Slavoj Žižek: Trump’s versatile relationship with the reality made him extra harmful than a fascist

Donald Trump has been a US president who has revelled in lies and obscenity. As we think about his legacy, his continued crass behaviour ought to make us ask how such a nugatory individual received the job within the first place.

On November 23, Donald Trump lastly agreed to start the transition of energy, however the best way it was introduced tells us lots about him.

Head of the Common Companies Administration Emily Murphy stated in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden that she had decided the transition from the Trump administration may formally start. She added that she got here to her resolution “independently” and didn’t obtain strain from the chief department. (Murphy referred to Biden because the “obvious election winner” – the alternative of look is essence, so her qualification implies that ‘primarily’ Trump received, regardless of the last outcomes.

Minutes after Murphy’s letter was first reported, Trump tweeted that he had given her permission to ship the letter, however he vowed to proceed protesting his personal defeat. His marketing campaign workforce continues to push supporters to again fundraising efforts in a last-ditch bid to beat the election final result. 

I need to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Nation. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I don’t need to see this occur to her, her household, or staff of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we are going to sustain the great…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23, 2020

So, Trump approves transition with out conceding defeat; he permits acts that are made independently of his will. He’s a residing contradiction: the last word post-modern ironist presenting himself as a guardian of conventional Christian values; the last word demolisher of legislation and secure order presenting himself as its unconditional enforcer.

We discover the identical pressure in how Trump pertains to conspiracy theories. When he’s requested about radical Rightist teams which propagate violence or conspiracy theories, Trump is able to formally distance himself from the problematic points, whereas praising the group’s basic patriotic angle.

This distance is empty, in fact, and is a purely rhetorical system: the group is silently anticipated to behave upon the implicit calls to violence Trump’s speeches are filled with – when he continuously assaults alleged Leftist violence, he does it in phrases that are divisive and a name to violence in themselves.

A first-rate instance of this was Trump’s reply when he was requested in regards to the violence propagated and practised by the Proud Boys within the first presidential debate. As was reported on the time, “Minutes after Trump instructed the Proud Boys, a far-right group with members who espouse white supremacism, to ‘stand again and stand by’, on nationwide tv… members of the men-only group took to fringe social media websites to have fun what they thought of a ‘historic’ second for his or her ideological push in opposition to leftists.”

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That is – if I will be pardoned utilizing an expression which may be very problematic right here – Trump at his greatest. He does inform them to “stand again” – ie to restrain from violence. However he provides “and stand by” – ie to prepare, however for what? The implication is evident: to practise violence if Trump loses the election.

In Trump, we thus encounter a brand new variation on the previous concept of the emperor’s new garments. Whereas within the unique Hans Christian Andersen model an harmless baby’s gaze is required to publicly proclaim that the emperor is bare, in immediately’s reign of public obscenity, the emperor himself proudly proclaims he has no garments. However this very openness capabilities as a redoubled mystification. How?

In homology with Ernst Kantorowicz’s thesis on the King’s Two Our bodies, immediately’s populist emperor has double garments. So, whereas he boasts that he’s divested of his private ‘garments’ of dignity, he retains his second garments, the devices of his symbolic investiture.

For that reason, what makes Trump’s obscenity perverse is that he’s not simply mendacity openly, with none constraint – he additionally straight tells the reality when one would count on him to be embarrassed by it. When, in August 2020, he introduced his intention to defund the US publish service, there was no want for a fancy evaluation to show that he was proposing this to make harder postal voting and thus deprive the Democrats of votes: he overtly acknowledged this was the case.

Mendacity means you continue to acknowledge implicitly some ethical norms, you simply violate them in actuality. However what occurred with Trump on this case is worse than mendacity: in saying what’s actually true, he undoes or suspends the very dimension of reality.

We will additionally clearly see this in how Trump handled QAnon, a far-right conspiracy idea alleging a secret plot in opposition to him and his supporters by a supposed ‘deep state’. That is how ABC reported his response: “The White Home… defended the President’s embrace of a fringe conspiracy group, with press secretary Kayleigh McEnany saying that he was “speaking about his supporters” when he known as QAnon followers individuals who “love the nation” and stated he appreciates their backing.”

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Trump was cautious to not say that he takes the QAnon idea significantly. As an alternative, he restricted himself to solely two info, each of that are true: those that advocate QAnon theories are supporters of him, and so they love America. Plus, he added a subjective truth – which can also be true – that he appreciates their backing. The query of the factual reality of QAnon didn’t even enter the image.

We’re thus steadily approaching what successfully will be known as a post-truth discursive area, an area which oscillates between pre-modern superstition (conspiracy theories) and post-modern cynical scepticism. That is why Trump just isn’t a fascist; he’s one thing possibly much more harmful.

With Trump, we see the polar reverse to Stalinism, the place the determine of the chief must be stored unblemished at any worth. Whereas the Stalinist chief fears that even a minor indecency or indiscretion would destroy his place, our new leaders are able to go fairly far in renouncing dignity. Trump is legendary not regardless of his obscenities, however on account of them.

Within the previous royal courts, a king typically had a clown whose perform was to destroy the noble look with sarcastic jokes and soiled remarks, thereby confirming – against this – the king’s dignity. Trump doesn’t want a clown; he already is his personal clown, and no surprise that his acts are generally extra humorous or tasteless than the performances of his comedian imitators. The usual scenario is thus inverted: Trump just isn’t a dignified individual about whom obscene rumors flow into; he’s an overtly obscene one that needs his obscenity to look as a masks of his dignity.

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All this, sadly, doesn’t imply that his ‘excesses’ are to not be taken significantly. In a uncommon look on the electoral marketing campaign, Melania Trump denounced Biden’s “socialist agenda”. So what about Kamala Harris who’s often perceived as extra Leftist than the extraordinarily average Biden? Her husband was clear on this level: “She’s a communist. She’s not a socialist. She’s effectively past a socialist. She needs to open up the borders to permit killers and murderers and rapists to pour into our nation.” By the way, when did open borders change into a attribute of communism?

Biden instantly reacted: “There’s not one single syllable that I’ve ever stated that might lead you to imagine that I used to be a socialist or a communist.” Factually true, however this rebuttal misses the purpose. The dismissal of Biden and Harris as socialist or communist just isn’t merely a rhetorical exaggeration; Trump isn’t just saying this, regardless that he is aware of it to be unfaithful.

His ‘exaggerations’ are good examples of what one ought to name realism of notions. Notions are usually not simply names, they construction political area and, as such, have precise results.

Trump’s ‘cognitive mapping’ of the political area is an virtually symmetrical reversal of the Stalinist map during which all people who opposes the occasion is taken into account to be a part of a fascist plot. In the same approach, from Trump’s standpoint, the liberal centre is disappearing – or, as his good friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán put it, liberals are simply communists with a diploma, which implies there are solely two true poles: populist nationalists and Communists.

There’s a great expression in Serb: “Ne bije al’ ubija u pojam.” Roughly translated, it means, “It doesn’t beat nevertheless it kills the idea/notion.” It refers to any individual who, as a substitute of destroying you with direct violence, bombards you with acts which undermine your self-respect in order that you find yourself humiliated, disadvantaged of the very core – or ‘notion’ – of your being.

To ‘kill in a notion’ describes the alternative of the particular destruction (of your empirical actuality) during which your ‘notion’ survives in an elevated approach (like killing an enemy in such a approach that the enemy survives within the minds of hundreds as a hero). That is how one ought to proceed with Hitler and Nazism: not simply to destroy him – to eliminate his ‘excesses’ and save the sane core of his venture – however to kill him in his notion.

And it’s the identical with Trump and his legacy. The true job isn’t just to defeat him (as a result of there may be all the time the likelihood that he’ll return in 2024), however to ‘kill him in his notion’. To make him seen in all his nugatory vainness and inconsistency, but in addition – and that is the essential half – to ask how such a nugatory individual may have change into the president of the US. Because the German thinker Hegel would have put it, to kill Trump in his notion means to ‘carry him to his notion’ – ie to permit him to destroy himself by means of simply making him seem as what he’s.

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