Trump As the 'Kardashian of Politics'? Daniel J. Boorstin's 'Pseudo‐Event
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Trump as the "Kardashian of Politics"? Cornelia Klecker 215 “Trump as the ‘Kardashian of Politics’? Daniel J. Boorstin’s ‘Pseudo-Event’ and the Rise of Donald Trump” Cornelia Klecker He’s a poor person’s idea of a rich person. They see Ouellette 648). To make his point, Gabler draws on him. They think, "If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that. Why are my ties not made of 400 acres of Daniel J. Boorstin’s seminal work The Image,first polyester?" All that stuff he shows you in his house— published in 1962, in which he establishes the con- the gold faucets—if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy. cept of the “pseudo-event” and identifies it as a Fran Lebowitz (qtd. in Fox) major menace to American culture in the age of In the November 2016 issue of Television and mass communication. Gabler appropriates Boor- New Media, with a Trump presidency looming, a stin’s terminology by calling Trump’s campaign a special section on “The Reality Celebrity of Donald “pseudo campaign” and the candidate himself a Trump” provided a collection of short and insight- “pseudo-candidate” because of the way Trump’s ful commentaries that discussed various facets of success seems mostly based on his status as a celeb- the relationship between Trump and the media rity, or someone who is famous for being famous. (Negra 646). In one of those commentaries, Laurie “Trump is the Kardashian of politics,” he declared Ouellette makes the case that much of the media poignantly (Gabler; also qtd. in Ouellette 648). criticism surrounding Trump too easily dismisses Gabler’s essay reads as a provocative polemic reality television as mindless entertainment instead against the media coverage of politics over the of recognizing how it has long played a role in the past several decades, but his evocation of Boor- “neoliberal ‘reinvention’ of government” (648). stin’s The Image is particularly astute and Among other sources, she brings up Neal Gabler’s deserves further academic scrutiny. Despite the Salon article that essentially takes the media to task fact that The Image was published in the early by blaming the “deeply unserious media and real- 1960s and comments on the (news) media land- ity-TV culture” for the rise of Trump (Gabler; scape of that time, this article will show how his Cornelia Klecker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she teaches American culture, politics, and the news media as well as American literature, film and television. Her present research interests are diversity in scripted US-American prime time television series and contemporary US politics. She is the current treasurer and for- mer secretary of the Austrian Association for American Studies and recently became a member of the ASA Standing Committee on Gender and Sexuality. Her first monograph Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film was published with Universit€atsverlag Winter (2015) and her latest article in television studies titled “Female ‘Lone Wolves’: The Anti-Social Heroine in Recent Television Series” was published in The Journal of Popular Culture (2020). The Journal of American Culture, 43:3 © 2020 The Authors. The Journal of American Culture published by Wiley Periodicals LLC This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 216 The Journal of American Culture Volume 43, Number 3 September 2020 original concept of the pseudo-event and his get elected. As with any victorious candidate, related elaborations on the notion of celebrity as there were certainly numerous factors that con- “human pseudo-events” can help explain one of tributed to Trump’s election win, many of which the most consequential events of the 2010s: Don- a growing body of academic work has addressed1. ald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential Nonetheless, returning to Boorstin’s concepts election. The object of this analysis is not only to helps illuminate important elements that signifi- explore Trump’s ascent to the highest office in the cantly facilitated Trump’s becoming the first United States but also to reveal the media’s com- pseudo-candidate for president and eventually his plicit role in it. The central argument is twofold: very real election win. First, this article will demonstrate how Trump’s cultivation of his (false) public image as self-made BOORSTIN’S PSEUDO-EVENT man and billionaire perfectly encapsulates the human pseudo-event as defined by Boorstin. By AND CELEBRITY CULTURE laying out how the reality TV show The Appren- tice helped cement his persona, it will also become clear that using Boorstin’s theories does not nec- In The Image, Daniel J. Boorstin describes the essarily contradict Ouellette’s plea to consider the ways America built “the thicket of unreality significance of reality television. Second, it will which stands between us and the facts of life” (3). concentrate on Trump’s outspoken role in elevat- He argues that the origins of this unreality are ing “birtherism” from a fringe talking point to a what he coins “pseudo-events,” or, generally, national conversation. Briefly put, birtherism is a news stories that are artificially created (Boorstin conspiracy theory that, contrary to evidence, 11). Since the publication of The Image in the claims that Barack Obama, the first African- early 1960s, many scholars have drawn on and American president of the United States, was not further developed Boorstin’s theories on pseudo- born in the United States and is thus not a legiti- events and celebrity culture. For example, in His- mate president. The reason that special considera- tory of the Mass Media in the United States: An tion is given to “birtherism” is that it occupies a Encyclopedia, David Cassidy’s entry on “Staged unique place in Trump’s lifelong staging of News” refers to pseudo-events and defines them pseudo-events. It is the only one he actively par- (he uses the terms synonymously) as “effort to ticipated in for an extended period of time that control manner of news presentation,” which can was not directly about himself and did not help either come from people that wish to be covered his brand as successful businessman. Furthermore, or from the media itself (624). In the course of while Trump had “teased” the idea of a presiden- their study of pseudo-events and the Philippine tial run many times throughout his adult life, press, Edson C. Tandoc Jr. and Marko M. Skoric mostly for the purpose of self-promotion, it was observe that Boorstin’s elaborations have been his persistent contributions to this conspiracy the- used to analyze many different aspects of media ory over a number of years that gained him many coverage of the government and politicians, such supporters, particularly in far-right circles. This in as the military, campaigns, elections, presidents, turn led him on a path to win the Republican and at least one first lady (35). Among the articles nomination and eventually the presidency. A they reference is Tim Barney’s work that exposes comparison of some of Trump’s media appear- how the 2000 US presidential election played out ances related to “birtherism” to Boorstin’s criti- as a media spectacle. However, he merely evokes cism of Joseph McCarthy will illustrate how they Boorstin’s work on the image without ever truly constituted the staging of the ultimate pseudo- engaging with it (Barney 2332). In his analysis of event. It will also show how these interviews George W. Bush’s famous jet landing aboard an already foreshadowed the problematic media cov- aircraft carrier in 2003, an event so elaborately erage of his presidential campaign that helped him staged that many compared it to scenes from Top Trump as the "Kardashian of Politics"? Cornelia Klecker 217 Gun (1986), W. Lance Bennett builds on Boor- event is successful is solely determined by how stin’s pseudo-event and defines what he calls widely it is reported (11). Interestingly, Boorstin’s “news reality frames,” whose distinguishing char- prime example of a pseudo-event—the interview acteristic is that the media’s participation in these —is something that has become so normal and is staged events is much more active and interven- so frequently used that most people could not tionist than with “regular” pseudo-events (Ben- imagine the news landscape without it. Boorstin nett 174; also referenced in Tandoc Jr. and Skoric argues that unlike, for example, a natural disaster, 35). Similarly, Simon Morgan tests the usefulness the interview is a clear instance where news is of the concept of the pseudo-event for historians being made rather than merely reported (11, 14). but argues in the process, counter to Boorstin’s And it is this making of news—that is, the deliber- contention, that celebrities and celebrity culture ate creation of pseudo-events—that lies at the do not have their origin in the midtwentieth cen- heart of what we might call society’s self-decep- tury but already existed as a phenomenon in the tion. The situation is made even worse by the way centuries before. Similarly, William. Harpine pseudo-events may easily drown out genuine argues that William McKinley’s “front porch events since they prioritize their potential dra- campaign,” which happened already in 1896, was matic effect over their actual newsworthiness and a series of staged events. However, Boorstin’s can be repeated as often as necessary in order to observations on how new technologies of his time be more impactful (39).