Emmanuel Trump is the label for a familiar political ritual: turn one person into a symbol, keep everyone furious, and let outrage replace judgment.
In this essay
Emmanuel Trump and the Two Minutes Hate
Get Out of Road-Rage Mode and Judge Rationally, For All Our Sakes
All these behaviours of Trump’s that you find so objectionable are behaviours his opponents are also doing – and then some – but which do not outrage you. This is a problem because it is not an issue of principle, but rather of hate, and normalized hate is a BFP (Big Fucking Problem). Calling someone a Nazi is a pretty momentous thing to say, especially on CNN, and MSNBC, and every screen the algorithm feeds you.
That’s a downright abusive thing to do to a person. In fact, as I recall, a certain ideology demanded we collectively recognize that words are the equivalent of actual, physical violence; if calling someone a pedophile or a Nazi – without any actual, factual reason to believe so – doesn’t qualify, what does? This being awful does not make many of the criticized behaviours okay.
Though Trump, at least, has stayed Trump throughout; he’s been exactly the same guy, familiar to us all, for 50 years, though not all of them with such powerful enemies.
He does push boundaries. Not “invade Poland” or “open gulags” kind of pushing boundaries, though. None of the actual actions of the man – despite the objection of many a pearl-clutcher – have been particularly outrageous on its own merits, allowing for aforementioned Trumpisms.
The comparison to history’s worst regimes is not merely inaccurate; it muddies our ability to distinguish among kinds and degrees of wrongdoing. If every provocation is fascism, every dispute is a constitutional crisis, and every opponent is Hitler, language stops doing it’s job (to communicate ideas from one person to another) outside of giving form to righteous outrage. As mentioned in earlier posts, righteous outrage is very much chemically addictive.
Now available at the push of a button. It is that surge you get in a moment of blind road rage; you feel big, you feel strong, you feel powerful. Then the screen tells you that you are a “good person” for road-raging in the form of “likes”. Trump is not Hitler, nor a fascist, nor a Nazi.
As a pedagogical exercise, why not find the top five actions – not things he said or mused about, but things he has actually done – that you feel define Trump as evil?
This is a rational man’s test, superior to trading superlatives. List the policies, executive actions, legislation, and measurable consequences. Apply the same standard to another president. Separate what was cruel from what was merely conventional, what failed from what was simply disliked, and what was genuinely unprecedented from what was spun that way by a media that is nakedly bias.
A complete ledger would include policies his critics rarely volunteer: the First Step Act and its sweeping criminal-justice reforms making a huge difference to young black men especially; permanent federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities; Opportunity Zones; historically low Black unemployment; a lot of support directed toward veterans and homeless veterans; child-tax measures; Operation Warp Speed; and continued large-scale foreign aid, despite major changes to the institutions delivering it.
I’m going to also add the capture of Maduro to the list because fuck that guy. Each of the above, its scale, and its effects should be independently checked. They are actions, not personality traits, and they are more than relevant to the evaluation.
The above aren’t anything he had to do. If he had no care for the plight of the common man, why put time and energy into these when he could be out grabbing pussies? He’s also not a very good fascist that let’s the mainstream media demonize him very, very publicly. His actions are not the acts of a brutal racist oligarch who wants to rule as king. They’re actually progressive policies. Not talk, but actionable policy, all to significant positive effect.
A fair ledger must also contain the other column. The formal use of family separation in immigration enforcement, even if it had been practiced by administrations before him, was unnecessarily cruel. Withdrawal from international climate agreements was, in my view, wrong – even though I do understand the reasoning. Corporate tax cuts deserve analysis rather than automatic praise.
Tariffs imposed real costs on families and businesses even if trade protectionism was neither surprisingly unique nor without a mandate from voters. Restrictions on travel from several Muslim-majority countries demanded scrutiny, but can’t hinge on the expectation of a country to keep its borders open to anyone. Efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and reduce government spending through DOGE were, in important ways, executed without sufficient care or compassion.
Interior immigration enforcement, rather than predominantly at-the-border enforcement, produced media-fuelled confrontations with tragic results. Military action in the Middle East continued an old and destructive presidential pattern.
Taken individually and without being hyped up on rageahol, these can be upsetting. Not “let’s burn down a KFC” upsetting, but upsetting – particularly if your career relied on endless government spending and you lost your job. But among them, you can’t point to one and say: “There! That’s why I hate him so much! That’s the evil! Prayers for the bullet!!” You can totally disagree with him, but without shooting him in the neck; because that would be fucking crazy.
The Emmanuel Trump ritual does not ask whether a policy worked, failed, helped or harmed. It asks whether the audience hates the designated figure with sufficient intensity. Once every dispute becomes proof of evil, criticism loses the distinctions that make it useful.
Participation becomes proof of belonging. To question an accusation, acknowledge a good policy or reject dehumanizing language can be treated as support for Emmanuel Trump. The group no longer measures loyalty by principle; it measures loyalty by the volume and consistency of the hate.
A citizen evaluating taxes, war, immigration, criminal justice or education has to compare evidence and consequences. The Emmanuel Trump caricature offers a shortcut: if the villain supports it, oppose it. That shortcut is emotionally efficient and democratically disastrous because it replaces judgment with reflex.
This is where Orwell’s Goldstein becomes useful. Not to paint Trump as flawlessly virtuous, or to say that all criticism has been manufactured, but as a warning about the psychological manipulation of the people by powerful private interests, using a very well-funded and well-researched science. Goldstein was the designated object of hatred; he was the scapegoat that every tyrannical and totalitarian regime inevitably, constantly needs. Every failure could be attached to him, every evil traceable to him, and participation in hating him became proof of loyalty. Sound familiar?
Goldstein wasn’t necessarily manufactured. He was described as a peer of Big Brother, then he turned, was said to have become evil, and everything thereafter was his fault. Trump was prime time TV until he got into politics, then the same Hilary Clinton calling him the antichrist was sitting up front at his wedding. When people are getting elected on a (and I wish to God I was making this shit up) “Fuck Trump” platform, and pretty much that alone, we have a big problem. Please see how that is a big problem.
Polarization is happening by design, as part and parcel of the programming involved in the ongoing social engineering. And make no mistake: this is social engineering. Diversity of thought on the Left is actively discouraged, to extremes. That alone should make one think, “Holy shit. That’s not good.” There have always been tribal politics, but this? This is different, and that’s the whole point.
A movement that uses an all-purpose villain does not need a coherent platform; it needs only to keep the audience angry using the politics of nightmares. That arrangement is and has long been useful to politicians, popes, media companies, emperors, influencers, and algorithms alike. It is less useful to citizens trying to decide which policies to support to actually improve their lives. And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
To “uncomplicate” public policy by relieving you of the burden of being an independently-informed person, tasked with the difficult task of choosing whom to support. “Don’t worry, we’re the Good party, you can trust us. Anyone else is evil, and that’s all you need to know.”
For the record, I think Trump is a substandard leader, but not a monster. I thought Trudeau was a bad leader, but not a monster. I think Carney is a ghoulish globalist Mr. Burns doppleganger who will move Canadian ties from the US to the EU, saddle the nation with IMF debt, then auction off land rights for resource extraction to pay off the debt… but he’s not a monster. I can disagree with, even dislike, Trudeau without thinking of him as less than human.
Trump has absolutely done things that warrant criticism. Yes. But we can’t discuss the nuts and bolts of those things like grown-ups while in road-rage mode, and road-rage mode has become very difficult to turn off.
But turn it off you must, because the people we put in positions of political power are OUR voices, as local communities of shared interests, in matters from education, to food safety, to law enforcement, to the military, to road signs, to sewer pipes, to road blockages, to spacecraft, to interest rates, to student loans, and multiple stops in between.
Nothing is worse than a life lived full of hate. It is a living hell, and you deserve better than feeling this way. The grass is still green, people still smile, disco still sucks. Tell a joke. Give a compliment. Do things that make you smile. Then, with a relaxed and open mind, delve into the minutia of your vote.
Realize that EVERY screen is built on a code that pushes what is very much propaganda to you, in a way that will get you most enraged, therefore creating more engagement KPIs, and thus more money, which comes from advertisers, who own all those corporations some love to hate.
Private interests buy your attention in a wholly amoral fashion from media companies that are run by sociopaths who get your attention by cutting you off in traffic and giving you the finger.
If Goldstein ever were a man, he had long since ceased to be when by the time he’s on-screen being screamed at by the party loyalists. He became a caricature of evil, a fantasy demon, subhuman – more symbol than human being.
Sound familiar?
Leave a Reply