Trump l’Oeil

Gideon Jacobs peers into the uncanny valley of the Republican President-elect.

By Gideon JacobsNovember 3, 2024

• Politics

I BEGAN WRITING this after I saw the photos of Donald Trump working at McDonald’s. Like many, I was struck by how much the images, with their bizarre aesthetics and surreal content, looked like they had been generated by artificial intelligence: “Donald Trump working at McDonald’s” is the sort of generically absurd scenario one might blurt out when asked for a ChatGPT prompt. But once I saw several blue-checkmarked news organizations post the photos on social media, I grew confident that the former president had, in fact, been frying french fries in suburban Philadelphia. The campaign stunt dominated the day’s discourse. Its images slid backward into the uncanny valley and flooded it.

What was strange was that, even once I knew the photos were taken in the world with a camera, they still felt AI-generated to me. They were still charged with the fundamental quality that can make AI images unsettling: a realness untethered from reality; vivid signification without a vivid referent. Trump had taken Kamala Harris’s verified but imageless anecdote of briefly working at McDonald’s during college and replaced it with an image of him, smiling, manning the drive-thru. Yes, the photo was made by capturing an occurrence in the world, but that occurrence, like Harris’s, was irrelevant. The rectangle on my screen was larger than its dimensions, eclipsing what lay behind it. The image had overpowered reality in an unfair fight.

Trump came of age as a real estate mogul in the 1970s and ’80s, when New York City was broke, and greed, sleaze, and cocaine were good. Much ink has been spilled about how that period’s economic and cultural climate may have formed Trump. It is just as telling, though, that this was also the era when postmodern theory descended on the ivory towers of academia: Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition arrived in 1979, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in 1981, Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991.

I assume Trump and his mentor, the notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, were not reading much postmodern theory. But it seems that in their studies of the streets, boardrooms, and tabloids of New York City, they too sensed an existential shift occurring. There is a scene in Ali Abassi’s new Trump biopic, The Apprentice, where Cohn teaches a young Trump his Three Rules of Winning: 1) “Attack, attack, attack”; 2) “Admit nothing, deny everything”; and 3) “You claim victory and never admit defeat.” These rules, though taught as dictums of success, business, and politics, betray an insight about the power of images in an increasingly image saturated world: paired with a pathological aggressiveness, they can be all that matter.

In their own way, Cohn and Trump recognized they were in the early days of something like what Baudrillard called “hyperreality”: an ontological condition where realness loses its origins, the map precedes its territory, and signs can only point to other signs. Images, while always separate from the world that birthed them, were drifting out to sea. Those who could exploit this phenomenon could operate unfettered by reality’s inherent unwieldiness. Trump did not have to have money to be rich. Cohn could die a heterosexual man with liver cancer even if he was gay and his medical chart said he had AIDS. Pesky contradictions to one’s chosen image could be overwhelmed, papered over.

This mentality was not new, of course. Marilynne Robinson places Trump in the lineage of the trickster, or the archetypal confidence man whose shamelessness is his greatest asset. While Trump may be cut from the same upside-down American flag as P. T. Barnum, Robinson’s framework fails to capture what is fundamentally different about Trump in the present moment. Simply put, no trick is required. That word, trick, implies that the sucker—to use a Barnumism—has fallen for a lie, believed a false image. It also implies the sucker could be made aware that he’s been tricked if he were shown the truth, the image’s origin.

These are not the contours of today’s game. Four decades after academia’s postmodern fever, two decades into a mainstream internet, at the conclusion of an election cycle that saw Americans spend seven hours a day engrossed in their screens, it seems possible that we have arrived at a prophesied moment: all we have to debunk images is more images; all we have to fight lies are what Kellyanne Conway once called “alternative facts.” Slowly but surely, we have dropped a dimension. The flat-earthers are finally right. Hierarchy has finally been abolished. Expeditions up Mount Truth yield only lateral movements. Put another way: What the city planner of Springfield, Ohio, says about the on-the-ground reality of the city’s Haitian community exists on the same plane as Trump’s image of the “Situation in Springfield”—epistemological peers, equal and independent.

This flattening is partially why the election, viewed through a political lens, looks like an absurd, childish brawl that Trump—though armed with his mentor’s Three Rules—should lose to an adult. It also helps explain why, in spite of countless missteps, he may be at the peak of his powers. Trump won in 2016 partially because—like Barack Obama, unlike Kamala Harris—he possessed the skill most important for winning the modern presidency: the suite of abilities needed to believably perform an image. Some call this craft acting. Eight years later, Trump has only grown more believable, not because his chops have improved—senility is rapidly diminishing the old pro with 39 IMDb acting credits—but because he doesn’t have to act anymore. There is no man who must hide behind the character. He doesn’t even have to lie. Deceit is unnecessary once the image has been freed.

I’m using the word “image” very generally to include any abstracted piece of reality—any form, concept, or story. I believe that is how the writers of the Old Testament meant the word in the Second Commandment, which sits well above edicts banning murder, theft, and adultery: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.” Here in Exodus, the Hebrew word for image is “pesel”—roughly, a carved image. Earlier, in Genesis, “tselem” is used—roughly, a shape or shadow. (One can hear Plato’s skepticism of images echo through the cave.)

Before moral panics about image-oriented technologies such as artificial intelligence, social media, smartphones, video games, and television, before representation in all its forms became the hobbyhorse for entire generations of 20th-century theorists, before the advent of the camera allowed for copies of the world to begin looking very much like the world itself, humanity’s relationship to images was primarily a spiritual concern. Even in times when the most immersive images in existence were painted, drawn, or carved, there was already widespread understanding that our highly imaginative species was uniquely vulnerable to depictions of reality.

The ancient concept of Maya—approximated as “illusion” for Buddhists, “appearances” in the Hindu Vedas—is a veil of abstraction standing between us and reality, so convincing that we forget it’s there. In threads of Christianity such as Anabaptism and Quakerism, moderation of technology and images is foundational in emphasizing the internal over the external, humility over ego, community over individuality. Sects of Orthodox Jews and Sunni Muslims are among the most iconoclastic peoples in the world today, with strict prohibitions about depicting the divine. It’s possible to read the Old Testament as a never-ending cycle about the pitfalls of idolatry: the Israelites worship God, life is good; the Israelites start worshiping idols, life gets bad; the Israelites reconnect with God and realize their idols are actually little hand-carved not-Gods, life gets good again.

The language in the sixth chapter of Isaiah gives a good sense of what the scriptural authors thought to be the symptoms of idolatry. God describes idolators as “hearing, but never understanding”; “seeing, but never perceiving.” Other telling descriptors include “calloused,” “insensitive,” “deaf,” “dumb,” and “blind.” What looks a lot like us but lacks our complex vitality, our animated dimensionality? It seems the lesson here is that we take on the characteristics of what we worship, or—imagining how much Fox News Trump has watched in the last decade—we are what we eat.

Trump is an image living in an image world. (Madonna now echoes through the cave.) Why wouldn’t he be its leader? Consider the most iconic photo of this election: Trump, ear bloody, fist in the air, “Fight, fight, fight.” Like the photos from McDonald’s, the images of the assassination attempt felt strange. In the days after, many on the internet were crying conspiracy. The assassination attempt seemed staged; it looked a little too perfect. But what if stretching rationality to conspiracy is the result of trying to read a new mode with the old logic? What if we are recognizing traits we associate with performance—drama, comedy, tension, neatness, order—not because the event was manufactured but because reality is integrating them?

I mean this quite literally. There are now more cameras than people in the world. Every moment of our lives exists pregnant with potential to become an image, packaged into a form that can be easily shared and understood. If reality is looking more like reality TV, maybe that’s because it is, in fact, behaving more like reality TV, optimizing for what will make it compelling. Maybe reality—characterized by a signature realism that has long made it feel intuitively different from fiction—is subtly bending toward the camera, much like, say, Trump, in the nick of time, bent to view his image on the Jumbotron, his narcissism saving his life. How suspiciously fitting.

Consider the trajectory of the bullets: half an inch to the left, a big news story but no blood. Half an inch to the right, an American tragedy but the show loses its star. (The writers room shoots itself in the foot.) The bullet’s exact position through time and space? Potentially the most iconic image in political history; Schrödinger’s cat giving the performance of its career as the number of observers multiplies. If this sounds like convoluted, far-fetched, armchair metaphysics, Elon Musk, Trump’s great new champion, put it more succinctly in a tweet from 2023: “The most entertaining outcome (as if we were in a movie) is the most likely.”

After God finishes telling Isaiah about the spiritual consequences for idolaters, the material consequences are articulated. Isaiah asks God how long this idolatry must go on; God responds, “Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.” If, in our species’ cyclical struggle, we are in one of those stages of the treachery of images (René Magritte’s turn in the cave), I take solace in the probability that life will eventually get bad enough for things to get good again. Theoretically, that would require some sort of macro shift in our relationship to images, a mass softening of our focus on their shiny, colorful surfaces so as to regain a third dimension—to resee reality as it is by seeing images for what they are. There is, of course, a less secular term for what I’m describing: miracle.

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Featured image: Stills collaged from WFAA, “Donald Trump works at McDonald's while on campaign trail,” YouTube, October 20, 2024.