Trump and Publics of Affect

So, here is the nagging question that’s been circling my brain ever since the Trump phenomenon happened. It is very simple: Why is it that he can get away with saying the craziest things while others cannot?

Presidential nominees have seen a dive in their polling for making less provocative statements by comparison. Remember Romney and what he had to say at a private dinner of donors about the deplorable 47%? Candidates have been put down by the media for making statements that are actually true. Recall Gore and the information superhighway incident? Deletion of emails is no small matter, but it appears to be a routine practice for several politicians and administrations, whose email habits have not received nearly as much attention as Secretary Clinton’s. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has consistently bombarded an entire nation with outrageous statements for over a year. Here’s a sampling. He will build a wall. He will bomb, it seems, everything. He will ban all Muslims from entering the US. War heroes aren’t heroes unless they were captured. THE Blacks. And of course, the numerous colorful terms he uses to refer to the female anatomy, beauty standards, and dating practices, to put it mildly. This has not escaped the attention of comedians. Trevor Noah of the Daily Show put it best when he said that “Donald Trump is principally operating a cockfight camp within the woods, and but everybody’s upset that Hillary’s the naughtiest child at chess camp.” But this lunacy cannot be left to late night comedians to expose. I mean sure, they do a great job at it, but the double standard at work here should be deeply disturbing for all of us.

Jeff Hancock captured this effect best by explaining that “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” The explanation rests on Harry Frankfurt’s well known essay On Bullshit. The essay draws a distinction between liars and bullshit artists, making the point that while liars are preoccupied with hiding the truth, bullshit artists are more concerned with making things up that help them tell a convincing story. So when Trump says that “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” . . . “Because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it, ” yes, he is distorting political process, misinforming the public about how government works and confusing me, personally about what he calls “the situation.” But what he really is doing is selling a story to his supporters; a convincing one that has in turn produced the disturbing, affective refrain uttered in his rallies “Jail her!”

The thing with bullshit artists is that they use simple language and make emotional, not cognitive appeals. And well, those sorts of appeals are really friendly to platforms that possess affective architectures. Such platforms include stadiums. Think about how easily we all affectively connect around the Cubs. Churches. Rallies. Media. And, social media. Social media are accompanied by “unusually large amounts of bullshit,” as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen compellingly explains. It is not impossible to use social media to spread the truth and counter claims that are not factual. But the thing is, it also very easy to use certain social media to spread myths, memes, and refrains that unite people around shared sentiment. #BlackLivesMatter generates a lot of traction online, but unfortunately, so does #AllLivesMatter, which completely misunderstands the social context and injustice at work here. Content injections aimed at delegetimizing a movement, or shifting the focus of the story are frequent online, often and increasingly rendered through bots, used most recently to “swell a debate lead” for Trump.

For the past few years, I have been tracking sentiment expression online to understand how publics mobilize around shared goals. With colleagues at UIC we have been studying movements developing around the MENA region, the Occupy movement, but also everyday expression that forms around trending topics online. I use the term affective publics to describe evanescent publics that come together, identify themselves or disconnect based on expressions of sentiment. Affect is not the same as emotion. It is pre-emotive intensity we experience prior to cognitively ascribing an emotional label to a sentiment. It is the sense of movement we feel, prior to develop an emotion or an opinion (or both) about something. It is when we tap our foot to a song we like; nod a long to something we hear to indicate attention and not agreement; it is the intensity with which we feel. It is a sensation we experience, but because it is pre-emotive and pre-cognitive, it is possesses no direction. Think of it a sense of movement, but with no clear sense of where that movement is headed.

Trump and his affective publics are driven by statement, and fueled regularly by refrains (most recently, “Elections are Rigged!”) that augment their intensity. That should not surprise us. It is not unusual for publics to be affectively driven (think #ImWithHer or #FeelTheBern). These affectively prone statements invite and sustain feelings of community. Such feelings can either reflexively drive a movement forward or entrap publics in state of engaged passivity. In the end, technologies network us, bullshit sways us, but it is our stories that connect us, identify us, and potentially tear us apart.

So, to return to my original question? Why does Donald Trump get away with so much bs while others do not? Perhaps he is good bs artist, possibly one of the finest. And certainly, while many of us do take his claims seriously, his supports do not. They dismiss them, because they see a different story behind them that is appealing. But still, that answers the question of how — not why. Here’s the why: He speaks to deeply insecure people. They are not deplorable. They are possibly folks who feel they have lost control over what happens in their lives. They are also possibly folks who look for a political messiah to come and instantly fix long standing problems. And so Trump delivers, refrain after refrain, repetitive statements aimed at taking control of ones life, almost like a motivational speaker. The media hesitate to completely expose him, because our media are insecure, too. They are financially insecure, and they are politically insecure, too; concerned of being framed as liberal. I have always thought that insecurity explains 90% of the problems we experience in our everyday lives. The remaining 10% is cognitive dissonance. The refrains Trump delivers are hollow, and so is the story they weave together, and so is the connection they spawn. But that connection is present, intense, affective, and, thus pointedly directionless. In this case, there is no ‘there’ there.

Zizi Papacharissi wrote about sentiment, reason, and networked publics in her latest book, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics, published by Oxford University Press. She is Professor and Head of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago. All images used courtesy of Nonotak Studio and the Daydream installation.