Abstract
This chapter situates the rise and fall of the Trump presidency within the polymorphous technologies of truth and fakery associated with reality TV and social media: experimentation, verification, spectacularization, affect, and performativity. Drawing from but also complicating Baudrillard’s late diagnosis of the total telemorphosis of social life, I parse the contradictions of “post-truth” media culture, and show how the staging of governance as a reality show in which we are all compelled to play a part activates new mechanisms for contesting Trump’s presidential performance. Recalling Foucault’s notion of grotesque sovereignty as a manifestation of political power that operates in spite of its discrediting as “odious, despicable, or ridiculous”, I ask what bearing Trump’s declining ratings might have on the structural violence of racism, misogyny and market neoliberalism in the United States today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Change history
07 February 2020
■■■
References
Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117–139.
Andrejevic, M. (2004). Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Andrejevic, M. (2008). Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans. Television & New Media, 9, 24–46.
Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York and London: Routledge.
Baker, P. (2017, October 10). For Trump the Reality Show Never Ended. New York Times, p. A16. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/us/politics/trump-corker-feud-tweet-liddle-bob.html.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Baudrillard, J. (2010). Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonism. Salt Lake City: Seagull Books.
Baudrillard, J. (2011). Telemorphosis (D. S. Burk, Trans.). New York: Univocal.
Bignell, J. (2014). Realism and Reality Formats. In L. Ouellette (Ed.), A Companion to Reality Television (pp. 97–115). Malden, MA: Wiley.
Burk, D. (2011). Introduction. In J. Baudrillard (Ed.), Telemorphosis (D. S. Burk, Ed., pp. ix–xiv). New York: Univocal.
CNN. (2017, August 16). Tearful Van Jones: I’m Just Hurt. https://money.cnn.com/video/news/2017/08/16/van-jones-tearful-response-to-trump-comments.cnnmoney/index.html. Accessed 15 July 2016.
Codebó, A. (2015, November 20). The Grotesque Element of Power. http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/2015/11/20/agnese-codebo-on-the-grotesque-element-of-power/. Accessed 15 July 2016.
Corner, J. (2002). Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions. Television & New Media, 3, 255–269.
Dean, J. (2002). Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dumm, T. (2017, May 29). Grotesque Sovereignty and the Specter of Donald Trump. The Contemporary Condition. http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2017/05/thomas-dumm-grotesque-sovereignty-and.html. Accessed 18 September 2018.
Dumm, T. (2018, January 24). Our America: Grotesque Sovereignty Revisited. The Massachusetts Review. https://www.massreview.org/node/6385. Accessed 3 March 2018.
Edwards, J. D., & Graulund, R. (2013). Grotesque. London and New York: Routledge.
Fetveit, A. (2002). Reality TV in the Digital Era: A Paradox of Visual Culture? In J. Friedman (Ed.), Reality Squared: Televisual Discourses on the Real (pp. 119–137). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (2004). Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975 (G. Burchell, Ed.). New York: Picador.
Gladstone, B. (2017). The Trouble with Reality. New York: Workman Publishing.
Gray, H. (2013). Race, Media and the Cultivation of Concern. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 10, 253–258.
Gray, H. (2015). The Feel of Life: Resonance, Race and Representation. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1108–1119.
Hanlon, A. (2018, August 31). Postmodernism Didn’t Cause Trump: It Explains Him. Washington Post, n.p. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/postmodernism-didnt-cause-trump-it-explains-him/2018/08/30/0939f7c4-9b12-11e8-843b36e177f3081c_story.html?utm_term=.200fd2998dfe. Accessed 8 September 2018.
Hearn, A. (2006). John, a 20-year-old Boston Native with a Great Sense of Humour: On the Spectacularization of the Self and the Incorporation of Identity in the Age of Reality Television. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2(1), 131–147.
Hearn, A. (2008). Meat, Mask, Burden: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 197–217.
Is President Trump Making a White House Reality Show? (2017, April 10). Snopes. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-reality-show/. Accessed 12 April 2017.
Ishac, A. (2017, April 7). Trump Signs Deal with NBC for New TV Series: “The First Real Family of DC”. Extra Newsfeed. https://extranewsfeed.com/trump-signs-deal-with-nbc-for-new-series-the-real-first-family-of-d-c-718c6a2dccc1. Accessed 8 April 2017.
Keefe, P. R. (2018, December 27). How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success. The New Yorker, n.p. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success. Accessed 8 March 2018.
Lewis, T. (Ed.). (2008). TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show. New York and London: Routledge.
Murray, S., & Ouellette, L. (Eds.). (2009). Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Ouellette, L. (2009 [2004]). Take Responsibility for Yourself: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen. In S. Murray & L. Ouellette (Eds.), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (pp. 223–242). New York: New York University Press.
Ouellette, L., & Hay, J. (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Sender, K. (2012). The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences. New York: New York University Press.
Skeggs, B., Thumin, N., & Wood, H. (2008). Oh My Goodness, I’m Watching Reality TV. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(1), 5–24.
Terranova, T. (2000). Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text, 18(2), 33–58.
Turner, G. (2010). Ordinary People in the Media: The Demotic Turn. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ouellette, L. (2019). Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power. In: Overell, R., Nicholls, B. (eds) Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25669-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25670-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)