Trump, from Fantasy to Reality

Where politics are made on the basis of images, and fiction becomes reality, election campaigns are sometimes compared to a circus.

In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” one of the best Westerns of all time, an elegantly precise phrase sums up the story: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

In a country where politics are based on images and fiction becomes fact, election campaigns are sometimes compared to a circus, and legends become facts.

It is the world of fantasy, says the writer Kurt Andersen (“Fantasyland”).

But it is a circus with consequences, and few aspirants seem to have understood this better than Donald Trump, who, since his days as a real estate tycoon, has turned everything that happens around him into a show to enhance his image, no matter how negative it may seem.

“He’s P.T. Barnum,” one of his own family members indicated at one point. The comparison is not gratuitous: Barnum was an early 19th century circus impresario, the first millionaire entertainer, known as The Prince of Humbugs, and the man who wrote, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

It’s no accident that the prestigious journalist, Maggie Haberman, chose the description “confidence man” for the title of her Trump biography.

Every fact, good or bad, surrounding the mogul seems to contribute to his persona, at least with his core voters, Andersen noted.

And Trump, who already won the presidency in 2016 based on promises he didn’t keep, is a potential election winner next November — based, again, on a show in which he is the actor, author, producer, publicist and ultimate beneficiary.

“Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals,” because we live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality,” wrote historian Daniel Boorstin years ago, for whom “there is no way to unmask an image. An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”

That’s Trump. A man driven by his resentment of the social and economic establishment that did not accept him despite his repeated efforts to belong. A character who “does not like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to feel the truth” and “sees conspiracies everywhere,” while exploiting the myth of white racial victimhood that is at the core of today’s dominant ideology in the Republican Party.*

Trump is above all an entertainer, one who doesn’t sing, but who performs comedy by insulting his competitors; one who claims to be a victim of the system, although he has used it in more than 4,000 lawsuits and at least two bankruptcy proceedings; a man who sues anyone in the media that question his wealth.

And, just maybe, president of the United States again.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, this quoted passage could not be independently verified.