{"title":"A Trumpian Mechanism","authors":"Emmett Peixoto","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.4012","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism also worked against Trump in regard to his handling of Covid-19. Ultimately, the mechanism helps explain both the outcome of the 2016 and the 2020 elections. The article concludes by stressing the importance of using this mechanism to better understand the Trump phenomenon. It claims that using the mechanism as a guide to understand Trump can prevent empowering the very object we, as critics, often aim to disempower.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4012","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism also worked against Trump in regard to his handling of Covid-19. Ultimately, the mechanism helps explain both the outcome of the 2016 and the 2020 elections. The article concludes by stressing the importance of using this mechanism to better understand the Trump phenomenon. It claims that using the mechanism as a guide to understand Trump can prevent empowering the very object we, as critics, often aim to disempower.
期刊介绍:
The intellectual trajectory of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture is located in the humanities and social sciences in the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Comparative cultural studies is a contextual approach in the study of culture in all of its products and processes; its theoretical and methodological framework is built on tenets borrowed from the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies and from a range of thought including literary and culture theory, systems theory, and communication theories; in comparative cultural studies focus is on theory and method, as well as on application; in comparative cultural studies metaphorical argumentation and description are discouraged; the intellectual trajectory of the journal includes the postulate to work in a global and intercultural context with a plurality of methods and approaches, and in interdisciplinarity in the study of the processes of communicative action(s) in culture, the production and processes of culture, the products of culture, and the study of the how of these processes; the epistemological bases of comparative cultural studies are in (radical) constructivism and in methodology the contextual (systemic and empirical) approach is favored (however, comparative cultural studies does not exclude textual analysis proper or other established fields of scholarship).