Donald Trump isn’t real. He’s Just a thought-provoked Symptom.
I hate talking about Donald Trump. I make myself vulnerable by talking about politics, but I make myself less so by stating my true opinion of politics: it’s all bullshit. Despite this opinion, I still think Trump is the worst bullshitter of all. I avoid mentioning his name on social media, and I’m wary of mentioning it here because I’m only helping to trend his name online, but I have something important to say:
Donald Trump isn’t real. He’s just a thought-provoked symptom of the American hyperreality.
Sure, Trump may seem just as real as his competing political candidates, but he’s the typical American politician in many ways. He rallies crowds with promises he can’t keep, such as a wall he promises to have Mexico pay for at the southern American border. Like other candidates, Trump has a gross excess of money to spend on his political campaign, going so far as to brag about how much money he has. He is also an outright bully. But Donald Trump isn’t real.
Let me try to explain.
According to Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodern social theorist, our society creates a simulation of reality (a hyperreality) because we have all attempted to discover and explain the absolute meaning of everything in an objective way through the use of language. This is not a new idea. John Keats suggested the idea of Negative Capability in the Nineteenth century, where our intellectual pursuits have caused us to avoid thinking unconventionally. Negative capability has become increasingly pervasive in an information-based world.
As Baudrillard explains in his essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” this occurs in every structure of our society, including science, art, economy, politics, and it also occurs everyday in the media. Think about it: we attempt to classify every found species on Earth, going so far as to place humans in subcategories according to a social construct we call race. Our entire stock market uses absolute numbers to suggest value, yet the entire system is based on speculation, same for the price of gas. Worse is the us-versus-them nature of politics: we vote for a candidate because they are the Republican or Democratic nominee, not because they would be the best person for the job, but because they happen to be the wealthy elect, most likely bred and raised as a politician by politicians, but that’s democracy for you. In the media, we believe events have taken place after reading about them, though the message is sometimes skewed, sometimes propaganda, and is always filtered by the reader.
Donald Trump is merely part of this hyperreality, this delusional state of existence. He is also a terrible symptom of the American hyperreality. From one man, we have created a cultural icon who represents our own delusional sense of patriotism and nationalism, capitalism and industry, xenophobia, aggressiveness, and bigotry. Despite the delusion, Trump is causing real harm when he uses political language to pit the uneducated and educated against each other, men against women, Americans against immigrants.
We should be worried. The crowd cheers on as Trump promises to build a wall, a physical boundary between us and them. Further, he wants to deport all illegal immigrants in order to protect ‘real’ Americans, as if there is an undeniable line between what constitutes the essence of Americanness itself. In the hyperreality, Trump is not merely the man we see on television, whose voice calls on us to “Make America great again.” Trump is closer to the symptom of a psychosomatic disorder, an illness manifested from the collective minds of an American society teetering between anxiety and narcissism. Trump has made us sick, or perhaps, we’ve been sick all along, but I’m worried because he could cause us more harm in the long-term. I have no answer to the paradox that the hyperreality presents, where our perceptions and assumptions inevitably become the collective reality, and where reality is murdered by our need for an objective truth. I have no answer, but I simply wanted to point out that Donald Trump is not real. He is just a thought-provoked symptom of the American hyperreality, and that presents a real problem: what medicine can we prescribe for a psychosomatic disorder of the collective mind?
