Tugging at the Umbilical Cord: Birtherism, Nativism, and the Plotline of Trump's Delivery

Abstract

There is a growing consensus among political analysts examining the relative roles of race, gender, class, and economic anxiety in the 2016 presidential contest: the race was about race. But the plot of Trump's delivery to the White House thickens when read through a psychoanalytic lens, with an eye to the primal scene and to anatomical difference. One key thread of the plot is the birtherism narrative and its chain of signifiers, which I argue form a complex of various “isms,” including classism, nationalism, fundamentalism, climate denialism, racism, and sexism. This complex is centered around our literal birthplace—the vagina—but it is an obscured center. I suggest that the vagina operated as a secret key to both the presidential campaign and to the Trump presidency. Though ignored in conventional analysis, this key provides crucial insight into Trump's obliviousness to reality and truth, his misogynistic actions to dismantle women's (reproductive) rights and environmental protections, and his inability to concede to the reality that he and a black man, Barack Obama, shared a common birthplace and birthright.

Keywords:

• racism
• classism
• sexism
• Christian fundamentalism
• nationalism
• democracy
• vagina

Notes

1 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, September 4–8, 2015, cited by Jacobson (2015): The pollsters asked, “Do you happen to know what religion Barack Obama is? Is he Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, something else, or not religious?” Among all respondents, 29% said Obama is “Muslim” (a finding that was 11 percentage points higher than Pew had found five years earlier). The percentage was higher for Republicans alone—43% thought Obama is Muslim, compared with 15% of Democrats and 29% of Independents. CNN/ORC surveyed 1,012 adult Americans by landline and cell phones, for a sampling margin of error of three percentage points.

2 Trump's claims were made at a rally in Sunrise, Florida, in August 2016. See, among many reports, Pager (2016).

3 An interesting exception to this pattern, at least judging by analyses of his Republican Convention acceptance speech, is Donald Trump. Despite the trope of using the words “democracy” and “freedom” in political speeches, historian Eric Foner (and others), have noted that Trump did not name democracy, and only used the word freedom once and free twice (Gitlin, 2016)—“free” in one of these speeches was a pejorative reference to the free (as in roaming) illegal immigrants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Gentile

Jill Gentile, Ph.D. is a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she co-chairs the Independent Track, and a faculty member and supervisor at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She is also a corresponding editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis while serving on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, (formerly the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology,) and The Candidate Journal (advisory). She is the author of many scholarly essays on personal agency, desire, and symbolic life. Her book, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, with M. Macrone (Karnac Books, 2016) examines the mutual relevance between psychoanalysis and democracy through the lenses of free speech and gender.