For someone who has devoted much of the past decade to trying to attach meaning to the words Donald J. Trump has spoken, the news that as of this week there is nothing left to parse comes as a surprise. There is nothing more satisfying than this. It’s just dancing, which you can probably only witness but never understand. At a town hall meeting in Oaks, Pennsylvania, last weekend, the former president finally got fed up with his words, his language, and the audience’s Q&A, even himself, and just kept the song on and boogieed for, well, 39 minutes. to the playlist of your choice that you choose to down.
Ever since he came speeding down the Trump Tower escalator and started ranting about rapists and Mexicans, we all take Donald Trump literally but not seriously, or seriously but not literally? Or maybe I should finally take it as a new party, but I was half-crazy. The York Times is now quaintly characterizing the whole thing as the communications of a man prone to “improvised deviations” from the usual campaign standstill script (or, increasingly, from reality itself). But what really matters is that after eight years of the media’s dedication to this effort to shove the word down their asses, it has finally and conclusively become clear that Trump’s words don’t matter. Perhaps the only thing that matters is dancing.
I’m not going to link here to the 20 articles I’ve written in the years since 2016 trying to graft agreed upon meanings onto the free-floating works of President Trump. Because, like other media outlets, I used to think that politics, policy, law, and elected officials were somehow correlated with language and words that had a common public meaning. I spent at least a full year trying to find a legally enforceable meaning for his various speech acts. fool. As the Times further reported over the weekend, many Trump supporters seem to like him precisely because they don’t actually believe anything he says. Slippery disjointedness is a feature, not a bug. And, as the polling organization pointed out, “41 percent of likely voters in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll found that “people who are angry with Donald Trump don’t like his words. “They take things too seriously,” he said. The character flaw lies not in his inscrutability, but in those who try to understand and believe him. And with these lights, Dada, a dance recital held in place of City Hall, makes perfect sense.
Those of us in the press have been discussing in recent weeks the widespread media tendency to “brainwash” Donald Trump. This is a criticism that corporate media can’t resist making former presidents sound normal simply because that’s how we’ve always covered politics. Because that’s the only way to understand electoral politics. But in the case of the event in Pennsylvania, we may have moved past the sanity wash and straight into the dance wash before we knew it. There, the media doesn’t even have to try to translate insane speeches and social media posts into readable ideas. Because it’s much easier to just watch him. dance. We’re finally forced to abandon the insistent journalistic need to translate President Trump’s words into promises and commitments, and the former president’s indescribable agitation and fist-pumping and show-tune frenzy Perhaps we have become comfortable with simply admiring the joys of life.
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If it’s still 2016, the American people have completely abdicated their obligation to have one of the two candidates for the position of Commander-in-Chief on the ticket utter a word to take office. You may be well aware of this. Americans might also be furious when a candidate, tired of answering questions, wants us to watch him dance. But by 2024, this switch will be experienced primarily as a relief. Why spend energy trying to dismantle which parts of President Trump’s promises to expel immigrants and jail his critics are deliberate and which parts are just smoke? It’s already turned into smoke. Studio 54 election.
With three weeks left until November 5th, if anyone is asking why this presidential election is so unbearably close, it’s because we live in an era of failed democracies with language freedom. It should remind you that it’s because of the rush. People who have lost faith in politics, the media, and even the stability of language itself still find their favorite candidate swaying to a song to which they mysteriously know every word by heart. , I feel that watching them grind makes me feel calm. Even if everything else falls apart, the constant “It’s fun to be at the YMCA” is the one thing we can all still rely on. Words that have finally lost their meaning We’re screwed.
