Click Bait Celebrity Politics
I have been writing a fair bit about the aftermath of neoliberalism and its effects on governments and modern politicians. Click bait celebrity politics. The fact that now, more than ever, our politicians are basically just ‘talking heads.’ Familiar faces captured by the media’s cameras espousing sound grabs about popular issues. If you want to see how far this evolution has progressed take a look at President Donald Trump’s cabinet in America. Many of these prominent political figures are former TV and social media celebrities. This is the future made present in all its crassness. This is the long standing trend of style over substance carried to the nth degree. It is a very American thing.
“He has plucked two Fox News stars from their airwaves – Sean Duffy for Transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. For the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has turned to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known for his health show that aired for 13 seasons. His pick for the Department of Education, meanwhile, is Linda McMahon, who co-founded and built a professional wrestling and entertainment empire alongside her husband.
Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, had a six-year run hosting a Fox News show. Tulsi Gabbard, his selection for director of national intelligence, was a contributor on the conservative network after she left Congress and once subbed for its former primetime host Tucker Carlson.”
Trump 2.0 Jam Packed With Right Wing Celebs
The disengagement with traditional politics by the American population is legend. The success of Donald Trump as populist demagogue is based on his reality TV celebrity status during the long running show The Apprentice. It therefore makes sense that he would extend this success via incorporating other screen celebrities in his government. Empty headed crassness knows no bounds in the USA. Congress, on the GOP side has been cast into silence and blanked out, whilst the TV stars make government for the adoring right wing fans. Photoshoots of cosmetically enhanced Kristi Noem out front of tattooed prisoners packed into cages in the El Salvador gulag are so Trump in their disgusting nature, which mixes human suffering with selling sexiness in that weird American way. It reminds me of the lurid covers of those titty magazines back in the day – The Picture, Truth, and such like.
“Scantily clad cover girls, titillating titles and cheap thrills are just part of the riveting tale of Australia’s fast-paced pulp fiction industry of the 1940s and 50s, set to be revealed in a new exhibition at the State Library of NSW from 7 February 2015.
‘Pulp Confidential: Quick and dirty publishing from the 40s and 50s’ presents a behind-the-scenes look at the rise and fall of Australia’s tough pulp publishing market through a rich and lurid collection of vintage ‘pulp’ cover art, crime story illustrations, gags and original comic strip artwork held in the State Library’s archives.”
American Celebrity Politics
Disengagement feeds the aspirations of fascist authoritarian governments, as too many folk don’t pay enough attention to what is really going on at the top. The grift, corruption, and erosion of liberties which invariably occur under these regimes. Americans (at least half of the voting public) have wilfully chosen a crooked President. Very few could honestly say that they did not know the character of Trump. I think it is the result of a malaise of distrust with the entire political system in the United States. That these folk thought they would vote for this guy in the hope they would get more out of him than the alternative. Electing a mob boss crime family with links to the Russian mafia, who is a compulsive liar strikes most of us in the rest of the world as un-American – in the sense of what we have been fed by Hollywood over the years.
America Admires Bad Ass
In fact, Americans collectively admire ‘bad ass’ things and people. American celebrity politics embraces glitz and glam to the detriment of old fashioned stuff like integrity and telling the truth about things. Better the Pimp you know! You could make a case for a historical situation where Americans have been lied to about important stuff since the very beginning and that they are all hopelessly lost on this score. Christianity is basically a big lie, as are all religions. Ancient historians and biblical scholars are now telling us that Saint Paul is a fictional character and all his letters too. If you grow up surrounded by the people you trust, parents etc, telling you stories about a blue eyed Jesus performing miracles like coming back from the dead but nothing like this exists in the real world you can get bitter and twisted about stuff. A nation built on slavery and stealing all its land from the Indigenous inhabitants has a pretty f***** up way of looking at things if it claims it is a Christian nation. I don’t think there are any stories about Jesus disenfranchising and murdering native peoples or enslaving anybody either. The whole Christian thing is such a distorted weird fiction that confusion and malaise are not unexpected outcomes really. Click bait celebrity politics is unsurprising in light of the American journey.
George Washington Slaver & Property Developer
Think about George Washington whose motivation was property development and wresting land control away from British masters. Washington is made out to be the great liberty bringer to all Americans. Of course he was a large slave holder and the revolution did not bring any great liberty for slaves, indentured servants, Indians, and women, rather it was an exchange of their master’s political orientation from British colonial subjects to new Americans. The hoop la celebrated on the 4th of July was a mere realigning of propertied white male power. American propaganda poisons any semblance of understanding the historical truth.
The Rise Of Ugly America
The arising of Donald J Trump on the political and global stages has been a shock for many around the world. The ugliness of this American in terms of his racism, avarice, misogyny and courting of extremism is unlike what the US has projected internationally for decades and maybe centuries. The rise of the ugly American, I call it. Soft power has been put in the bottom drawer. Instead we get lurid click bait celebrity politics with fake tits on old broads cosmetically enhanced, gold leaf glitz in the Oval Office, ICE agents illegally arresting Americans off the streets, attempts to bully prestigious universities and law firms, and a raft of anti-government slashing of jobs and whole departments. All of this stuff is against the law and involves bending rules like dried spaghetti, which ends up broken into lots of irredeemable pieces. Hundreds of court actions in protest at what this administration is attempting to do have been launched. Cries of ‘Constitutional crisis’ are heard left, right and centre. America is riven with countless conspiracy theories, I think, in response or reaction to the decades of secrecy by its governments. Is it any wonder that its citizens get all their information from TV shows, movies, and the Internet? A mish mash of bits of fact, lots of fiction and loads of misinformation. Russia loves the collective American psyche and has been sewing seeds for its destruction for decades. The online social media phenomenon has served its purposes extremely well. Russian bots fomenting polarisation has been a feature of the second and third decades of the 21C.
Sadopopulism
Click bait celebrity politics has arisen in response to the foul mood of the day. Prof. Timothy Snyder calls it sadopopulism.
The desire by some to see others suffer more is a nasty cultural manifestation. The extremist nature of Americans and their love of bad assness does not inspire those of us looking on from afar. Trump and MAGA demonising immigrants and their supporters look on as human beings are treated like animals and put into cages. The handmaiden to this is Kristi Noem, our cosmetically crafted babe, like a magician’s assistant in revealing costume for the cameras. It is a sadopopulist show for the right wing folk in the suburbs. Similarly students of higher education are arrested by masked agents for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. These are elites, as are their teachers, and they deserve punishment according to the Trump regime. Making a public display of this kind of power is a fascist stratagem, as it sews fear among the populace. Keep your head down and your mouth shut! These are the messages from a police state.
“ICE grabbing people off the street in America and transporting them to El Salvador, where they are imprisoned, is completely illegal. The Trump regime have made up laws to facilitate this gross malfeasance. Everything about Trump’s El Salvador solution is illegal. There is no due process occurring, no presumption of innocence and no trials. Basically, if you have a tattoo and look like you are from Central or South America you are in trouble.”
Doomsday Cult
The Trump 2.0 era is just like the cover of a dirty magazine. Replete with TV celebrities, babes, conspiracy theorists, extremist whackos and nutjobs. Bad ass is the negative aspiration which lies at the core of its populism. Pete Hegseth sharing bombing plans of Yemen with buddies via a group chat bragging about it like a little boy at school behind the bike shed. The stupidity and immaturity of Trump and his ilk are not what is so shocking, rather it is that these fools and evil scumbags are in power at this level. If you have ever had fears for the end of the world as we know it? Well, we are seconds way from midnight on that doomsday clock. The likelihood of these idiots doing something cataclysmic is pretty damn high.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©HouseTherapy
