Trump the Game

The supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion.
—  Engels - Condition of the Working Class 1845

Everyone understands the job interview. We are called upon to demonstrate our suitability to the capitalist enterprise. Even being called upon is a sacred trust. We know enough to hide any union sympathies we have. The most suitable of us have killed those sympathies long before we begin the interview. We enter the interview out of need. We comport ourselves as ever-willing providers of surplus value. But who wants to watch that?

To qualify as entertainment the enterprise, with its cogs and assemblies for the proper acquisition of labor, must manifest itself in the persona of the boss. And the pool of applicants must drop their chorus masks of undifferentiated labor power and put on personality. In reality they are always one. They always end up alone. By slaying their competitors they complete their renunciation of the working class. But there will be no induction into the owning class. Whatever the prize for their victory it will not be ownership of the means of production. They may become sacrifice or they may usurp the master. At that point it only matters to the story runner.

Trump's main concern with declaring himself was giving up his Apprentice franchise. Giving up being the boss, the simulacrum of the capitalist. In the world of the show he was the totally free subject, unquestioned, magnificent. Why accept a demotion to candidate? And that is why his campaign has looked all wrong. He isn't running for president, he is president. Fundraising, ad buys, deference to the press, all of it, to what end? I have suspected since his announcement last June that he didn't actually want to be president. I failed to recognize that he had already ascended to that role.

But the boss or the president is only that if there is someone over whom to exercise power. You can't be the boss if you can't fire someone. You can't be the president if you can't throw someone out of the country. That is why the central ritual of the Trump rally is expulsion and assault. The contestants on his show, the aspiring masses at his rallies, profess to be nothing. Their identities have been subverted by others. By pledging fealty to the boss they share his power, they are granted license to reclaim territory which has been lost to political correctness and to trade agreements.

The structures of authority which they wish to restore are embodied in the idea of the wall. Of course there are already walls everywhere. But they don't give a sense of protection because those attending a Trump rally are, like the rest of us, excluded by those walls. If they were truly inside the walls they would have no incentive to attend Trump University, to be contestants on a reality show, or to line up for admission to a stadium to watch their president.

The wall they want is a barrier between themselves and other members of the working class who they can only see as competitors and enemies, not as allies. In the eyes of capital we are all equal as sources of surplus value. It will play the game of setting one against another but it cannot avoid the fact that, once the numbers are in the ledger, nation, gender, and all other marks of distinction are gone. As people the bourgeoisie are as stocked with prejudice as the rest of us. They may even look askance at the suspect manners of Mr. Trump. But as capitalists they know that M = M.

And that is why Trump can campaign against Wall Street. Capital undermines all social structures that don't serve it directly. Whether here or abroad its prescription for us is austerity and insecurity. For the masses who have forsaken any kind of class solidarity Trump can lay all of this at the feet of Clinton and the Democratic Party. Even Bernie Sanders cannot change the fact and the perception that the Democrats serve capital. An interval of eight years since the last Republican administration is also not long enough to erase the memory of who that party serves as well. All mere candidates are now naked.

Left alone is the boss. The limits of his appeal are glaring but enough to control a party that has been hollowed out by its own contradictions. His virtue has been to simplify the lullaby of money and domination for those who wish nothing more than to continue their sleep in the bosom of power.