attention at all. It is the disappearance of reading into itself, without even a last reprieve of wanting to know what reading had just glimpsed. Hate-without-love is to refuse to read and to refuse to know what has happened, and why the distraction was then needed, why it was needed ‘in the first place’. Trump, after all, is the distraction from the main distraction, the attraction of distraction from himself; he is the main attraction of the main distraction, the attraction of the distraction from the end (‘Donald Trump’). 

In October 2019 James Rickards admits as follows in an interview:

Trump is a difficult to understand genius. I look at his opponents, the media, the Democrats, the progressives, and I say ‘did they learn anything, did they learn anything in 2016, so that they can do something different today, and perhaps beat him?’ And so far the answer’s ‘no, they haven’t learnt a thing’.

He adds:

They’ve doubled down. No sign at all that they’ve learned anything.

Let us draw a diagram: for those we call ever more loosely ‘on the left’, the decision to hate is the conscious decision to resist; it is the conscious decision not to read. But the symptom (the object of resistance) is itself misrecognized from the first. The symptom can itself not even be misread, because it is not even seen or felt, so seen and felt is it, all the time, every day. No new psychic shape is taken on even though we are surrounded by signs that a new psychic immersion has taken place, that ‘Donald Trump’ is itself the name of a new love and a new need, a new degree of psychic distraction, a new hate without opposite.

‘Donald Trump’ becomes the name of the situation wherein to hate Donald Trump without question is to learn nothing, to see nothing, to let nothing happen. This is why it is true that Donald Trump is the ‘genius’ of this situation, and the name of what genius has now become, in a situation wherein it is impossible to say what or that ‘genius’ means, in which reading no longer takes place.

Remarkably stable genius of the unread, still unread.

Trump’s Communism

Informally speaking, Trump does two things to communism. One, he completes it. Two, like Heisman said of Hitler, he disproves it. As an innovative spiritual function forcer, Trump is total communism and Trump is the total refutation of communism forever. Anyone still thinking that, on this more than finite and mortal earth, communism as liberation will sometime soon be magically switched on, will find themselves increasingly in a place of arcane self-contradiction.

Given’s finitude’s severity, Donald Trump is the only total communism now available to us. This is what he means as a writing, in the strong and neutral and grammatological sense; this is what he means as spiritual function forcer. Those who fetishize China at the expense of his symbolic value have hardly any sense of what the loss of Tibetan intelligence means for world intelligence as a whole. Oppression has now been shaped by the response to Trump and not by his policies. ‘Of course I hate Trump’ or ‘of course I’m not a Trumpist’ — the rhetoric of this ‘of course’ — is always implied or explicit. It becomes a rhetorical calling card for an imagined group to come, into no future at all. Rhetorically totalitarian, empty. The qualification has to come first — the prime and mystical ‘of course’. Of course Trump is an idiot, of course we must get rid of him.

Really? Part of what is happening here is that the clausical slowdown of ‘of course’ acts like an empty hypnotism and is even more phatic (socially empty) than could be implied, like the ‘literally’ in Ash Sarkar’s ‘I’m literally a communist’. Condemnation has to come first, but by what right — except an absolutely literal one. One might imagine a very open reading in which the ‘literally’ means that one isn’t a communist because there is literally no communism. This would be a very weak ‘literally’. As if one were saying without ever saying it: ‘of course I am literally a communist because there literally isn’t any communism that is now or ever was viable (except of the autocidal type)’.

What this means is that the qualification (‘of course’, ‘literally’) is a phatic hallucinogen and gets in the way. It makes of Trump-hatred, but not Trump himself, an analgesic that prohibits anything like Trump-thought. Of course you are a communist because you cannot be now! According to the same surreal logic, which is Trump qua Trump, only Trump will have been communist. In other words , the obvious way of explaining the question of Trump — as, essentially, the problem of Trump-hatred — gives the false impression that it has been solved, and thus prevents it from being posed. Four years, and we never even started . . .

Or, again, if the whole problem is the ‘of course I’m not a Trumpist’ and not Trump himself, then the true fascist copula has to be found in the ‘of course’. If every contemporary portrait of Trump had to open with a paragraph making excuses and letting the reader know ‘I am on the right side’, then every such portrait would be, in this fashion, doing nothing — and perhaps risking everything, including the spaces of reason. To act like this would be to risk infinitely more than Trump’s supposedly ‘fascist’ supporters are meant to risk. As Weil puts it with amazingly booby-trapped frontality, ‘I believe in the responsibility of writers of recent years for the disasters of our time.’

How can this admittedly contrary-looking state of affairs be the case? Precisely because the assumptions being made under Trump are increasingly not given, because the Presidency and its transcendental critique cannot be taken as natural, and in some ways because we have acted as if this presidency did not take place at all, despite all the noise to the contrary. Not because we ignored its effects, but because we assumed them all too quickly.

No offence, but this means that the last thing you are is a Communist, literally.

Trump’s Penis

Trump’s genius is of course partly penis. Such genius brings to mind what Mitchell Heisman’s Genius called ‘The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Jesus’, except that ‘The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Donald Trump’ doesn’t really rhyme. In his very Jewish text Circumfession, Derrida claimed he was the only philosopher who ‘will have dared describe his penis’. But by 2010 Heisman, the least Jewish Jew to ever depict the second holocaust to come, is giving prose a whole lot of dick. To confront Marx with Hitler in Crematorium I is, by definition (b.d.), big dick energy, not that Heisman is the type to put it on the table. No doubt Trump was the first candidate to ever defend the size of his dick in a presidential debate in March 2016. ‘Look at those hands, are they small hands? I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.’ Back in the basement that Heisman knew so well, we also find this early speculative (Covidian) statement: ‘No one touches Mr Trump’s penis without a glove.’

The Bidens, simultaneously, represent a perfidious rendition of rancid big dick energy. We’ve now seen what Hunter’s gaming with on a laptop that does not exist. Equally off-site, the CCP-DNC caliphate is a primitive form of BBC. The size of the opposition is a threat. China is too big — you will never win. As Curtis Yarvin puts it, ‘Why were you pro-Trump? Because you loved seeing your enemies grow huge and fat and hard?’ Yarvin likes to win, and so supported Biden — not that it’s difficult to figure out this had something to do, as well, with his being a friend of the Biden family.

The spiritual penis of Donald Trump may symbolically still penetrate its way all through the earth to the belly of Shanghai and the bat shit farms of Wuhan. Such is its place in the grisliness of what Weil calls History. To say Trump’s hard-on for the Biden crime family has to do with inadequacy can only be half the truth. In other words, just because Trump is a crook, it does not mean his charges against the Bidens are half-cocked, and just that whole fact is the politics in the Trumpian political.

Trump’s Slippery Slope

The Trump era slippery slope argument (why don’t you take down all statues?) may be understood literally and we can repeat that there is literally no communism left (what remained was literal communism). Taking the slippery slope argument only halfway (let’s smash white ontology) is weak relativism and no communism at all or only literal communism. The only total communism is taking the slope the whole way (let’s smash white ontology, black ontology, Chinese ontology, poetic ontology, cinematic ontology, and so on) and this savage relativism is perhaps more hopefree, more kind to the moment.

In other words, there literally is no communism left and the phatic proclamation of the opposite is just that, literal-minded communism and a relapse into the One of religion, as an ontology of the Unified and not a metaontology of non-literal social sets, no communism left at all. What Trump means is that Communism literally is not communism at all and can only be literal communism at all by killing off all available communal images and sidebars.

Total communism became literal communism in the absence of all literal success, and the need to literally still be a communist, despite all, even so, rather than a Trumpist at all costs, is the One as no other option, as the worst, as the total and literal absence of communism.

Trump’s Truth

The problem with the NYT and The Guardian now is that they think somehow we have to abandon Shakespearian objectivity because of Trump, which is a strangely random and ahistorically catastrophic decision. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is basically the failure of such a resistance. The resisters say ‘we have to abandon objectivity and take arms against a tyrant, but it will be worth it’, and in doing so they become ‘Caesar’.

Trump’s Analysis Interminable

If the world is in a state of addictogenesis, then we know from our experience of addiction that an addict will use until they die or until they need not to, until the trauma underneath can be faced. It is uncertain how anyone could know where we are on that scale — and if we can face world trauma now, the world trauma the Trump Drug has distracted us from for four years. Is the trauma the drug itself that saves us, given finitude’s shutting, or the trigger for recovery? Who commands us to count the votes and finish analysis?

If there is a way to know what is politically best, I wish I could find it. Events play out over centuries, and as Weil says, we really will look back and see we were more Trump than he himself was.² To tell an addict to stop when they cannot is to make it worse for them, to send them towards it. The same applies to the world. So how could anyone know how to judge Trump when he has become like a house in which we live that nobody could have ever totally expected? To move on in this context is always to move back, to relapse. To finish analysis prematurely.

As Jackie Wang puts it,

Soon mind won’t be mind, for I am becoming other to myself. I know that when the last inch of thread comes loose the madness will return. The dream. It calibrates my nervous system to the same frequency that overtakes me whenever I hear the word ‘relapse’.

To speak from the unconscious about this is something, probably even everything. If an analyst were to say to me, ‘I hate Trump, so you must hate him too’, analysis would be over. So Trump must be analysis! He has put us in session, and perhaps we should be thankful.

1. ‘Auschwitz, then, can be viewed as a legitimate implication of Marxism.’ (Mitchell Heisman, Suicide Note)

2. ‘The responsibility which savants and all who write about science have assumed in these days is such a heavy one that they also, like the historians and even to a greater degree, are possibly guiltier of Hitler’s crimes than Hitler himself.’ (Simone Weil, The Need for Roots)