Fame, puts you there where things are hollow

The French historian Antoine Lilti has described “the invention of celebrity” in the late 18th century. For Lilti, celebrity is a phenomenon of fusion. The relationship of admirer to celebrity is a mediated one, but in the mind of the admirer the mediation disappears: She becomes one with the object of her devotion, his desires becomes hers, his fulfilments as well. What he detests or fears, she detests or fears. One sees this urge to identify, to erase critical distance, in this video of a group of young women being shown around Trump’s penthouse. One sees it in his assumption that the things (and women) he collects are what everyone else covets as well. One sees it in his followers’ belief that no opposition will be capable of resisting him, because he has mastered “the art of the deal.”
“The deal,” ultimately, is the trumpenproletariat’s answer to the potential for paralysis that the Founding Fathers built into the American Constitution to allay their fears of faction and tyranny. To prevent a faction or a tyrant from seizing power, they installed checks and balances into our system of government and sought to ensure that no individual or group would likely be able to control every possible veto point. But in recent years this veto-ridden system has shuddered to a halt. Immobilized, the great engine of government has failed to respond to the needs of many groups of citizens, not just those who see their salvation in Trump. 

With celebrity and the illusion of omnipotent wish-fulfilment it bestows, Trump now promises to slice through this Gordian knot. He has made a career of portraying himself as a man who gets things done, who builds buildings, beds women, pummels opponents, hires and fires apprentices. His followers want things done and, having identified with his self-presentation to the point of fusion, they have convinced themselves that with him their wishes, no matter how contradictory, will all be fulfilled. They mistake their man’s celebrity for the kind of power and mastery needed to unfreeze the system. And why shouldn’t they? As Thomas Hobbes put it, “Reputation of power is power.” Thanks to his reputation of power, Trump’s ignorance of government, of foreign policy, of economics counts in his favor, because as Hobbes also said, knowledge “is small power,” since the truths it contains are evident only to “such as in a good measure have attained it.” Ignorance cloaked in celebrity appeals to the many, while knowledge, with its frustrating acknowledgment of difficulty and of incompatible goods, does not please crowds. 

Trump’s celebrity is thus the ultimate Trump-l’oeil. It deceives his followers into thinking that if they elect him, opposition both political and material will simply melt away. Citizens and hero will simultaneously occupy both the White House and the penthouse and squeal with joy at the commanding view. Losers will give way to winners, the weak will succumb to the strong, and everything will be as “beautiful” as the megalomaniacal Trump-tower lair when all the lilies have been gilded with the Midas touch of Donald J. Trump.