On Trumpsurdism

Why ask why?

The weird White House Instagram post above got me thinking about a trend I’ve noticed in MAGA messaging; what I think it’s meant to achieve; and how it might be countered.

Throughout the Trump era people have noted the goonish social media hits he and his people put out. The earliest one I remember is from 2017, in a which a clip of Trump at a Wrestlemania gig pretending to beat up Vince McMahon was altered so that the CNN logo was pasted over McMahon’s head.

Since there wasn’t a lot other footage of Trump swinging on anyone, in the ensuing years we got a lot of wholly false imagery showing him with a buff physique, sometimes bearing a rocket launcher or other weapons, taking combative stances — what we might call Butch Trump propaganda, promoting the flabby crook as a powerful fighter. You could say the allegedly-not-posed photo of Tubby with his fist up in Butler, Pa. is the apotheosis of the form.

The Second Wave of MAGA imagery came up in the 2024 campaign and didn’t much feature Trump at all. This may reflect a high-level judgement that, Trump being frightening to a lot of voters, it made sense to shift that fear onto the opposition. Second Wave was mostly AI slop cartoonishly portraying a nightmare world of feral immigrant hordes to which Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris would doom the United States.

One of the more famous of these was a fake photo of a little girl hugging a puppy after a flood, tied to a story that the Biden/Harris administration failed the help disaster victims — which gains piquancy, you might say, now that Trump is actually withholding FEMA funds from disaster areas.

The Trump campaign did a lot of more traditional lying, but arguably these visualizations of an alternate reality were more effective with the kind of people who would vote for him. Lies can be disproven; emotions, however cheesily evoked, cannot.

Third Wave MAGA means to promote the idea that the current administration is doing a great job for the American people — a hard sell, given Trump’s dismal current approval rates. Maybe that’s why, as in Second Wave, Third Wave doesn’t show much of Tubby, either.

Like Second Wave, it relies a lot, though not wholly, on AI and other fabricated or altered imagery. But while the Second Wave campaign messages, AI-infected as they were, were at least based on traditional political themes — mainly that the hero’s opponent would leave Americans vulnerable to the enemy — Third Wave is not so focused. In fact, unless you’re already wholly bought in to the vision, it may seem nonsensical.

You’ve probably heard about the psycho AI video allegedly “published beforehand by accounts unaffiliated with the White House” that Trump’s Truth Social disseminated in February, showing a post-war Gaza turned into a glittering resort enjoyed by Trump, Elon Musk, and Bibi Netanyahu. If you’re thinking in ordinary political terms, this might be confusing: Apart from the viciousness of its premise, which is of course part of MAGA’s appeal, it’s hard to imagine even the most credulous Trump voter believing that he will turn Gaza into Las Vegas, or even Fort Lauderdale.

Then there are the weird ICE videos that famously revel in the capture and captivity of Central and South Americans. The White House is still promoting these; one recent video shows dark-skinned people being hauled off and detained while Trump’s reading of “The Snake” plays in the background.

Again, the viciousness is expected and understandable, but the repeated use of these images seems not only unnecessary but even potentially counterproductive — after months of news reports showing that most of the captives are ordinary people with no major criminal charges pending, who among even the biggest Trump fans can believe them to be a mortal danger — especially as the propaganda footage itself shows them cowed, humiliated, and powerless?

You get a little closer to what’s going on here when you consider that ICE actually used an image from the South Park parody of ICE to promote itself on social media. This too would seem counterproductive. They can’t be relying on their viewers not to know its provenance; the few MAGA people who don’t watch South Park surely must have heard about the recent episode that slagged on ICE. An obvious takeaway would be “ha ha, look, that show you like thinks we’re assholes.”

So why put out shit that, on its face, makes no sense? I think the answer is that “sense” is what’s being attacked. Like the image of the plug-ugly Border Czar Tom Homan as the sun from Teletubbies, it doesn’t have meaning so much as anti-meaning — a refutation of meaning itself.

It’s hard to objectively quantify the volume and audacity Trump’s public lying, but I would say that has entered a new phase as well. Take his claim that he will reduce drug prices by 1,500%. Some (not all) news reports attempt to communicate in their headlines that this claim is plainly nonsensical. But you can tell that their hearts aren’t in it, and their stories devolve to thumbsuckers about what a masterful politician Trump is (“‘He uses statistics less as a factual statement of, “Here is what the best data says,” and more as rhetorical construct to sell an idea,’ said Robert C. Rowland, professor of communication studies...”).

White House spokesmen don’t even bother to clean up after his rhetorical messes anymore. Back when he was pushing the annexation of Greenland, you may recall, his senior team came up with contorted rationalizations to explain it as if it made sense. Not anymore. Social media users — not even necessarily supporters — get the message, and put out their own claims that Trump is doing outlandish things like cutting back the school year to six months nationwide, and no one particularly cares — just like if Trump himself made the preposterous claim.

I would call this Trumpsurdism — the acceptance that, when it comes to this one person who happens to have unprecedented control of the federal government, what we normally consider reality, meaning, cause and effect etc. are inoperative. The lack of consequences (thus far) for his fantasies has led to a sense that consequences don’t exist. Policies are not explained or defended, merely asserted. To help get them over, there is sometimes patriotic palaver, waving flags, and such like, but increasingly the propagandists just give us crap like sunny Tom Homan to stress that none of this is to be examined like a sales pitch or a sermon — it’s just part of the sea of unmeaning in which we all float. Like the old Bud Dry commercial said, Why Ask Why?

That may sound depressing and dystopian. It can’t last, though; national drift eventually crashes into something. There is a potential upside; when people start looking for relief from the inevitable cataclysm, then the politicians (few as they are) who yet insist on reality and solutions to actual problems are well positioned to benefit.

Of course, history shows us that the possibility of an even darker fantasy taking hold is also possible. But you knew coming in that this was a dark ride. Here’s hoping!