“THIS WILL MAKE GREAT TELEVISION“
Trump is reported to watch the media 4-8 hours a day. He makes his decisions based on his understanding of the media and how it works. As we see in the recent debacle with President Zelensky, and with his “real estate deal” for Gaza, he needs no reference in the empirical world in order to argue his case for anything at all. He bases his real world decisions on medial events.
This is the clearest case of inhabiting a world of simulacra.
A simulacrum is an image that has become self-referential. It is the end point of a long historical development in the “reality status” of the image. You could say this development is the inexorable impoverishment of poetic image, becoming less and less transparent to transcendence, less representational, and more and prosaic, more literal, more opaque until…the simulacrum. To inhabit a world of simulacra is to inhabit a world without suffering, without limitation, without a physical body, without, of course, death.
The medial world now is that world of simulacra and it has become the real world for many captivated by the mass media. Trump inhabits this world. He is a simulacrum himself. Trump is making decisions from within that world that forces that world to respond in kind, i.e., with further simulacra. For example he can say “X” and a flood of medial events follow, for or against, but all in response to his saying “X”—all show, all entertainment!
But, unnoticed by him and other media inhabitants, what remains as the real world for most people—the world of mostly stress, anxiety, alarm at this time—is reeling with all the unintended consequences rippling from the world of simulacra as it collides effortlessly with the empirical world of human limitations.
As we saw with utmost clarity, Trump does not inhabit or care about the empirical world. He has become a simulacrum himself. For him dropping bombs or getting rid of a few million people (pixels) is merely the push of a button with no reference to empirical reality. In this way the “way of being” that is the world of simulacra is penetrating empirical reality and ITS former way of being, swallowing it up so to speak, converting its inhabitants (us) into more simulacra that can be manipulated easily through the media. Two worlds colliding with no connecting bridge of reference between the two. This little video I noticed many years ago is good demonstration of what happens:
I expanded this exploration of simulacra into an essay in 2016.
