The Postmodern Presidency

Donald Trump

“Don’t be misled,” many friends whispered last week, when President Trump floated a trial balloon about delaying the election. “It’s all a distraction. He doesn’t want voters looking at the disastrous economy his policies have created. Don’t give the election tweets free air, it’s all another distraction.”

Another distraction.

Let’s briefly acknowledge that it seems weird to distract voters from the economy by suggesting withholding the vote altogether, even temporarily. Yes, let’s acknowledge that, then leave it, because it doesn’t matter. I’m more interested in what it means if Trump really did attempt to distract Americans. Because the “another distraction” argument seems to occur pretty frequently.

Supposedly, Trump distracted Americans from his impeachment hearings in January by attempting to provoke war with Iran. Or, he declared a state of emergency on immigration in 2019 to distract from his legislative incompetence. Or he used his notorious 2016 theatre tweets to distract from a policy agenda so awful, even his base showed distaste.

Taken together, these accusations make Trump sound like a crafty media manipulator. He shoots pop flies to right field, the White House press corps follows them, while his minions steal home plate. Thing is, we could believe this strategy from, say, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, skilled communicators both. But Donald Trump? He’s as crafty as a trucker with concussion.

Trump’s long history of public incoherence, lack of forethought, and kitten-like attention span vitiate the idea of specific, point-by-point strategy. Taken together, however, they suggest a specific, and very concrete, pattern of outcomes. Trump’s opponents, eager to find his subtext, attribute remarkable meaning to the things left unsaid, while encouraging listeners to ignore his actual words.

A pattern emerges: Trump’s supporters and detractors alike increasingly distrust words. “Meaning” becomes a constant hum of notes, like a Philip Glass composition, that listeners recognize but cannot describe. We don’t understand anything, not really, we just submerge ourselves in a tide of words. Presidential language loses all import, and gist becomes entirely subjective.

Trumpian political language is, in brief, postmodern.

Michel Foucault

I recognize that saying “postmodern” invites problems. It’s a concept without agreed-upon definition, and many people use the word “postmodern” as a casual synonym for “gobbledygook.” Yet for our purposes, we can understand postmodernism as a rejection of modernism; and we can understand modernism as an attempt to create meaning.

Modernism, including philosophies like Marxism, empiricism, and existentialism, start with the assumption that universal meaning exists. It doesn’t have to come whole and revealed by God, but arises from human reasoning based on evidence. Modern philosophies seek to tie everything together with some concise, elegant narrative which explains everything.

This works well in domains like science and math, which are, to a degree, objective. We can test our narrative against reality and know whether it works, or needs amended. But modern philosophies generally crumble within the human domain, which is subjective. The human element doesn’t permit easy explanation, and most modern philosophies, when pushed hard enough, generally let in contradictions and flaws.

Postmodernism rejects modernism, meaning it rejects the idea that any single narrative ties human philosophies together. To the postmodernist, meaning is found in context, experience, and subjectivity. Meaning cannot be adduced, and then applied to new areas; instead, new areas must be experienced, because human explanations always fail.

Admittedly, a presidency that trusts doctors who believe in succubi, probably doesn’t formally have a postmodern philosophy. But in practice, that’s what we have. By teaching people to distrust language emerging from official sources, they’ve spread the belief that “meaning” emerges only subjectively. Presidential dictates cannot be tested, because they’re based on language, which is ultimately meaningless.

Jacques Derrida

There’s a problem with postmodernism, though, whether the academic postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida, or the authoritarian postmodernism of Donald Trump: humans seek meaning. We want a story that ties our actions together and guides our choices. From early humans seeking gods in rivers and stars, to scholars studying atoms and nucleotides, we want the framework that explains, if not everything, at least the choices available to us.

By reducing language to balderdash, Trumpists arguably separate meaning from authority, giving themselves the latter without the former. In practice, though, we look at them, like all postmodernists, as divorced from reality. If this continues, and politics comes to seem as far from lived reality as academia does, we plebs won’t turn to politicians, just as we don’t turn to literary critics.

Lived reality has persevered without academia. If this trajectory continues, it’ll persevere without politicians, too.