The Trump Dialectics
A Republican Onto-Theology of Uncertainty
In the midst of Trump’s farcical hush money trial (made a farce by Trump’s attitude towards the validity of the trial and his blatant ignorance of jury confidentiality regulations), reflections on the type of political forms underlying his self-satirising, delirious capacity for critical jesting become increasingly necessary. The rise of a qualitatively new form of anarcho-capitalism, as seen with Argentinian right-wing radical Javier Milei, places the ‘Trumpism’ category in an obscure in-between space even in contemporary US politics.
In 2016, Trump did appear to stand for an opposition against the Republican vision of Democratic, Washington-based bureaucracy, which sides with corporations over ‘the downtrodden voter’, even though the truth of Trump’s big business lobbyists backing his campaign clearly contradicted this ‘down to earth sympathy’ with the average Joe. Today, a similar ‘common sense’ appeal is made in the backing of Trumps criminal trial-coloured campaign, whilst a crypto-fascist colour washes over the Trumpist discourse, including Trump himself more recently expressing his intent to ‘lock away’ his political enemies. At the same time, the radical policies of Javier Milei’s new vision of government make Trump look like a middle-of-the road reactionary jester, or more accurately make Trump look like a strange, indeterminate enigma of the unstable globalised political landscape.
Whilst Trump recycles a narrative of anti-bureaucratic opposition and desperately appeals to the formless enthusiasm youth voter culture, Milei vows to cut government funding of major cultural, educational, welfare etc. sectors at the same time as decentralising the Argentinian economy and letting financial markets determine themselves without State intervention.
When once asked the question of what he thinks of capitalism, Noam Chomsky, echoing the response of Gandhi when asked of his thoughts on Western civilisation, replied that ‘it sounds like an interesting idea’. Capitalism, Chomsky means, has yet to come into existence. Market economies are still heavily dependent on centrally regulated State interventions for business sectors that would not survive the ‘ravages of a free market’. Whilst an ‘interesting idea’, the truth of a decentralised free market is of course that it would inevitably wreak its havoc first on the working masses before hitting large corporation owners. Nevertheless, it seems as if ‘capitalism’ according to Chomsky’s definition of it (perhaps excessively faithful to Marx’s understanding of capitalist reproduction as a complex division of labour aimed at the creation of relative surplus-value, or a commodity circulation process relying on fixed and variable capital investments) may come into its own with Milei’s reforms.
With an unnerving (and eventually false) antithesis between Milei’s anarchic free market decentralisation and the Democratic corporate lobbying mixed with centralised State regulation, Trump appears as an obscure avatar of a non-existent political position. Returning to the US, there is therefore clearly no neat political spectrum in which Trump occupies one end and Biden the other. Despite (or rather precisely because of) his ideological uncertainty, Trump is currently doing well in the polls, marginally creeping ahead of Biden. With the ‘success of indeterminacy’, or the politics of the a-political, that Trump stands for, to articulate this position, to define a concrete figure of the Trump-exception, will become an increasingly pressing demand. Here, I am concerned merely with a few notes on Trump’s dialectical, incomplete position in the political field.
G. K. Chesterton’s famously paradoxical description of Christian Orthodoxy could be formally transposed onto Trump himself. For every criticism of Christianity, the inverse appears simultaneously true: as an ideology, Christianity is too meek and submissive, and yet it has been one of the most aggressive and dominant forces in human history; Christianity breaks up the family dynamic, obeying a universal paternal principle, and yet Christianity demands a nuclear family structure, etc. In its totality, the sublimity of Christianity lies in its presupposition of an internal self-contradiction. The same formula appears to work with Trump: he is an extreme libertarian, and yet he insists on silencing and removing his political opposition; Trump is a right-wing traditional conservative, and yet (unlike Biden) he has in past decades stood for gay-marriage rights and been pro-choice (although Trump’s current administration contradicts his initial stances) whilst abandoning the traditional-values lifestyle (in a playboy, ‘vulgar new-money’, hookers and trash-talk kind of way); Trump is just an anti-bureaucratic, free market Republican, and yet his administration is under the sway of large corporate lobbyists requiring government management of market trends.
Trump’s position is undoubtedly a dialectical one. By dialectical I indeed mean the dialectical form that Hegel presents in the Science of Logic: it is a position which presupposes its own non-identity to itself, it inscribes contradiction as the ground for its own expression. Trump’s obscure ‘third position’, which is in fact a constant inversion of the standard archetypes of the poles of US liberal democratic discourse, formally reproduces the method by which Hegel is capable of positing ‘existence’ (die Existenz). Existence is the determinate form of being and its simultaneous negation, nothing. Being as such is present only negatively, in indeterminate form, and is negated by the nothing which is irreducible to it. This contradictory impasse is reverted into being positing its presupposition in the form of nothing, whereby nothing is the first moment of being, and being expresses itself as the nothing which is irreducible to it. Being therefore reverses its contradictory position into a presupposition for its own existence.
This is central to the dialectical position of Trump: he continuously embodies his own contradiction. An ironic example of this paradox was Trump’s rebuttal of Hillary Clinton’s suggestion of the catastrophic consequences of Trump being given legislative/executive power, during the 2016 election debates. Clinton’s statement was a straightforward negation: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country”, to which Trump made a simple reply: “Because you’d be in jail.” The Hegelian reversal is clear. Instead of making a serious case for his legal proficiency, Trump accepts Clinton’s negation (‘it would be a bad thing if Trump was in charge of the law’) and posits it as a condition for his own superiority (‘indeed it would be a bad thing… for you’). Trump posits a contradictory moment as a his own taking-off point.
Trump’s political position, awkwardly and uncertainly occupying an in-between space in contemporary political categories, expresses precisely the internal contradictions which Chesterton’s theology and Hegel’s ontology frame. His appeal seems to lie partly in this metaphysical tension - perhaps this dialectical mechanism which Trump embodies is worth pausing at, in the lead up the the 2024 election.