Trump is changing politics at an invisible and more insidious level
Political commentators have been dumbfounded and confounded by the resiliency of Donald Trump’s campaign to be President. His campaign has consisted of racist accusations that would have sunk any other candidate. He has repeatedly made statements that are undeniably false. And yet in spite of this he still has the support of nearly a third of Republican voters.
The pundits have offered a number of reasons to explain how Donald Trump’s campaign has defied the laws of political gravity that would have brought any other candidate crashing to the ground. Here is my theory.
Every era is governed by an ‘episteme’ or system of knowledge, a framework we use to determine what is true and what is not. For example, during religious times the answer to questions about the universe were answered by consulting religious texts. In a scientific era, those questions are answered through scientific testing. In biblical times we knew that the earth was the centre of the universe because the bible said so. In scientific times we know this is not the case because we’ve measured how the stars behave.
For most Americans alive today the way we’ve known the world is through our media. So if we read something in the paper or see it on TV we have generally considered it to be true. The Internet has undermined this confidence but when push comes to shove — when we want to know if it’s going to rain tomorrow — we generally turn to the news. This reliance on the media has been in place in politics too. Until now.
Trump is unique as a political candidate in the power of his celebrity. He alone has the power to draw Trump scale audiences. He alone can move the dial for Saturday Night Live or the GOP debates. Much is said of social media’s power to disrupt existing power relations but in reality social media almost always amplifies the power of celebrity. The biggest names in Instagram are the Kardashians. And this is the world that Donald Trump dominates. And he’s been able to marshall his celebrity status to transform the notion of political truth by disentangling it from the way political facts are delivered through conventional media.
