Abstract
This chapter situates the rise and fall of the Trump presidency within the polymorphous technologies of truth and fakery associated with reality TV and social media: experimentation, verification, spectacularization, affect, and performativity. Drawing from but also complicating Baudrillard’s late diagnosis of the total telemorphosis of social life, I parse the contradictions of “post-truth” media culture, and show how the staging of governance as a reality show in which we are all compelled to play a part activates new mechanisms for contesting Trump’s presidential performance. Recalling Foucault’s notion of grotesque sovereignty as a manifestation of political power that operates in spite of its discrediting as “odious, despicable, or ridiculous”, I ask what bearing Trump’s declining ratings might have on the structural violence of racism, misogyny and market neoliberalism in the United States today.
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Ouellette, L. (2019). Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power. In: Overell, R., Nicholls, B. (eds) Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_2
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