No Trump Beneath the Skin

Sycophantic “plan trusters” and conspiratorial Trump haters could not differ more in sentiment, but nonetheless converge on the belief in a Trump beneath the skin.

Trump, a man who does first and thinks second, cannot be measured against any set of principles. He is loyal to no stable ideology, unlike his Republican predecessors; no internal hierarchy of principles is even pretended to moor his conduct. This convenient opacity permits all camps, whether ‘plan truster’ or panic-hungry liberal, QAnon or BlueAnon, to see what they want, and anticipate what they will, unchecked by the doctrinal boundaries that previously governed political interpretation. Behind the phenomena, Trump's facile rhetoric, anyone can guess what noumenal personality impels him. But if no inner Trump can be named, since he is interpreted so diversely that no single picture stabilizes, then we must bracket his existence entirely and deny that anything lies beneath the phenomenal.

There is a myth of Trump as a showman who arrives once a century to pull down the silken veil and illuminate the jagged inner mechanisms of an age. Trump is a demythologizer of American politics, one who lays bare, in the accessible speech of a layman, all that was hitherto buried under courtesy, ‘presidential’ language, and optimistic platitude. The Department of Peace is aptly renamed as the Department of War, energy independence is recast as energy dominance, bilateralism is substituted for unilateral decision-making. European diplomats wince as their dearly held Westphalianism is shattered by threats to annex Greenland for its critical minerals. Foreign policy realists extol Trump as an honest statesman, and this diagnosis seems to ring true when he interrupts Rubio’s talking points to exclaim that ‘we are taking Venezuela for the oil’ and intend to take “charge” of Cuba next. Trump plainly telegraphs the American empire’s appetite for tangibles whereas Bush, Clinton, and Obama sought the careful mediation of ideology. Trump seldom justifies intervention on the grounds of human rights, popular sovereignty, and liberal guardianship.

This is a popular interpretation, and one Trump himself leans into, but it conceals as much as it reveals. Trump is assumed to be a truth teller who simply communicates a correspondent picture of reality. Having done away with the manners and pleasantries of a languishing elite, so some argue, he presents the unvarnished truth. Even when he lies, he lies obviously. He smashes idols. Prior to Trump there existed a marbled replica of politics elegantly shaped so as to distract from the original’s begrimed and unsightly countenance. The public suspected that they were being denied the original, accessible only to the handful of sculptors elected to hew its copy. Coasting off this torrent of public suspicion, Trump vowed to relocate the original from the smoky corridors of Congress to the exposed sweep of the National Mall. If not to fix politics, to unmask it. To the absolute contrary, Trump has replaced one veil with another. Supporters inimical to the Mideast misadventures of Bush and Cheney—who elected Trump in protest—have no issue now that they have undergone a rebrand, and 84% of Republicans back military intervention in Iran.

Trump’s penchant for coalition building springs from a strategic vagueness that he himself does not intend. He is good at campaigning, able to join Lindsey Graham and Dave Smith at the ballot box for the same reason that he is bad at ‘messaging,’ whether on H-1B workers or foreign students.

The unfolding war in Iran, disclosed openly by Trump as being commandeered by Israel’s foreign policy directives, has been met by assertions from Stockholm Syndrome afflicted supporters that the President means more than he says, as cheap as his word is. They maintain that war has everything to do with securing oil from China and nothing to do with Netanyahu’s seven visits to the White House in the past year.

On illegal immigration, when Trump reiterates for the fourth time that ICE is pursuing “criminal aliens” while easing workplace raids for the millions of illegals who staff hotels, farms, factories and restaurants across the nation, they obstinately decline to take him at face value. They interpret it, against all obviousness, as a cunning diversion meant to cloak mass deportations from the media spotlight. ICE can retreat from Minnesota to escape the ire of left wing protestors and Trump’s most hardened supporters will swiftly reframe it as a stroke of genius orchestrated from the highest levels of the Oval Office. A master plan, headed by Stephen Miller, is quietly underway behind the confusing sheen of administration messaging. Ignore the testimony of your eyes and ears and ‘trust the plan.’

Likewise, conspiracy-minded politicos attempt to discern equally bottomless motives where there are none. This is evident on the left, where every subtle hand gesture and improvised turn of phrase is taken as a carefully crafted dog whistle to be scrutinized for allusions to 1933. An entire House committee built upon the premise that Jan. 6 was long plotted but a quickly foiled insurrection sprang from this singular assumption of mens rea. Dedicated leftists think that behind the aging demeanor of a former reality show star lies a calculating tactician who aims to convert America’s fragile democracy into a dictatorship manned by throngs of boomer sleeper cells, untrained ICE agents, and Proud Boys. The truth is far less intentional than that. Trump is no Mussolini and his aging, Fox News watching voters are no blackshirts.

Recovering Trump devotees spuriously maintain that the President is restrained from carrying out his promises by the contents of the Epstein files, which is ostensibly held in safekeeping in Tel Aviv. While a rejuvenated Pat Buchanan occupies the seat of the Oval Office, he is fed infusion bags of poor information by IV drip from his advisors and denied visitation from his longest supporters. This reading insists that beyond lock and key there is an authentic Trump who truly desires, but for whatever reason is unable, to carry out the ambitious promise of 2016. If only he were counseled by Tucker Carlson and not Jared Kushner. Never mind that Trump is the one who picks his Cabinet members, even if, as seen with Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, seldom well.

Indeed, Trump has introduced a new and unfamiliar mode of deception, the unfamiliar always being the most effective. He doesn’t lie by constructing a convincing nor coherent model of political fact and probably lacks the restraint to do so. Instead he offers infinitely amendable statements that demand no consistency in time and place, enabling them to be heard in accordance with the intuitions of the listener. Where these statements are held up against a clear administrative record, he loses, but where they are free to stir the reactionary imagination into a frenzy, with vague promises of federal takeover injected by stump speech and glitzy TikTok edit, he wins. Of course, these campaign promises mean very little, and having served their function, they never materialize into policy. He runs on the promise of ending superfluous wars only to outmatch Bush in foreign policy hawkishness in the opening months of his second term. Critical of foreign aid on the campaign trail, he continues the incessant stream of weapons transferred to Ukraine and Israel. Sweeping tariffs can be imposed and dropped only a day later, even as this air of “strategic uncertainty” has worked to compel allies to renegotiate trade deals. In one breath he maintains that he wants to raise home prices for owners but drop them for buyers. Trump’s self-correcting rhetoric, delivered via Truth Social posts and market crash, has both the immediate effect of spinning heads and prolonging negotiation. But contrary to the persuasions of a decisionist he leaves matters in a state of suspense. He can insist that a war will crawl on for months and a second later declare victory to end the conflict, without the conflict ever coming to a close.

Politics has undergone a similar transformation. Like Trump, it no longer lies by imitation, that is, by positing a compelling lie, but by making sufficient noise to drown out the truth. Slogans like “America First” and “MAGA,” which were verboten for a time, have become watered-down buzzwords deployed to denote whatever opinion Trump absorbed last, much to the chagrin of its earliest adopters. Those thrown out of the 'big tent' which houses Lindsey Graham and Ben Shapiro range from MTG and Matt Gaetz, both of whom have resigned from Congress, to Tucker Carlson. Power, which was previously only interrogated by a handful of journalists and tinfoil-hatted skeptics who denied the ultimacy of appearance in favor of an unseen reality, now survives by stirring speculation about what underpins the world of appearance. Faced with an regress of stories, everyone desires hidden access to ground zero, and an illiterate podcaster gives it to them. Without evidence, Facebook boomers will tell you with a straight face that Epstein devoured infants whole on Little Saint James with Bill Clinton in attendance (not to say that there wasn't sexual impropriety), and the aunt you haven’t seen since last Thanksgiving will inform you that Bibi Netanyahu personally authorized the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The real shooter escaped via a trap-door contraption into the sewer system below the UVU campus. Kirk, was just on the cusp of renouncing the Zionism he had slavishly championed his whole life before the opportunity was stolen by a nameless assassin’s bullet. This normalization of a previously marginal conspiracism, far from moving public consciousness closer to the truth, muddies the waters such that nothing can be made out clearly. It is the perfect defense mechanism of a regime which must change to perpetuate itself.

Indeed, statecraft–now indistinguishable from entertainment–has become a light show of spectacle, excess, and loud text which overwhelms and diverts, something that goes beyond the DHS X account using a compilation of capeshit movie clips to glamorize war in Iran. All prattle about a “Deep State” belies an ultimately superficial one. Trump will convene a press conference to discuss the prosecution of Obama on charges of treason, in addition to the numerous bureaucrats who would’ve overseen his incarceration had he not won, only to drop the initiative after chyrons catch the news and his most gullible supporters buzz with anticipation. Leftists who take Trump to mean what he announces must live in a perpetual state of terror. But Trump, a born salesman, vampirically feeds off the anticipation of an imminent decision, an expectation that he will, this time, cast the die and cross the Rubicon. People should stop getting their hopes up.

The proper stance to take toward Trump and his rhetoric is that of provision rather than prosaic interpretation about what ‘he really means.’ All inquiry into what he really means, predicated upon what he says, devolves into political pareidolia without terminus. This is particularly true on the right, where right-wingers believe that fidelity, the fidelity of a battered wife, will obtain them a foothold with the administration. In thinking themselves insiders, with a stake too great to sell, they spout convoluted explanations to make sense of the mess. They, like rabid attack dogs, seize on anyone who criticizes their failed investment as “panicans” and “traitors.” One must handwave them away. Where speech has become inscrutable, as with Trump’s insistence most recently that the war in Iran is simultaneously complete and just the beginning, one must look to Trump’s actions and inactions to determine him.

Laying the blame at the feet of White House messaging, an issue of rhetoric, misses the point because it takes the issue as a matter of communication, where in truth, on foreign policy and domestic policy, Trump has failed to produce goods worthy of communicating. The campaign promise of a “Golden Age” hasn’t materialized. In many cases, little or insufficient action is dressed in exaggerated font—designed to spark applause from the base and fury from the libs, but without the permanence that would merit either. As Curtis Yarvin and Nick Fuentes have respectively noted, this is a foolish strategy because it empowers the left, which is already inclined to read fascist takeover in every minor policy change, while supporters are left concussed by the marked contrast between speech and speech and speech and action. Trump will not cross the rubicon, but he will tease doing so—running for a third term and suspending the Constitution—until he is out of office. Suspense, dressed up in the garb of decision, will be met by naked decision from the left come 2028.