Trump l’Œil: Is Trump's Post-Truth Communication Translatable?

ABSTRACT

Around the world, journalists complain that Donald Trump is untranslatable. Yet he is challenging even for many Americans to comprehend. In this think piece, I argue that Trump's post-truth statements need a deeper cultural and historical contextualization to be rendered comprehensible or translatable for significant portions of cosmopolitan citizens, not to mention Americans. Using the example of the emergent popular cultural genre of “outrageous Trump statements” in “listicle” or “greatest hits” form, I translate Trump through a series of post-truth developments in journalism, social media communication, and political communication, amidst historically specific cultural backlashes, some of which are globalizing.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-truth
• Donald Trump
• emotion
• facts
• anger
• culture
• political communication

Notes

1. On MSNBC's Morning Joe (March 16, 2016): www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2lBz0532wU

2. Prems is a childish expression meaning “first.” It could transpose the awkwardness of Trump's “… with myself, number 1” (a good explanation here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prems).

3. Here I deliberately use promotionalism as subject of the sentence instead of Trump; my argument is that we should see Trump as a “subject effect” of promotionalism as discourse.

4. My theory of “emo-truth” is elaborated in more depth in my article “Post-Truth (Right-Wing) Media Strategies: The French Anti-Gender Theory Movement and Transatlantic Similarities” (in press) cited below.

5. Giddens’ (cited below) discussions of trust, “facework,” performance, and codes of authenticity does not make reference to aggressive emotion. That is my extension of the concept.

6. Here I am extending, and playing upon, Jacques Rancière's book: La Haine de la démocratie.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jayson Harsin

Jayson Harsin is an associate professor in the Global Communications department of the American University in Paris and currently the vice-chair of the Philosophy, Theory & Critique division of the International Communication Association. His scholarship sits at the intersection of politics (electoral and social movements) and popular culture (especially social media). Since 2006, he has researched and published on contemporary problems in post-truth politics, including political rumors, fake news, fact-checking, and the attention economy in historical and cultural context.