Trump: camp king
by popular demand
After I cited Trump’s Wendy Williams Show appearances in my
newsletter, I received request to write about Trump as camp icon. Lucky for you, I already did that over a year ago.
I’ll include an excerpt for the piece I wrote for The Critic after Rihanna’s Super Bowl performance below:
I tried to remind people that Rihanna is not a strong vocalist. Neither does she play an instrument, write her own songs or dance particularly well. Without her good looks, stylists and marketing team, she would likely have gotten stuck amongst the milieu of Amerie, Ashanti, Ciara and other mildly successful pop&B acts of the mid 2000s — who at least could decently sing and dance. Don’t remember them? Case in point.
Thus my relief when scrolling upon former President Trump’s tweet in response to Rihanna’s performance: “EPIC FAIL: Rihanna gave, without question, the worst Halftime Show in Super Bowl history … ” In a later tweet: “Without her ‘Stylist’ she’d be NOTHING. Bad everything, and no talent!”
Never has one of Trump’s hot takes made me feel so vindicated. Just as I’ve been trying to convince people about the truth of Rihanna, I’ve tried to tell them that Trump is not merely a big orange meanie. He is, and always has been, a camp icon.
I’ve known this since I was twelve years old, when I would tape magazine clippings of him on my wall next to others of fierce divas like Wendy Williams, Serena Williams and Mariah Carey. I recognized a flamboyance, a flouting of conventions when watching The Apprentice (and even more so on The Celebrity Apprentice). I stanned Trump the way I did for larger-than-life pop stars like Beyonce. I donned a Trump mask whilst giving a presentation about him in my ninth grade economics class; visited the gaudy, decrepit Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, where his face was pasted onto everything from water bottles to room key cards; and unwrapped with elation TRUMP: The Board Game on Christmas morning of 2005 (I only allow a select few to see the photo of me doing so).
I’m not the only one who has picked up on Trump’s camp sensibility. Over the last five years, pieces have been featured in the Washington Post, the Atlantic and The Week drawing parallels between Trump’s persona and Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”.
Something about this particular tweet — with its brazen disregard for conventional propriety, attention to aesthetics and blatant truthfulness — has commanded the attention of camp enthusiasts, making it harder for them to deny the harsh reality.
“The reason I can’t ever commit myself to hating this man is because he has to be the cattiest, bitchiest, gayest straight guy on the planet,” commented one Twitter user. Others like Glenn Greenwald concurred on how “gay” and “bitchy” Trump’s tweet was.
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Trump has spoken on several occasions about his support for the LGBT community (he once gave a shout out to his gay supporters at a rally, only to snarkily reply, “you don’t look very gay … ” to one who started cheering). There have been several interviews with gays who attended Trump rallies lamenting the intolerance and death threats they’ve received from other gays. “Gays for Trump” rallies have been held.
His appeal to gays has less to do with his statements of allyship, but rather with his persona. Of course, Trump isn’t the only Republican to have achieved gay icondom. Take Ann Coulter (who is also known as the “right wing Judy Garland”). The moralistic fervor against Trump on the part of mainstream gays and most other “normies” is emblematic not only of the bourgeois shift in queer culture post-Stonewall, but also of the general shift toward moral puritanism and political expediency.
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Trump challenges the predominant social imaginary using his campy amoral aestheticism, joining a long line of decadent prophets who have celebrated lies in order to shed light on truth, exalted artifice in order to point to nature, and played with the diabolical in order to open the door to the sacred. The paradoxical, reverse psychology of figures like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, JK Huysmans, Quentin Crisp and Andy Warhol has aimed to take the vapidness of their contemporaries to its extreme, logical conclusion in order to reveal the falsehood of their values. Thus they provoke them to see the truth in its fullness.
It’s no coincidence that Trump’s appearance and style of speaking have been compared to that of drag queens. He’s made a name for “reading”, “spilling tea” about, and “throwing shade” at his opponents, in a manner similar to drag queens. These distinctly camp modes of truth telling are generally associated with those who possess proclivities that are caught between “unnatural” forms of deviance from nature and the near-shamanistic allure of supernatural godliness. This metaphysical tension enables them to see deeply into the truth of human nature to reveal truths that most of us are too afraid to “read”.
“Reading” presents truth enshrouded in artifice, rendering it into a work of performance art. This performance of truth forces one’s audience to reckon with the extent to which ethical (and political) truths are preceded by and derive from aesthetic and metaphysical truths. Trump may be an unethical brute and poor politician — but during these aesthetically and metaphysically challenged times, we need people like him who can “read” the culture for what it is.
The fact is, Rihanna really would not have gotten far without her excellent stylists (and savvy producers and publicists). Trump may be mean. His orange spray tan and unruly hair piece may be laughably artificial and ghastly to gaze upon. Nonetheless, his odd combination of truth-telling and bullying, of fakeness and humour, continue to hold our attention. If only we’d look at ourselves in the gilded, Trump-brand handheld mirror he is putting up to our faces.
Read the whole thing here.