We Apologize for Nothing Here

By Finbarr Curtis

In response to critics of President Trump’s executive order on immigration, White House Chief of Staff and Count Dracula impersonator Reince Priebus stated: “We apologize for nothing here.” While he was referring to chaos at airports, his statement follows a broader pattern of refusing even a potential apology. This is unusual. Human beings make mistakes. Apologies are ritualized practices that repair social damage and reestablish relationships among people. To never apologize is to be something other than fully human.

Priebus is aware that Trumplandia is out of the ordinary. His usage of “here” is one of a number of rhetorical moves where spokespeople have imagined Trump's White House as a new space set apart from ordinary politics, a zone where things work differently. Priebus knows that people usually feel accountable to each other, and what makes this administration exceptional is its aspiration to act without reciprocal obligations to the popular will or other branches of government.

The administration's efforts to rule by extraordinary means recalls Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which he wrote: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Following Benjamin's outline, the immigration order begins by citing the events of September 11, 2001 as grounds for suspending existing immigration policies. That 2001 was almost 16 years ago indicates that this emergency will last as long as Steven Bannon’s imagined war to defend “Judeo-Christian civilization” persists.

The Trump Campaign Is Not Taking Place

Jean Baudrillard/Donald J. Trump

By Kerry Mitchell

I have replaced "simulacrum" with "Trump campaign" in the following: "The Trump campaign is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The Trump campaign is true." Ecclesiastes

By this I mean not, of course, that the Trump campaign is speaking the truth, but that the truth of his campaign—what his campaign is—is true: it is what it is. And what it is is nothing. There is no campaign. There is only Trump.

The absence of a conventional campaign was the subject of a recent MSNBC exposé that wondered whether the Donald could triumph while lacking a proverbial "ground game":

Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem. Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims. "Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said.

For Trump supporters, the MSNBC report can be dismissed as a hit piece, a takedown. The article argues largely that Trump’s is a lousy version of a campaign, just as some suggest that Trump is a lousy version of a leader (but without the original, what can you do?). But there are threads within the article and other media that are much more threatening than disapproval, which is easily celebrated or dismissed depending on one’s leanings. These threads suggest not that Trump is being a bad leader, but that he is not being a leader at all. He is just being him. This suggestion is so much more threatening than disapproval as it removes the foundation upon which both approval and disapproval rest. Without such foundation political statements do not so much speak truth or falsehood as flash images that affirm or negate. Such statements are immune to argument, gaining their strength from the sense of confidence, joy, and invincibility with which they are asserted. If Trump has no campaign, if Trump is not a leader but just Trump, then the attacks on him will simply affirm this reality, breaking the feedback loop of claim and counterclaim and coming back again and again to the negation.