Trump definitely understands branding, but I think you give him way
too much credit. The man gets away with what he does because he is a
perfect storm. His lifetime of conning everyone to believe he was richer
than he actually was is what allowed him to build his empire to what it
became, which allowed him to pass himself off as a business genius. Yet
at the same time he comes off as a complete imbecile who might actually
be dumb enough to believe the stupid things he is saying, which people
could overlook because of his fake business acumen. So what we get is
someone who is both dumb enough to champion ideas which dumb Americans
approve of, and yet smart and successful enough to make the dumb people
think this is reality.
No one else could
get away with that because the smart ones couldn’t pass themselves off
as genuine enough to believe this stuff, and the dumb ones would never
have such a strong background to hold up as their resume.
So
sure, branding is part of it but without the imbecilic aspect of this
the man would have gotten no where. And I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the
intention.
I think there are two dimensions to this.
First, I think that there's a typical self-congratulatory tendency in liberals that conservatives have grown adept at taking advantage of. I think that Dubya was being more canny than most realize when he said that people 'misunderestimated' him -- him being attacked as a yokel stoked his popularity because American's don't like to watch better off people pile on and mock someone who apes poor rural America's mannerisms - it appears grotesque because it is grotesque. But he wasn't a yokel. He was a patrician, a Texas blueblood who went to Andover and Yale, and a politician who in the end achieved all his aims. Disastrous as those aims were for the world and the country, they were very lucrative for Bush and his cadre. Bush let himself be hated and mocked and seen as a dumb redneck, even as he sailed through eight years of horrific mismanagement and corruption that benefited himself and his personal backers. Romney had a similar pedigree, but he owned his background, was cast as a wooden vulture capitalist, and failed spectacularly. Bush's alchemy was to wave the matador's red flag - the typical liberal just couldn't resist the gaffes and malapropisms, and their rabid vituperation managed to transfigure this slick, privileged scion of a Texas oil baron into a poor victimized hillbilly in the public eye. To quote an article I once read that touched on this subject, the left 'misunderestimated' Bush for all eight years of his presidency. Trump has tapped into this same strategy, and it worked wonders for him as well -- on the other side of the aisle, I think that AOC has also managed to master this trick. Her father was an architect and she grew up in an expensive neighborhood, but casts herself in the public eye as just a workin' class broad from Brooklyn because she got a job at some bougie bar for a few years. When someone achieves spectacular aims, and being perceived as 'dumb' helps them along their way, the canny observer (who isn't obsessed with feeling intellectually superior) entertains the idea that they might not be as dumb as they appear.
Secondly, without falling into that trap, I think there's some truth to what you said. Trump reminds me of a Baudrillard passage on Disneyland that I read recently, especially this segment:
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout
Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All
its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed
and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland
(L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American
way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a
contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and
that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order
simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real"
country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as
prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety,
in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented
as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in
fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real,
but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a
question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing
the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality
principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence
machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.
Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's
meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults
are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that
real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go
there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
I think something similar happens with Trump, and specifically with the 'return to normalcy' which was supposed to happen afterwards. Part of why Trump was elected was the absolute failure of the Washington elite to do anything competently. In foreign policy, it's been nothing but failure after failure since the 90s. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Georgia/Ukraine. Domestically we've seen the financial crisis and bank bailouts. The student debt crisis. Health crises. Rampant drug overdoses and the hollowing out of the working class. It had become abundantly clear to large segments of the American people that the adults were not in charge any more.
So we went to Disneyland - we elected Trump. Trump was never going to right this sinking hegemon; he could at best hope to patch some holes. But the real service that he provided was a break from the psychological anguish of seeing the people that every elite institution in the country had selected - the creme de la creme of American society - running the country into the ground in every arena of public life. Many on the right have decided that Disneyland is nicer and want to stay there: this world with Trump's larger than life personality, the electrifying rallies, the screeching hordes of enemies outside, the madness and the mayhem - it's so much more colorful, it makes more sense than a world where every single institution was catastrophically failing with no solution in sight. Some on the left also want to stay in Disneyland. They have their own fever dreams and their own mythology: Trump the Russian agent serial rapist. Russians plotting to shut off the gas during a polar vortex. Havana Syndrome, hookers giving golden showers to the President, high treason, the walls are closing in! It's all very cinematic, the Manchurian Candidate meets James Bond.
There are also people who are leaving Disneyland with the desired effect - restoration of belief in 'the adults' running things. These are the people who want to vote for DeSantis, and the people who voted for Biden. These people just want to go back to normal; invigorated by the mad whirl of the Trump presidency, they find their faith in the adults running the show restored. But this too is an illusion, which Biden's presidency is shattering at breakneck speed. Inflation, disaster in Afghanistan, Covid resurging, now the clusterfuck in Ukraine. The same leeches that have been running the country into the ground for decades have flocked behind DeSantis's and Biden's banners, and they will do the same shit once they get back into power. Already we are losing that revived faith in the competence of the system - the adults can't be 'back in charge' because there never were any adults in charge to begin with -- Trump just made us forget that for a while in the mad whirl of his presidency. Personally, I think we're all going to be 'going to Disneyland' a lot more often in the years to come. In a way, this is a repetition. The Bush years had a markedly less pronounced but still unmistakable 'unreal' quality to them that quickly dampened during the Obama presidency - which turned out to be just as incompetent and corrupt on many levels. I think that this cycle is both intensifying in amplitude and accelerating in frequency. Hold on to your seats, this ride's not over yet.
