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Trump’s Family Romance and the Magic of Television

[He] is nothing if not a televisual thinker.

—JAMES PONIEWOZIK

In The Art of the Deal, Trump recalls the day of Elizabeth II’s coronation, which, in his telling, becomes a kind of televisual primal scene. Trump was seven years old at the time. Recalling it over thirty years later, he says:

I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he’d say. “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” My mother didn’t even look up.¹

Trump tells the story to account for his love of pageantry, which he claims he inherited from his mother. It is from her, not from his practical father, that he learns to gild the surfaces of his properties, he says. His way of telling the story suggests he identified with his mother’s refusal to yield that day to his father. But the story relates something else, too: the moment Trump imprinted on TV, which was the source of his mother’s power that day, and with what consequences.

One obvious consequence is that Trump became a TV celebrity forty years later, and by then TV, which had been in its infancy in 1953, was all grown up. It became Trump’s standard of measure. For him, success in that medium is success as such, as he made clear when he mocked the TV ratings of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor on The Celebrity Apprentice, and gloated that Robert Mueller’s less than telegenic appearance before the House in 2019 was reason enough to nullify his entire report.²

But television is not just a yardstick for Trump. The story in The Art of the Deal suggests a deeper attachment, evidenced later by his behavior in public office. Over sixty years after Elizabeth’s coronation, he is president, and he spends hours every morning watching television. Is it because he loves the news? Yes, the Fox Channel version. Is he just keeping track of his numbers? Assessing the coverage of him and his followers? Yes, that too. But he is also in a way spending the morning with his mother, or so his childhood story of the 1953 coronation suggests. For Trump, TV is a site of maternal attachment, dating back to the day his longsuffering mother took time to watch a royal coronation on TV and was emboldened for once to refuse to yield to her browbeating husband.³

Trump’s mother expressed no anger that day; she did not even look up then, keeping her eyes on the TV screen. But Trump’s TV-watching now is accompanied by rage. Why? While commentators try to explain his temper tweets with reference to specific stories being broadcast on Fox, the rage often exceeds any such content. What may explain it is this: if television is a site of maternal attachment for Trump, then watching it reenters him also into his father’s abusive dismissal: “For Christ’s sake!”

The story told in The Art of the Deal is not only primal scene, however: it is also family romance. In the Freudian family romance, a young child of about Trump’s age at the time fantasizes that the drab people he lives with are not his real parents and that his real parents are rich and important, royals or nobles who are surely still looking for him.⁴ In Trump’s version of the Freudian fantasy, which is televisual, his mother does not simply watch Elizabeth get crowned on TV. In the watching, and in his watching her watching, Trump’s mother in Queens becomes his mother, the queen!

This is the real magic of television for Trump: it exposes the dingy life of a browbeaten housewife and her browbeaten son as a terrible mistake, it transfers his Scottish mother’s maternity to the queen and this remakes Trump into the lost offspring of a royal.⁵ The fantasy validates the child’s grandiosity and corrects the terrible injustice of his obscurity as Elizabeth’s coronation becomes virtually his.

But what happens, psychologically, when the Queens housewife becomes the English queen? Does that miracle free the son of paternal judgment or freeze him further into it? “Enough is enough,” Trump recalls his father saying that day. For the younger Trump, therefore, enough is never enough: excess will later be his trademark. Trump will brush off the bankruptcies, and, when he fails as a businessman, he will play one on TV. But he is frozen into his father’s judgment nonetheless. If “they”—the royals—are all “a bunch of con artists,” then so too will be their long-lost son: Trump. Apple, meet tree.

This means that when, during the 2019 House impeachment hearings, the Stanford constitutional law scholar Pamela Karlan made light of the fact that Trump named his son with a word that is also a royal title, she lit on a detail that mattered. Like a loose thread when pulled on, that detail helps to unravel a larger fabric.

“Contrary to what President Trump says, Article Two [of the Constitution] does not give him the power to do anything he wants,” Karlan said. “And I’ll just give you one example that shows you the difference between him and a king, which is the Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he cannot make him a baron.”⁶

The son, Barron, was by then thirteen, much older than seven, the age of his father in 1953 when the seed of the child’s name was planted by the coronation of the queen, (as) his mother. But, at the age of thirteen, the son was still a child all the same, and Karlan was criticized for what Republicans claimed was her outrageous violation of an innocent. Although other actual innocent children at that moment were being held captive in camps at the U.S./Mexico border, Karlan apologized. But for what, exactly? Saying his name?

Karlan’s target was not the child but the father, who chose a name for his son that had actually been one of his own. Barron was Trump’s longtime alias, starting in the 1980s, when he disguised his voice and posed on the telephone as John Barron, his own spokesman, to manage press coverage of his activities. Remarkably, it worked.⁷ Today’s outrage at Karlan’s name-saying achieves what Trump’s use of the name did then. Deflection, now, and deception, then: both block further inquiry.

A few months after the impeachment hearings, on Twitter on March 28, 2020, Daniel Drezner referred to Karlan’s reference to the son as an “offhand mention,” meaning to note how manufactured was the outrage that followed it. It was manufactured, he was right.⁸ But it is also a thread worth pulling on. When Trump named his child Barron, he was living out his family romance; unable to make the child a baron, he could nonetheless ennoble him with the name. But it is not just that. The name is a loose thread in the politics of America’s romance with celebrity and flirtation with royalty, an expression of many Americans’ fundamental longing to crown their presidents and let them be royals.

When in April 2020 Trump persistently misspelled on Twitter the name Nobel—as in Nobel Prize—as Noble, he was mocked for the error (he was meaning to talk about Pulitzer Prizes) and for the misspelling, but no one picked up on the loose thread here: his penchant for nobility. Nor was the irony later noted when he was sickened by Covid-19 that this was a corona virus and his illness, therefore, the dark double of the coronation he had long sought.

America’s royalism was noted by Thomas Jefferson, who said the Constitution “wears a mixed aspect of monarchy and republicanism.” He neglected the despotism that was also constitutionally entrenched in the 3/5 clause of the Constitution.⁹ The result was a mix of monarchy and republicanism, with a big dash of tyranny, that still makes mischief and misery in American political culture, from Kennedy’s Camelot to Trump’s daily performance of l’état c’est moi (in which he decries the “terrible things done to our country,” by which he means himself), to the “overpolicing” and criminalization of people of color.¹⁰ The personal yearning by some Americans to rule monarchically and the political yearning by many to be so ruled, even as many others, still somehow scenting in the political fabric the faint fragrance of freedom and equality, strive ever more determinedly toward them—these make up the rhythm and rhyme of American political culture.

The hope of Jefferson was that the spirit of republicanism would triumph over the constitutionally entrenched relic of the monarchical form; others hoped despotism, too, might be similarly vanquished. Instead, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the power of the federal government’s legislative branch has been diminished and the executive increased by a series of emergencies (Depression, WWII, 9/11) and, since 2017, by a president who would be king and who has gone out of his way to feminize the legislative branch, especially the House, whose speaker, since 2018, he calls Nervous Nancy, though we have never seen her nervous.¹¹ Jefferson and others saw the representative and participatory virtues of republicanism as manly, so they might have been especially alarmed by the feminization of the legislative branch (though of course they would have been surprised, even appalled, to find a woman serving as speaker; but that is not the only detail of the moment that would appall them, surely). Pamela Karlan’s attempted witticism at the impeachment hearing stumbled on all of this. And that makes her little joke an act of feminist criticism.

Feminist criticism is different from feminist theory.¹² Where feminist theory aims to be systematic, feminist criticism is more nimble and more pointed. Where the horizon of feminist theory is remote and its apparatus weighty, feminist criticism works from the particular to the general, not the other way round. Feminist criticism is oriented to the time of now while connecting to larger patterns, contexts, and timelines. It proceeds by observation and offers readings of texts or events, not articulations of principles or deductions of norms, though its readings are compassed by feminist theory’s normativity.

Both feminist theory and criticism document gender inequalities in the hope of correcting them, and both move beyond feminism’s main goal—to empower women—in order to attend more broadly to feminization. Feminization is the complex array of discourses and practices that reproduce, secure, and advance hierarchical divisions of sexuality, gender, race, ability, indigeneity, ethnicity, lineage, and class that make the world legible, hospitable, and accessible to some more than others. Feminization is a device of disorientation and a practice of desensitization. It works at a sensorial level by demeaning and degrading whole swaths of populations, outlooks, and behaviors, demanding their submission, compliance, or silence, and exhorting others to join the circle of bullying. Feminist criticism has its own unique way of responding to feminization, which is pressed daily into the service of a kind of shock politics. The task of feminist criticism, and this is what makes it particularly well suited to the moment, is to sensitize the senses and hone the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals. Its penchant for the particular is part of its power. It focuses our attention on the individual and the idiosyncratic. It is drawn to the loose threads of psychological and collective life, not to the well-worn fabrics or fabrications in which nations are wrapped to hide their shortcomings and deflect critical scrutiny.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) gives us the best account of shock politics we have, connecting it to what she calls “disaster capitalism,” but she does not consider shock’s longstanding partnership with misogyny.¹³ A specifically feminist analysis of shock remains to be done. That work could be done as theory or as criticism. I choose the latter in this collection because I believe in the importance now of the grounding power of close reading and the wild connections of loosened threads to offset the shock politics program of disorientation and desensitization. The hope is that grounding counters disorientation, that wild connections resensitize the senses, and that, together, they help energize a joyful citizenship that refocuses attention on the urgent tasks at hand.

Exhaustion is a feature of shock politics, the deliberate product of disinformation. In the last twenty years, subjected to (dis)information overload under both Bush II (shock and awe) and Trump (who you gonna believe?) Republicanism, we have become enmeshed in a shock politics of disinformation that disorients and destabilizes democratic institutions, practices, and habits, aggravating inequalities of all sorts. Shock now is the impact on citizens of living in a world in which the real and the fake, the authentic and corrupt, the public-minded and the self-serving can be hard to distinguish, and disorientation rules. Deprived of once reliable—not necessarily indisputable or incontestable, but reliable—points of orientation, like news reporting or CDC guidance, and saturated by noise and accusations every day at every minute, people are thrown back onto themselves, and the result is, at best, solipsistic confusion and, at worst, destructive conspiracy-thinking and paranoid politics. Worse yet, the disorientating powers of shock make (trans) national publics vulnerable not only to the predatory privatizations of Klein’s disaster capitalism but also (as she herself notes) to the routine corruptions of would-be oligarchs.

Trump himself has long been a practiced purveyor of shock. Here is his rather pithy statement of his version of the shock doctrine: “‘You know what solves it?’ Trump said of America’s alleged troubles during a 2014 interview. ‘When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.’”¹⁴ There is something going on in that chuckle, which is humorless. It is a distancing technique. And “you’ll have riots” means “I will watch them on my TV in my tower.” (Or, as in June 2020, in the PEOC, the president’s emergency bunker in the White House, as occurred during the protests of the police killing of George Floyd.) And “total hell” is the prelude to what Naomi Klein calls the tabula rasa, the clean canvas on which disaster capitalism wants to paint our future. Trump, a brass-knuckled New York City developer, several times bankrupted before he became a reality TV personality and then a reality TV president, perfectly embodies the blend of thuggery, grift, irresponsibility, and chaos that is shock politics.¹⁵

He is also famously thin-skinned, with no sense of humor, it is said. This brings me to the last feature of feminist criticism: its enlistment of humor to crack the surface of the serious. Walter Benjamin noted nearly a century ago that laughter enables thinking by rendering the familiar strange.¹⁶ Nowadays, however, our task may be a bit different: to find in the strange something familiar by way of which to orient ourselves and to relieve the exhaustion of the moment by generating through laughter the energy and insight we need to combat shock politics.

If Pamela Karlan’s joke about Barron/baron caused such consternation, it is because she did not just call the son by his name, she named us by her call: a call to engage civically as democratic citizens against the royal privilege of self-exemption while doing the work of constant interpretation, repair, and vigilance that are the mainstays of feminist criticism and democratic citizenship. This is the legacy left to a once slaveholding country that entrenched monarchy/patriarchy at the center of a republican constitution designed to take the place of a once supposedly rightful monarch.

Of course, the fraught focus in December 2019 on the named son distracted attention from the Cassandra-like truths uttered by Karlan at the time in her effort to make totally clear during the impeachment hearings the problem with permitting an American president to extract a quid pro quo from Ukraine under duress: “What would you think if, when your [state] governor asked the federal government for the disaster assistance that Congress has provided, the President responded, ‘I would like you to do us a favor. I’ll … send the disaster relief once you brand my opponent a criminal.’”¹⁷

As we learned just three to four months later, in the spring of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, this was no crazy hypothetical. He might extort a different quid pro quo from state governors, but a quid pro quo it was, all the same. Instead of asking for dirt on an opponent, he might say, your ventilators will arrive when you learn to say thank you and stop criticizing the president in public. Show some gratitude: “All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative. I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true. I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job.” In March 2020, Trump said about Governor Cuomo, at that moment struggling from behind, finally, to prepare New York State for a vast public health emergency, “It’s a two-way street, they have to treat us well also.” About all the governors working with the federal government to prepare, he said, “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”¹⁸

This is not just Trump’s much-vaunted transactionalism. Feminist criticism sees it more clearly: it is a move in the game of patriarchal domination, in which it is no surprise that a female governor loses her name: “We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan,” as if saying Governor Whitmer’s name might grant her dignity or agency. It might.¹⁹

On behalf of their constituents, some of the governors submitted, a bit like feudal lords to a king bent on usurping their independence. They offered up some positive-sounding things about the president or the federal government as they scrambled in a still open and competitive marketplace, often forced to bid against each other, and even against the feds, to acquire much needed ventilators, masks, gloves, and gowns for their essential workers. Governors Cuomo (New York) and Newsom (California) were the first to oblige. Their words, just some of their words, were immediately harvested for a TV ad promoting the president.²⁰

It is hard not to think this was the purpose all along, to extract praise to be used as “content” for marketing purposes. This is what the public relations people of rapists and harassers do when queried about accusations, and it is what their lawyers do in court: offer up any seemingly friendly text or apparently genial conduct later by the victim as evidence that coercion did not occur when in fact it is just as likely evidence it did. And is still. The tactic has often worked in the past. Ask Harvey Weinstein. But it may not always do so in the future. Ask the brave women of the #MeToo movement, who wove together the tattered threads of their experiences and made a social movement out of them.

The practice of feminist criticism takes inspiration from these and many other women, real and fictional. My favorite in the latter group is Homer’s Penelope, who knows all about tattered threads. In the Odyssey, as Penelope waits and waits for Odysseus’s return, she weaves a shroud by day and unravels it nightly. Unraveling means finding a loose thread and pulling on it until the fabric comes undone. That requires a certain attention to detail. In a way, this book is a collection of loose threads that I have drawn out of the tight fabrics of shock politics’ practices of social domination. The hope is to contribute to a great unraveling. When we are made to doubt our senses, feminist criticism recommits to them, with doubled focus and renewed attention to detail. Penelope unraveled her fabric for years, every night, in a bid to preserve her independence. Her indefatigability is another of the traits that make her an important model for feminist criticism now. Later in this volume I will suggest that we see her, anachronistically, as the first in a long line of gothic heroines, shut up in castles, country retreats, aristocratic manors, beautiful houses, or terrible rooms, isolated from others and left with only their wits and intelligence to save them from men who might be monsters. Then as now, the monsters of the moment are not extraordinary men, just those privileged enough that they are accustomed to having their say and doing their thing, and all of them well-practiced in the politics of shock.