Juan Villoro
Protests against Donald Trump’s authoritarianism received the most absurd response. In a video made with artificial intelligence, the US president appears as a pilot wearing a crown and spraying excrement on protesters.
Max Weber shifted the notion of “charisma” from religion to politics to analyze leaders revered for irrational and emotional causes; however, in his vast sociological analysis, he did not take into account a variant of behavior that is making its debut on the world stage: that of the leader who makes crude jokes.
Since taking office, Trump has used artificial intelligence to become a rock guitarist, an American football quarterback, or a golden statue in Gaza. The White House tenant uses his office to celebrate a Halloween of his own invention, with costumes and macabre jokes. His sense of humor is quite basic, not unlike that of someone who places a “whoopee cushion” on a chair. Even so, the brazenness with which he mocks everything he feels like has great symbolic weight. The president does not aspire to respect or prestige, values scorned by the TikTok era, but rather to the bravado of someone who pees in the Kool-Aid without penalty.
What is the political significance of this? In his debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said that Haitian immigrants ate cats and dogs. The nonsense did not hurt him much because, in these times, what matters is not whether something is true, but whether it goes viral. To enhance the unreality, the defamer posted images of himself being cheered by cats.
For decades, Trump made bad business decisions, but he was a master of branding (brand perception); each bankruptcy was replaced by a new project that promised wealth and raised skyscrapers with golden walls. His job was to succeed with no other sustenance than the promotion of success itself. A master of advertising and self-promotion, he embodied the American dream of reaching the top. Once there, he demonstrated that the Anonymous Avenger is no longer the hero of contemporary society, having been replaced by the Joker. In hooligan logic, nothing beats someone who makes an atrocious joke and gets away with it.
How much does he owe to his digital avatars? In another article, I commented that in 2022, Yoon Suk-yeol won the South Korean presidency thanks to Al Yoon, an avatar who surpassed him in charisma and responsiveness. Although the falsification was blatant, it showed the possibilities of an opaque leader. In the spectral dynamics of social media, what matters is not who you are on the civil registry, but who you can become. Suk-yeol was not captivating as a person, but Al Yoon was irresistible as an alias. The reflection was superior to its model. Once empowered, the winner became an autocrat and was removed from office.
Trump uses artificial intelligence in a completely different, not unastute way. He does not seek to improve his image; on the contrary, he caricatures it in such a way that, by comparison, his actual performance seems almost moderate. Liz Huston, who belongs to the White House press team, told the New York Times: “No leader has used social media as creatively and definitively to communicate with Americans as Donald Trump.” Indeed, in the post-truth era, the tubular-haired president reports without any basis that a drug causes autism and posts a doctored video in which he arrests Obama in the White House. In this context, the truth is a hard-to-find relic.
In his first term, Trump did not complete the wall he had promised along the border. In his second term, his exercise in fiction has been far superior: he creates news that does not produce reality. He announced his desire to take over Greenland, annex Canada, found a resort in Gaza, and raise or lower tariffs on all economies. With each of these initiatives, journalists were forced to cover imaginary events.
Trump’s jokes belong to the most curious branch of charismatic domination. Enough people laugh at them, but above all, they show that exercising omnipotent power means getting away with anything.
In the midst of all this, where does reality fit in? Everything indicates that it has become a state secret.
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