Donald Trump is a superhero – but not in a good way

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[Commentary] Hovering above all the brouhaha about Donald Trump’s bizarre presidential candidacy floats one critical question: Are we an electorate or are we an audience?

Trump has bet on the latter, while his competitors, even one like Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has positions close to Trump on many issues, bet on the former. Trump certainly isn’t the first candidate to conflate entertainment and politics. When Ronald Reagan was asked if it was hard adjusting to being president after being an actor, he replied that he couldn’t imagine anyone being president without being an actor. Reagan was right. Performance skills, including the skill of drawing attention to oneself, are now intrinsic to political skills if one hopes to become president. But Reagan was talking about communication, which is why he always invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt, another great communicator, as a model. He wasn’t talking about replacing substantive policy with performance. Something has happened over the past 15 years or so that has radically altered the relationship between performance and politics. It is partly due to the US political arena, in which a candidate must constantly try to grab attention. More subtly, however, it is also due to America’s ever-shifting popular culture, in which new kinds of narratives regularly push aside older ones.

Usually sooner rather than later, the lights come up in the theater, and the audience walks out into the bracing real world from which they had been escaping. At least that is the way it has always been. Trump is in a movie. His competitors are in a primary. If he somehow manages to sustain his candidacy, if the power of popular culture has so embedded itself in Americans’ consciousness as to make the public re-envision the world, it will say less about Trump than about a sea change in US political culture — from one that is about governance to one that is about putting on an exhilarating show.

[Neal Gabler is the author of “Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.”]


Donald Trump is a superhero – but not in a good way