The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, arguing that the rhetorical form of his appeals constitutes demagoguery defined by a reliance on victimized, White, toxic masculinity. Extending work on demagoguery, which has emphasized its characteristic lionization of certainty and demands for mastery, I suggest that Trump’s capacity to conclude his audience as at risk and vulnerable figures a condition inherent to democratic politics—undecidability—as a threat to personhood. Trump’s construction of a precarious and socially segregated “America” constitutes an image of masculinist totality that works on the basis of the incompleteness suffusing politics while undermining the possibilities for a feminist political ethics characterized by mutual vulnerability.

KEYWORDS:

• Demagoguery
• Donald Trump
• masculinity
• precarity
• victimhood
• vulnerability

Acknowledgments

This essay was presented at the 2016 National Communication Association gathering in Philadelphia, PA. The author would like to thank Damien Pfister, Michael Mario Albrecht, and Peter Odell Campbell for their comments on earlier versions of this work, and Caitlin Bruce for generative conversations. Also, thanks are owed to Kristen Hoerl for her tireless and careful work as editor, and to several thoughtful and very charitable reviewers.