Donald Trump Was a Monster Forged by the American Free Market
by Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Jacobin, Nov. 8
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/donald-trump-us-free-market-democracy
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But Trump was also, and in a somewhat more direct sense, the first (late) capitalist president — not the first to celebrate that system, of course, but the first whose claim to the office was based on a story about his power to make money from money, not on any record of political, military, or other public service. Although he was not the first entertainer-president — Ronald Reagan preceded him, and the last century has generally favored presidential candidates who mastered the latest medium — he is the first to have thrived in a new era of fragmented media and splintered publics, in which success comes from a passionate niche, often defined more by an imagined common enemy. Trump is the president of the Twitter–Fox–MSNBC era, when resentment is the political emotion par excellence and everyone feels they are in a potential endangered minority.

He was, relatedly, the first nihilist president. His campaign and presidency made sense only on the basis of a collapse of the difference between politics and marketing — and marketing of the cheapest, most short-term kind, never more than one step ahead of the tax police (if only we had those!) or the repo man. This line had been badly blurred and crossed over forever, but with Trump, governing dissolved into a mere vehicle for the latest pitch. It was the point where a long process of erosion tipped over into a more lycanthropy-like transformation.

‘Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,’ wrote the poet of democracy, and that remains the idea.

This was the manner of Trump’s business practice before it was a political practice. The sense in which he was the first capitalist president was simply the other side of the same coin as his political nihilism. An unerring instinct for credulous marks and pots of money available for organized looting led him eventually from branded steaks and shady real estate investors to the Republican primaries and the United States Treasury, along with the many incidental business opportunities of the presidency, particularly for a man with a large and enterprising family.

The Marketplace and the Ballot Box

These observations add up to a basic point about the life of a capitalist democracy like the United States. For any stability and legitimacy, that regime relies on a division of spheres.

On the one hand, there is the marketplace, where people count according to their ability to generate returns on investment, and where more or less any legally tolerated way of generating returns is fair game — cutting labor costs, tanking pension obligations, offshoring, breaking an inconvenient union, or deluding people that your product has all sorts of magical benefits. It is a realm of sanctioned selfishness, where wealth amounts to authority and where the most basic and far-reaching inequalities are taken for granted.

On the other hand, there is the sphere of citizenship, where we decide together about the “direction of the country” and where the law is supposed to establish a basic equality of treatment and expectation. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote the poet of democracy, and that remains the idea.