Seize the Means of Community

trumpandmaga

Preface The logics of formal rationality, geopolitical abstraction, and American exceptionalism became progressively entangled over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries—and, in figures like Donald Trump, they culminate in the idiotization of social reality. What began as a set of highly abstract, formalized tools for thinking the world (automata, deterrence, strategic choice) has, through successive degenerations, been embodied in performative forms of power that no longer simulate rationality, but parody it.

1. The Strategic Turn: Von Neumann and the Formalization of Rationality

John von Neumann stands at the root of this genealogy. In modeling economics, warfare, and even biology as systems of formal logic, he initiated a powerful abstraction: human beings as strategic agents, interaction as games, life as computable pattern. His work birthed game theory and cellular automata, sowing the idea that human behavior could be managed and predicted through mathematical formalism.

This was not merely an intellectual project. It aligned with a national mood: mid-century America, facing the Cold War and commanding planetary scale, needed tools to manage vast complexity without losing control. Game theory offered the illusion of rational mastery, enclosure through comprehension.

2. Cold Abstraction: Kahn and the Thermonuclear Mind

Herman Kahn extended von Neumann’s logic into the thermonuclear domain. For Kahn, even nuclear war could be modeled, strategized, and won, so long as one remained emotionally detached enough to treat mass death as a variable.

This was the next phase of enclosure: not just mapping the game but inhabiting its cold logic, turning apocalypse into a scenario. American exceptionalism here becomes explicit: while the world might burn, the U.S. could endure.

Kahn’s work reflects a shift from isolationism to strategic exceptionalism: America would not simply retreat, but govern global chaos through calculation. Kahn's posture mirrors the national affect: paternalistic, distant, and singular. (Kahn, notably, served as one of the real-life inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove—a parody that may, in retrospect, have undershot the reality it satirized.)

3. Tacit Signals and Social Systems: Schelling and the Interface of Strategy and Behavior

Thomas Schelling softened this logic, introducing the human back into the model. He studied how agents coordinate not just through commands, but through tacit signals, expectations, focal points, and credible threats. His models of segregation, brinkmanship, and commitment mechanisms made clear how micro-decisions could create macro-patterns.

Schelling’s great insight: even limited preferences, bounded rationality, and social signaling could lead to large-scale enclosures. But he left the political stakes largely unexamined. How these enclosures are legitimated, maintained, or weaponized would fall to future actors.

4. Homo Economicus Ascendant: Trump as Strategic Idiot

Trump represents the performative degeneration of this trajectory. He is not the rational strategist von Neumann envisioned, nor the detached planner Kahn embodied, nor even the social modeler Schelling portrayed. He is instead a synthetic product of all three: he preserves the outward form of game logic—competition, leverage, advantage—but strips it of coherence, proportionality, and rational structure. His moves are impulsive rather than calculated, improvised rather than strategic, theatrical rather than credible.

In Trump, all interaction is reduced to “the deal”—a hollow transactionalism that desaturates schmooze-level social reality. Where others used game theory as model, Trump treats it as ontology. There are no deliberative processes, no shared frameworks, no community. There are only wins, losses, leverage, and spectacle.

His America is the idiotized imagined community: a national ego wrapped around grievance, projection, and brute negotiation. And at the core of this performance lies a grotesque metaphor: auto-erotic sovereignty. Power is exercised not as responsibility, but as gratification; diplomacy becomes dominance theater; international relations are reenacted in the register of “if you're famous, they'll let you”— with the world cast in the role of the submissive other. The nation becomes not a commons, but an extension of his libido and his brand.

In Trump, Homo economicus is no longer metaphorical. He is the game—and the only rule is him.

5. Mood and Machine: National Affects as Systemic Drift

This history isn’t just intellectual. It’s affective. Each phase of this genealogy correlates with a national mood:

  • Postwar anxiety seeks mastery (von Neumann)
  • Cold War fatalism seeks survivability (Kahn)
  • Late-century ambiguity seeks coordination (Schelling)
  • Post-2008 decline seeks vengeance (Trump)

What binds these is not ideology, but a progressive enclosure of interpretive frameworks into systems of calculation, control, and strategic egoism. Sociality becomes strategy. Meaning becomes leverage. Deliberation becomes posture.

6. Toward a Counter-Genealogy: Communitaria and the Resaturation of Meaning

The Communitarium Project emerges as a counter-move: not rejecting enclosure per se, but recognizing that it has been captured and idiotized. Rather than surrender social interaction to strategic modeling, the project insists on rebuilding ensembles of mutual interpretation, where meaning is not extracted or computed but co-constituted.

The Communitarium doesn’t long for a lost intimacy or preach anti-rationalism. It proposes a resaturation of schmooze-level sociality through collective deliberation, shared interpretive labor, and contextual moral economies.

In short: to resist the idiotized legacy of von Neumann, Kahn, Schelling, and Trump is not to deny structure or strategy—but to re-embed them in community, where computation serves life, not the reverse.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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For over a millennium, antisemitism has thrived on grotesque fabrications — a conspiracy theory with no authors, accusing a people with no crime. Jews have been portrayed, in different times and places, as shadowy manipulators of power, hoarders of wealth, global puppet masters, and even sadistic child murderers. These lies, devoid of evidence and rooted in fear and envy, fueled pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, and ultimately genocide.

What’s striking, in the eerie mirror of modern American politics, is how these very tropes — long used to justify persecution of an innocent people — now find something resembling flesh in the form of Donald J. Trump. Not as a Jew, of course, but as the embodiment of those phantasmal accusations, made real in the actions and ambitions of a single man.

Trump, a man of immense inherited wealth, has flaunted that fortune while refusing transparency, skirting taxes, and using his position to enrich himself. Where Jews were falsely accused of controlling the press or banking, Trump has actively tried to co-opt the Justice Department, weaponize the IRS, and install loyalists at every level of power — not through secret cabals, but through brazen public acts. He has attempted to delegitimize elections, demanded personal loyalty from officials sworn to the Constitution, and encouraged violence from his base — a demagogue openly courting authoritarianism.

Perhaps most disturbingly, where the blood libel myth falsely claimed Jews murdered Christian children, real-world violence often destroyed Jewish families — including children — as collateral in waves of collective punishment. Trump, by contrast, has demonstrated indifference to the lives of actual children: jailing them at the border, ignoring climate threats, and supporting policies that tolerate mass death by gunfire in schools. These aren’t hallucinations. They’re documented.

This isn’t a moral inversion or an act of rhetorical vengeance. It’s a bitter historical irony. Trump is not what Jews are; he’s what antisemitism imagined them to be, and in that tragic irony lies a warning: those who weaponize myths may one day get their monster, not in the people they feared but in the leaders they adoringly follow.

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What do an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and a modern American president have in common?

More than you might think.

Nearly 3,500 years ago, Pharaoh Akhenaten undertook one of the most radical reforms in Egyptian history: a sweeping religious revolution that centered worship on a single god—Aten, the sun disc—and declared that all other gods were false or obsolete. Akhenaten didn’t just change the official religion; he tried to redefine reality itself, dismantling the symbolic and institutional structures that had organized Egyptian life for centuries.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we find ourselves watching a figure like Donald Trump attempt something uncannily similar—not in theology, but in media, institutions, and the symbolic life of a democracy. His political project has been less about changing policy than about monopolizing interpretation. Truth itself, in this new regime, is increasingly framed as something only he can deliver. Anything outside that channel? “Fake news.”

This isn’t just about power in the usual sense. It’s about enclosure.

What Is Enclosure?

In the history of land and law, enclosure refers to the fencing-off of common land, taking something that once belonged to many and making it the property of a few. But enclosure isn’t just something you do to land—it can also be done to meaning, to ritual, to language, even to reality itself.

In a broader framework we’re exploring (the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework, or SIF), we treat interpretation—the ability to make sense of the world—as something that is socially distributed. Meaning isn’t manufactured in the brain alone; it’s shaped in relationships, rituals, institutions, stories, and habits. Power, in this sense, isn’t just about force or law—it’s also about who gets to say what things mean.

Akhenaten: Enclosing the Divine

Before Akhenaten, Egypt had a sprawling pantheon of gods: Amun, Osiris, Hathor, Ptah, and many others. These gods had temples, priesthoods, regional festivals, and mythic roles embedded in everyday life. Religion was not centralized—it was participatory, layered, and locally embedded.

Akhenaten tried to change all that.

He abolished the old gods, built a new capital city, and declared that Aten was the only true god. More dramatically, only he—Akhenaten himself—could interpret or access Aten. The priesthoods were sidelined. The symbols of old belief systems were scrubbed from monuments. A new iconography appeared: rays of sunlight ending in hands, blessing the royal family.

This was not just a religious reform. It was an epistemic coup—a top-down redefinition of what counted as sacred, real, and true.

And yet… the god Bes—a squat, cheerful deity of childbirth, music, and household protection—never really went away. Even under official suppression, Egyptians still kept amulets of Bes, whispered his prayers, and painted his grin on the walls of their homes.

Trump: Enclosing the Real

In a very different setting, Trump has built his power not by offering a coherent ideology or governing vision, but by waging war on shared reality. Institutions that once offered multiple interpretive frameworks—science, journalism, law, education—have been systematically attacked or delegitimized. Loyalty is prized not for competence but for alignment with a singular interpretive frame.

In this view: – Only Trump can declare what’s real. – All others—journalists, experts, even courts—are liars or traitors. – Truth becomes person-bound, not process-bound.

He doesn’t need to suppress every opposing voice. He just needs to enclose belief—to narrow the trusted zone to a single source.

And yet, here too, there are limits. The household gods of modern life—meme culture, satire, community organizing, independent media, neighborly conversations—persist. Like Bes, they whisper from the corners. They can’t be fully stamped out.

Why This Matters

Akhenaten’s reforms didn’t last. After his death, Egypt erased his name, restored the old gods, and reopened the symbolic commons. His attempt at enclosure was dramatic—but ultimately reversible.

What happens in our own time remains uncertain. But the stakes are eerily similar.

When we lose the ability to share in meaning-making, we lose something more than civility—we lose reality as a commons. And when one figure or faction claims exclusive rights to define the real, we’re not just facing political conflict. We’re facing epistemic enclosure.

Which is why the survival of Bes still matters.

And maybe why your neighbor’s stubborn attachment to shared truth, humor, or old-fashioned decency matters too.

Not everything can be enclosed.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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Previous post

Roy Cohn has become a symbol. Books, documentaries, and political commentary have turned him into shorthand for the ruthless, amoral politics of 20th-century America—a mentor to Trump, a ghost at the banquet of modern conservatism.

But what about Mark Burnett?

Why do we invoke Cohn by name, but rarely speak of Burnett, whose influence is arguably more far-reaching? Why has the architect of a decades-long cultural reprogramming effort—who helped make Trump palatable, power telegenic, and performative branding the default moral posture—remained in the shadows?

The answer isn’t just that Burnett “stayed behind the camera.” His relative invisibility reflects a systemic condition: our culture has trouble seeing the structural operators of spectacle. The very logic that Burnett’s productions normalized—aestheticized personality, agonistic individualism, and content-driven morality—also works to obscure their own production. Burnett didn’t just build the medium. He helped encode its metaphysics.

1. Burnett’s Style Is Designed to Obscure Authorship

Unlike Cohn, whose influence operated through proximity to power, Burnett’s power lay in formatting the visible. His editorial logic turned social interaction into consumable fragments: confessionals, judgments, eliminations, victories. Every “real” moment was framed, stylized, and scored.

But because he worked through spectacle rather than speech, Burnett’s influence is diffuse and deniable. He never appeared in the boardroom. He didn’t sit on the couch in Shark Tank. He constructed worlds and let them run.

We might call this bunraku-style authorship: the hand that moves the puppet is meant to disappear. The illusion is strongest when the manipulation is most seamless.

2. Entertainment Still Isn’t Taken Seriously as Political Infrastructure

Though Burnett helped redefine the cultural meanings of leadership, morality, and success, entertainment journalism rarely connects such formats to political ontology. Serious political analysis still focuses on speeches, votes, policy—rarely on semiotic infrastructures.

But Burnett’s productions taught people how to feel about wealth, competence, failure, and trust. They helped millions rehearse, nightly, a worldview in which:

  • Collaboration is conditional
  • Authority is personal charisma
  • Justice is elimination
  • Attention is value

That is politics by other means.

Burnett has maintained tight legal and proprietary control over his footage. Notably, efforts to release unaired clips from The Apprentice—rumored to contain racist and misogynistic remarks by Trump—have been shut down or stonewalled. Burnett’s refusal to release the tapes during the 2016 election, despite internal pressure, directly shaped what the public was allowed to see.

The New Yorker and Vanity Fair both reported that Burnett and his associates invoked legal threats to keep damaging material out of public circulation. This is not accidental. It is part of a broader practice of controlling the narrative, and thereby, the moral frame.

Burnett didn’t just protect Trump. He protected the sanctity of the format—the illusion that what you saw was real, earned, complete.

4. The Culture Rewards the Performance, Not the Frame

Burnett understood what the audience wanted—and he built formats that gave it to them. Not stories. Not ideologies. Formats. Reproducible shells into which new contestants, entrepreneurs, and egos could be poured.

This formal logic does not invite authorship. It invites replacement. The audience identifies with the performer, not the constructor. That’s part of the enclosure.

And this is the deeper reason Burnett remains unexamined: we were trained to look at the contestant, not the cut. To celebrate the pitch, not the producer. To take the edit as the world.

5. What This Reveals About Hegemonic Power

Burnett’s invisibility is not just a media story. It’s a case study in how hegemonic power works in the 21st century. Not through coercion or direct ideology, but through formats of experience that shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves.

The genius of hegemonic power is that it doesn’t need to argue. It doesn’t announce itself. It structures the conditions of thinking—and then withdraws from view. You feel like you’re just “seeing things clearly,” “responding to reality,” or “being practical.” But you're operating inside a semiotic enclosure that has already defined what counts as clarity, reality, or practicality.

Burnett’s work helped install exactly this kind of enclosure. His shows offered moral schemas—about who deserves to win, what failure looks like, how to recognize value—that didn’t come with slogans or manifestos. They came with music cues, camera angles, and emotional beats. And because they came in the language of entertainment, they were absorbed without resistance.

The most effective ideology is the kind you don’t recognize as ideology.
The most enduring control is the kind that feels like your own free choice.

Burnett’s formats didn’t just entertain. They taught millions to think in ways that served hegemonic interests—to internalize competitive individualism, aestheticized authority, and a morality of merit filtered through charisma and packaging.

What’s erased in this process is the recognition that other ways of thinking—cooperation, deliberation, mutual care, schmooze-level ambiguity—are not just possible but necessary. When these disappear from the horizon of plausibility, we don’t just lose practices. We lose imaginative agency.

6. The Task Ahead

The Communitarium Project is not just about reintroducing community. It’s about restoring the conditions under which community can be imagined. That requires confronting the infrastructures that have made people think they are only as real as their brand, only as worthy as their charisma, only as moral as their visibility.

Mark Burnett didn’t preach. He didn’t propagandize. He formatted.
And we have lived inside those formats for decades.

It’s time to name them.
It’s time to exit the frame.
It’s time to build something else.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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The first post laid out the facts: Mark Burnett created a media empire that changed how millions of Americans think about power, success, and social life. Through Survivor, The Apprentice, and Shark Tank, Burnett helped install a new cultural operating system—one where competition is sacred, hierarchy is natural, and individual branding is the ultimate virtue.

But these shows weren’t just entertainment. They were training grounds—aesthetic regimes that prepared viewers to live in a world where:

  • Community is strategic, not constitutive
  • Talk is branding, not mutual understanding
  • Morality is performance, not relational ethics

This post explores how Burnett’s media logic overlaps with idiotism, possessive individualism, and the obliteration of schmooze, making a case for why the Communitarium Project is a necessary countermeasure.

Idiotism: The Isolated Public Actor

Idiotism doesn’t mean stupidity—it comes from the Greek idiotes, meaning “private person,” one who does not participate in public or collective life. Burnett’s productions offer a vision of sociality where each individual is fundamentally alone, even (or especially) in groups. Alliances are temporary. Trust is naive. Everything is strategic.

In Survivor, contestants form “tribes,” but the moral logic of the show punishes loyalty and rewards betrayal. The winner is the one who plays the others.
In Shark Tank, collaboration is replaced by pitch. The crowd is gone; the entrepreneur stands alone, appealing to concentrated capital.
In The Apprentice, the boardroom is a sacred theater of judgment, and your value is tied to your ability to dominate the task and the edit.

Each show models idiotism as survival. Participation in community becomes a performance for individual advancement. Idiotism, once a pathology of political life, is now a media genre.

Possessive Individualism: From Person to Pitch Deck

C.B. Macpherson’s concept of possessive individualism described the liberal subject as one who owns himself—a self-contained, self-owning individual whose freedom lies in control over his labor and its fruits. Burnett updated this for the 21st century: the individual doesn’t just own himself—he markets himself.

Shark Tank is the clearest case:
Your business idea is inseparable from your persona.
Your success depends on being persuasive, passionate, legible.
Your personal story is an asset class.

Failure isn't just economic—it's existential. You weren’t compelling enough. Your affect was off. You didn’t brand yourself well.

In this schema, human worth is narrativized capital—the capacity to attract attention, investment, or admiration. The self becomes an entrepreneurial project. The world becomes a panel of judges.

The Effacement of Schmooze

Schmooze-level interaction—fluid, informal, collectively sustained communication—is the substrate of real social life. It’s how trust forms. It’s how communities negotiate meaning. It’s how differences get metabolized without being weaponized.

Burnett’s productions surgically remove the schmooze. What remains is:

  • The confessional monologue (performed interiority)
  • The boardroom showdown (staged accountability)
  • The alliance meeting (recorded negotiation with a purpose)

What disappears is:

  • Idle talk
  • Non-instrumental care
  • Deliberation without stakes
  • The ambient improvisation of sociality

The edit eliminates what isn’t narratively useful. This logic seeps into everyday life: if a conversation isn’t “content,” it’s noise. If a relationship doesn’t scale or convert, it’s wasted time. We start living as if we’re being edited.

Branding as Ontology

Burnett didn’t just install new heroes—he installed a new ontology. In his media universe, to be real is to be branded. Visibility is not only power; it is existence.

The unbranded are invisible.
The unedited are irrelevant.
The untheatrical are unworthy.

This produces a moral order in which identity is earned through performance. You must render yourself legible to the dominant gaze. You must signal mastery, polish, affective control. You must be content.

This isn’t just an aesthetic shift. It’s a massive semiotic enclosure. It constrains what it means to be a person, a citizen, a neighbor.

The Communitarium Response

The Communitarium Project is not nostalgic. It doesn’t seek to undo modernity or erase digital life. But it does insist that we cannot build a democratic future on the ruins of schmooze, under the reign of idiotism, and through the eyes of the edit.

That means:

  • Designing spaces for non-instrumental talk
  • Supporting forms of identity that are not performances
  • Reclaiming deliberation as a shared, messy, necessary act
  • Cultivating solidarity that is not based on virality

In short: resisting the Burnett Doctrine by rewiring our social imagination.

In the next post, we’ll ask: Why do we invoke Cohn by name, but rarely speak of Burnett, whose influence is arguably more far-reaching? Why is media production still seen as apolitical, even as it reshapes political possibility? And what does it mean that the most influential ideological operator of the 21st century may have been a TV producer with a theology of spectacle?

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When journalists and critics trace Donald Trump’s path to power, one name gets constant attention: Roy Cohn. The notorious attorney taught Trump how to attack, deny, countersue, and treat every conflict as war. Cohn is infamous, and deservedly so.

But there’s another figure—arguably just as influential—who has remained largely behind the curtain: Mark Burnett.

Burnett didn’t teach Trump how to fight. He taught America how to cheer. As the creator of Survivor, The Apprentice, and Shark Tank, Burnett didn’t just reflect cultural values—he reprogrammed them. He helped install a new interpretive frame, one in which competition is moral, wealth is wisdom, and power is personal charisma.

This is the Burnett Doctrine: a cultural infrastructure for neoliberal individualism, built one episode at a time.

Survivor: Community as Temporary Alliance

Burnett’s American TV career exploded with Survivor in 2000. Based on a Swedish format (Expedition Robinson), the show was retooled by Burnett into a high-stakes spectacle of social Darwinism. The setting was “tribal,” but the message was hyper-individualistic: trust no one, form alliances only to break them, and remember—it’s you against the world.

The show was a ratings juggernaut. The first season finale attracted over 51 million viewers. Burnett was the creator, executive producer, and the architect of its editing style—a style that turned human interaction into a game of advantage, confession, and betrayal.

It’s not that people weren’t trying to form community. It’s that the game punished them for it.

The Apprentice: Turning Bankruptcy into Myth

The Apprentice, launched in 2004, starred Donald Trump as the ultimate business authority. Never mind that Trump’s real-life business record was a trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and branding stunts. Burnett, again as creator and executive producer, crafted the fantasy of a golden-tower patriarch with the power to make or break your future.

The New Yorker reported that Burnett’s team worked hard to engineer this illusion, sometimes downplaying Trump’s financial issues and exaggerating his power and success.

The impact was enormous. The Apprentice was a hit, especially among wealthy and college-educated viewers. Trump became a symbol of capitalist competence—not because he was one, but because Burnett cut him that way.

Shark Tank: Entrepreneurial Morality Play

Shark Tank, which Burnett began producing in 2009 (adapted from Japan’s Money Tigers), extends the Burnett Doctrine into economic morality theater. Entrepreneurs enter. A panel of multi-millionaires evaluates their ideas, their branding, their charisma. Deals are made or denied in real-time.

The show made investing emotional, dramatic, and moral. If you win the sharks’ approval, you’re a visionary. If not, your failure is personal. Your numbers were off. Your story wasn’t compelling enough. Your posture lacked authority.

This is possessive individualism made binge-worthy. Collective economic struggle disappears; all that remains is the isolated individual pitching salvation to capital.

Viewership and Cultural Penetration

All three shows have been commercial and cultural powerhouses.

  • Survivor averaged 20–30 million viewers in its early seasons and still runs today, now past Season 40.
  • The Apprentice won Trump an Emmy nomination and remained a staple of NBC’s lineup until Trump’s 2016 campaign.
  • Shark Tank has run for over 15 seasons and remains popular with both general audiences and educators who use it to teach business.

The influence isn’t speculative—it’s measurable. These shows shaped not only what people watched but how they think about leadership, morality, and social interaction.

Media and Scholarly Commentary

  • The New Yorker detailed how Burnett created “a simulacrum of Trump” and shielded unaired footage that might contradict it.
  • A 2017 study in Feminist Media Studies analyzed The Real Housewives (produced under Burnett’s MGM umbrella) as a platform for showcasing gendered affluence and performative femininity
  • Writers like Emily Nussbaum and Adam Serwer have highlighted reality TV's role in mainstreaming authoritarian charisma and flattening political nuance into spectacle.

Burnett Taught Us to Cheer

Roy Cohn taught Trump how to destroy. But Mark Burnett taught America how to applaud it.

He created television that made domination thrilling, made branding seem moral, and turned group negotiation into cutthroat theatre. These weren’t side effects—they were the ideological payload. Burnett didn’t just ride the reality TV wave. He shaped the cultural grammar that made Trump’s political performance intelligible—and desirable.

We watched. We learned. And we voted.

In the next post , we’ll look at how Burnett’s media style dovetails with broader cultural trends—idiotism, branding, possessive individualism, and the war on schmooze-level interaction—and why the Communitarium Project was born as a response.

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Trumpism isn't old fascism reborn—it's fascism recomposed for the digital age: grievance as policy, spectacle as governance, and symbolic violence scaled without constraint. April 2, “Liberation Day,” marked a shift from trade to retribution, rhetoric to ritual. The enclosures are gone—what comes next?

Donald Trump is not a Nazi.
But Trumpism cannot be understood outside the semiotic architecture that has always underpinned fascist formations—grievance turned into identity, enemies turned into policy, spectacle turned into governance.

What’s different now isn’t just the content of this politics. It’s the infrastructure that allows it to form, spread, and sustain itself—not through ideology or institution, but through affective fidelity and semiotic warfare.

Trumpism is not fascism reborn. It is fascism recomposed, in an age where meaning itself has become a battleground.

I. “Liberation Day” and the Politics of Punishment

In the weeks leading up to April 2, 2025, Donald Trump began referring to that date as “Liberation Day.” Commentators braced for impact. The markets wobbled. Foreign leaders issued warnings. The message was clear: this would not be a policy announcement—it would be a symbolic rupture, a dramatic reversal of course for the American economy and its place in the world.

On that day, the Trump administration unveiled a sweeping set of so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But these were not reciprocal in any meaningful economic sense. They were calculated using a retributive formula: halving the U.S. trade deficit with each country and dividing it by that country’s exports to the U.S., guaranteeing a minimum tariff of 10%. The actual outcome was economically unpredictable but symbolically precise: it declared that the U.S. would no longer play by the rules of interdependence—it would punish those who had, in Trump’s telling, taken advantage of its generosity.

This was not economic strategy. It was ritualized grievance. “Liberation Day” was framed as the moment when America threw off its chains—chains of globalism, of diplomacy, of negotiation—and asserted its dominance through calculated injury.

This logic extends well beyond tariffs. Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, and has revived the fantasy that the U.S. might simply “take Greenland.” These are not idle provocations. They are semiotic incursions: they naturalize the idea that American greatness means surrounding countries are provisional, absorbable, and properly subject to U.S. will.

This is Lebensraum by suggestion—not through military conquest, but through perceptual annexation and symbolic absorption.

II. The Personification of Systemic Grievance

Trumpism does not explain economic decline or cultural disorientation in systemic terms. It translates vague, collective unease into targeted, personified threats.

  • Economic insecurity becomes “the immigrant invasion.”
  • Cultural discomfort becomes “transgender ideology.”
  • Public protest becomes “terrorism.”
  • Journalism becomes “treason.”
  • Education becomes “indoctrination.”

This dynamic is ancient. Across cultures, people have long responded to uncertainty and disorder by attaching blame to recognizable figures: neighbors, outcasts, strangers, “the corrupt,” “the impure,” “the possessed.” In many small-scale societies—documented in anthropological fieldwork—witchcraft accusations arise within face-to-face communities where everyone knows everyone else. In these contexts, symbolic violence operates without anonymity, and its consequences, however unjust, are entangled in ongoing social life.

But even this intimacy never guaranteed justice—only proximity. As societies scale up and stratify, the social distance between accuser and accused increases. Blood libel, emerging in medieval Europe, marks a turning point: here, accusers and targets no longer share daily life or mutual visibility. Jews, confined to ghettos and marked as “other,” could be accused en masse of ritual crimes. The accusation required no familiarity, no interpersonal knowledge—only stereotype and systematized fear.

Trumpism operates at the far end of this arc. In today’s digitally fragmented, media-amplified society, symbolic violence no longer requires any direct contact, shared space, or even basic knowledge of the accused. A trans teenager in a different state becomes the target of a national panic. A school librarian is turned into a symbol of indoctrination by people she will never meet. The tools of accusation have become portable, anonymous, and instantly scalable.

What once took a whisper in the village square now takes a keystroke.

Trumpism didn’t invent this transformation. But it is the most effective political formation yet to emerge from the convergence of social alienation, media saturation, and symbolic dispossession.

III. The Erosion of Tacit Consensus

It’s often said that Trumpism wages war on truth. But this is not quite right. The more telling damage occurs at the level of tacit consensus—the unspoken agreements that allow people to treat certain things as stable enough to act upon together.

These include:

  • That elections are counted and results accepted.
  • That journalists, however flawed, generally report rather than conspire.
  • That institutions may be biased but operate according to rules.
  • That shared words—“fact,” “law,” “citizen”—still mean something.

These forms of consensus are not epistemological commitments. They are social affordances—the minimal conditions of collective coordination.

Trumpism corrodes this not by replacing it with a new framework, but by eroding confidence in every framework at once. It floods the field with counter-claims, mockery, conspiracy, and dismissal. What’s left is fidelity to tribe rather than belief in the world.

IV. The Internet as an Engine of Symbolic Dispossession

The internet did not invent symbolic violence. But it unleashed it—decontextualized it, accelerated it, and freed it from reciprocity.

Historically, symbolic power—especially the power to define, accuse, exclude—was enclosed within institutions. Law, religion, media, and bureaucracy created hierarchies of interpretation and enforcement. This enclosure was exclusionary, but it also created friction and procedure.

Now, that enclosure has collapsed. Everyone has access to the tools, but no one bears the burden of stewardship.

  • Accusation is instantaneous.
  • Amplification is algorithmic.
  • Interpretation is fragmented.
  • Retraction is irrelevant.

What was once gossip or ritual is now broadcast globally and memetically weaponized. What was once a muttered accusation in the village square is now a trending hashtag.

Trumpism thrives in this environment—not as a cause, but as a synchronizing field. It does not need coherence. It needs only affective alignment: fear, resentment, scorn, and pride.

V. Absurdity as Tactical Ambiguity

When Trump says something inflammatory or incoherent, he rarely clarifies. He leaves meaning hovering.

  • “He’s just joking.”
  • “He’s just saying what we’re all thinking.”
  • “He doesn’t really mean it.”
  • “It’s a distraction.”

This ambiguity is not sloppy communication. It is a method of dispersing interpretive responsibility. The audience does the work of decoding—or refusing to. This allows the effects to accumulate—incitement, resentment, polarization—without any one statement being clearly actionable.

This is semiotic saturation: creating a haze in which speech circulates without anchoring, but always in the direction of domination and fidelity.

Conclusion: A New Semiotic Architecture of Power

Trumpism is not merely a political movement. It is a semiotic regime—an emergent structure of meaning-making, loyalty-building, and system-undermining, made possible by the breakdown of older enclosures and the rise of digital symbolic force.

It redeploys ancient tactics—scapegoating, grievance, purification—but under conditions that maximize their reach and remove their limits.

This is not Nazism, redux. It is something adapted to the present: fascism without uniforms, authoritarianism by meme, expansionism through suggestion, repression through ambiguity.

To respond, we must do more than refute it. We must reclaim the capacity for shared interpretation, rebuild spaces of mutual accountability, and grasp what it means to live in a time when symbolic power has escaped its old containers.

April 2 was called “Liberation Day.”

The real question is: liberation from what—and into what kind of world?

#TrumpAndMAGA

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