The Shameful Spectacle
On Trumpian Narcissism
Despite everything we know about who Trump is, what he has done, and the damage his administration is currently doing, there was still something shocking about the naked bullying unleashed on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office at the end of last week. Twitter erupted immediately, the hardcore MAGAs beating their chests and revelling in what they took to be an emphatic display of dominance, while almost everyone else stood there staring at them with their mouths hanging open in horror. What this moment made transparent was the brittle authoritarianism of the Trumpian vibe shift and its avaricious mobster mentality, as well, of course, as the administration’s pro-Putin agenda. If such a shameful spectacle can be said to have a silver lining, it may be that it seems to have clarified things for some of the anti-woke warriors who have, until now, been broadly sympathetic to Trumpism.
The first thing that struck many, especially feminist women, about Trump and Vance’s behaviour was how much it looked like the petty, toddler-like tantrumming characteristic of male abusers. MAGAs and assorted populists clearly believe that what happened in the Oval Office was a triumph of masculine strength, and to quote ‘End Wokeness’ —the Twitter account of the alt-right-white-supremacist-QAnon-loon Jack Posobiec—Trump and Vance put Zelenskyy definitively “in his place.” To many others, what the interaction revealed was the fragile, narcissistic structure of patriarchal masculinity, something Trump seems to have been put on this earth to demonstrate. (Dude, not even the tackiest dictators had their monumental statues gold-plated). Following the widespread backlash, MAGAs tried to justify their team’s behaviour by pointing to how Zelenskyy had challenged the Trump/Vance narrative, been disrespectful by not wearing a suit, and repeating Vance’s petulant bullshit about Zelenskyy’s inadequate gratitude. But this serves only to make the point. Demanding suck-up grovelling and being unable to deal with people challenging your version of reality is the mark of a weak, insecure, superficial ego. The very last thing that it is is a sign of real strength.
None of this is to say that this type of narcissistic weakness is benign, or that we shouldn’t be scared by it. The havoc being wreaked by Trump and his chainsaw-wielding cadre is evidence of how un-benign this narcissistic structure is, especially when carried to its fullest extent. The core of this structure is the drive towards absolute invulnerability, or, to put it in Trumpian terms—the terms he inherited from his cold, calculating, authoritarian father—the need to be, or to be seen to be, ‘a winner.’ In Trump’s world, this is a binary, zero-sum game. To be a winner is to ensure that the other guy is the loser. This is the logic of fuck or be fucked, of taking without giving, of the most extreme and rapacious form of male dominance. (And it’s not, of course, remotely accidental that the pussy-grabbing adjudicated-rapist Trump has involved himself in the release of the sex-trafficking Tate brothers). Grandiose invulnerability cannot recognise the existence of others, or their needs and interests, because dealing equitably with others is perceived as weakness in and of itself, an admission of interdependence that undermines the patriarchal ideal of unimpeachable dominance. The trouble with all this is that other people—and external reality—do actually exist, and it’s not an incredibly compelling illustration of your great big-manness to lose your shit every time you’re reminded of that fact.
As last week’s events showed, such an ideal issues in actions entirely lacking in honour or decency. You cannot, moreover, actually negotiate a just exchange or peaceable resolution to a conflict without recognizing the interests of people other than yourself, or whose interests do not simply serve your own. Trump might be vaingloriously fantasising about a Nobel Peace Prize, but lasting peace requires justice, and justice, understood as a balancing of interests, is entirely foreign to Trump’s mafiosi instincts. Growing up in Queens he venerated the local wise guys, and although the accents of the mobsters he now prefers have changed somewhat, his taste for getting what he wants by throwing his weight around hasn’t in the slightest. Trump became famous by performing the spectacle of a successful businessman, and that is good enough for him, because reality is irrelevant as long as he looks like the man on top. But while the MAGA faithful might buy the hype about his business acumen, the facts are he was incompetent, renowned in New York for stiffing contractors and repeatedly going bankrupt. For years he was kept afloat by his dad, before a steady stream of Russian oligarchs showed up in need of a real-estate laundromat. Narcissists of Trumpian proportions don’t have the psychic hardware for actual negotiation and Trump has never been particularly adept at The Art of the Deal. In addition to putting on a show and lying his arse off, what he excels at is the art of extortion.
There are political commentators whose analysis I respect, like Vlad Vexler, who have argued that Zelenskyy played it badly in the Oval Office because he didn’t do what was necessary to get the result he needed. The Ukrainian leader has now been forced to eat humble pie and perform the degrading suck-up routine demanded by thin-skinned, superficial creatures like Trump. Geopolitical realists might commend this as necessary strategy, and I appreciate their point, but from a feminist perspective, it turns the stomach. What Trump embodies is the continuum between grandiose narcissism, a violent but fragile form of patriarchal masculinity, and autocratic political inclinations. In both the personal and political registers, what this structure demands from others is obsequious flattery and dehumanising submission. Elsewhere I have called this ‘the deep structure of gender,’ a narcissistic mechanism in which the patriarchal subject turns everyone else into a mirror whose sole function is to reflect back its inflated sense of self. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, with characteristic acuteness, “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
Mirrors, importantly, are all reflection: we never get to see their own substance. The narcissist’s need for flattering and supplicant supply denies other people their own perceptions, subjectivity and reality, and the truth is that Zelenskyy’s error in the Oval Office was no more or less than refusing to meekly submit to Trump and Vance’s version of events. (The observation that Musk acts as if everyone else is an NPC (‘Non-Player Character’) is also pertinent here.) This narcissistic erasure of the other is the core of Hegel’s ‘Master-Slave Dialectic,’ an imagined encounter in which two subjects engage in ‘a fight to the death for pure prestige’ in order to impose their sovereign self-image on the other. This structure also perfectly describes the trans activist imposition of their bonkers beliefs about sex and gender onto other people, exemplified by the mechanisms of the pronoun protocol and the willingness to bully those who won’t comply. The culture war is a battle between two mirror-image forms of narcissistic reality-bending and the authoritarian domination it creates. The vibe shift is the pendulum swing between the poles.
It is to the credit of some of the actual liberals in the anti-woke coalition that they are starting to express concerns about the evident authoritarianism coming out of the ‘End Wokeness’ contingent. As a radical materialist feminist, I am not principally a liberal, and I don’t believe ideals of autonomy are enough to create a society that resists exploitation and supports full human flourishing. Feminism must, however, necessarily be an anti-domination project, and feminist concerns do coincide with those of liberals when it comes to resisting authoritarianism and autocracy. Hopefully the spectacle of Trump will give some liberals a renewed appreciation of the clear connections between a preening, patriarchal narcissism and authoritarian domination, but that’s not requisite for them to recognise flagrant bullying when they see it, or grasp what’s driving the Trump/Putin autocratic bromance. When feminist women wanted to keep the hell away from Trump in the fight against trans ideology, it wasn’t a matter of wokeist purity politics. It was the sure understanding that such evident patriarchal authoritarianism would be harmful, not only to women’s interests, but to democracy itself. The democratic ideal demands that we respect and relate to other human beings without turning them into mirrors of our own, weak egos, or trying to subordinate them to our own interests or ideas. A gold-plated narcissist like Trump is the antithesis of that ideal.