How People Make Sense of Trump and Why It Matters for Racial Justice
Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Vol. 8, No.1/2, 2018, pp. 107-136. How People Make Sense of Trump and Why It Matters for Racial Justice Will Penman Doug Cloud+ Scholars, journalists, pundits and others have criticized the racist, anti-queer, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xeno- phobic rhetoric that pervades the Trump campaign and presidency. At the same time, commentators have expended a vast number of words analyzing Trump’s character: why does he do the things he does? We ask, how do the latter (analyses of Trump’s character) help explain the former (Trump’s racist statements)? Through a close rhetorical analysis of 50 diverse examples of Trump criticism, we reveal four prevailing characterizations or “archetypes” of Trump: Trump the Acclaim-Seeker, Trump the Sick Man, Trump the Authoritarian, and Trump the Idiot. Each arche- type explains Trump’s racism in a different way, with significant consequences for social critique. For example, the Trump the Idiot archetype dismisses his racist statements as a series of terrible gaffes, whereas Trump the Authori- tarian explains them as an actualization of white supremacy. We trace the benefits and tradeoffs of each archetype for resisting white supremacy. Keywords: Donald Trump, white supremacy, identity, rhetoric, archetypes Read enough critiques of Donald Trump—the president and the candidate—and you’re likely to be struck by three things: 1) there are a great many of them, 2) they expend significant effort analyzing Trump’s character as a way of explaining why he does what he does, and 3) they are repetitive—certain characterizations surface over and over and become familiar as explanations (e.g., the idea that Trump does what he does because he is an incompetent idiot).
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