Part 1: A Bare Bones Recollection of the 2016 U.S. Election
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“You won't
Remember my pain
Your politics of screaming
You won't know my name
Or my forgiveness
Mercy's overrated”
- Gary Numan, Mercy (2017)
“Nowadays if you’re a crook you’re still considered up there. You can write books, go on TV, give interviews - you’re a big celebrity and nobody even looks down on you because you’re a crook. You’re still really up-there. This is because more than anything people just want stars.” - Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” - Donald Trump (2016)
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If the 1990s were a golden period of capitalism, where brands attempted irony to keep up with the youth, the 2010s are when the bill came due. The Clinton administration rock star politicians became the caretakers of cultural taste, children became the face of climate change awareness and prominent political figures drew praise for threatening economic calamity for a lead in the polls.
In 2016 the United States elected a former television star as the leader of the free world for a second time.
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The SCP foundation exists as a repository of some of the finest science fiction and horror writing available freely on the internet today.
Entry SCP-1981 is a tape recording of former president Ronald Reagan giving his 1981 ‘Evil Empire’ speech while being attacked and dismembered by invisible forces until he seemingly dies on the podium. Other times, his address lapses into nonsensical ramblings and anecdotes, and he withstands the attacks until the recording finishes. No two viewings of this tape are the same and any attempts to copy the tape are met wth failure.
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"There are your truths and there are my truths. There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown <indecipherable>. Some of them are in the audience right now!"
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The disparity between Reagan’s attempts at composure and the horror of his appearance are designed to unsettle. The tape is sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying, sometimes both. One might notice a similar phenomenon in the White House’s current incarnation.
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| "For the first time we have risen, and I see we are being consumed. I see circles that are not circles. Billions of dead souls inside containment. Unravellers have eaten country's moral fabric, turning hearts into filth. I'm from a kingdom level above human. What does that yield? A hokey smile that damns an entire nation. There is no hope.” |
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R. Budd Dwyer notoriously killed himself on live television over a corruption scandal in 1987. Bill Clinton’s 1998 would-be impeachment would be a stain soaked into the fabric of his tenure as President. Today these events would be indistinguishable from the glut of news across every screen today. One of the biggest catalysts to accepting shock is indifference.
Donald Trump weathers controversies and motions that would have brought down his predecessors twice over and more. The presence of scandal has become so ingrained with the public’s perception of high office that we no longer expect anything better.
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After testing the waters and crashing out in the primaries as a Reform candidate in the 2000 election, Donald Trump lay relatively low throughout the next three elections, preferring to sling the odd bit of mud at the incumbent.
He had particular ire for Barack Obama, trumpeting the “birther” conspiracy theory well after it had been discredited.
The 2016 United States Presidential Election is seen as many things from all sides of the political spectrum, but the most undeniable of these is that it was the latest step in politics and reality television being intertwined. More than ever both main candidates were judged for their character than their policies.
The GOP embraced the divisive rhetoric of Trumpism, the party of family values now fronted by a serial adulterer with an unsettling fixation with his own daughter.
Things that had previously become millstones to Republican candidates (see Mitt Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” and Bush Jr.’s “Mission Accomplished” gaffes) became unexpected boons. Trump at least in this uncannily teflon-like manner became the mafia don he had supposedly always wanted to be.
The DNC chose former secretary of state and former first lady Hillary Clinton to front a campaign widely derided as smug and out of touch.
The face of progressive politics briefly became the senator who attempted to pass the Family Entertainment Protection Act into law and unwittingly became every part the elitist shill Trump had positioned himself to defeat.
Amidst the memes, the fake news and the Russian twitter bots Donald Trump emerged as the winner of an election that had less to with winning than making sure the other side lost in as brutal and humiliating a manner as possible.
Building on a bedrock of film cameos and the waning U.S. version of The Apprentice, Donald Trump launched his presidency as his biggest role yet.
The White House has become the most viewed series of The Apprentice broadcast across multiple networks live and constantly. Shocking elimination follows shocking elimination. Who’ll be next to leave? The press secretary? The national security advisor? The head of the FBI?
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I was in my third year of university and experienced the campaign almost entirely through the lens of social media as many of us did, lending the election an additional layer of unreality. In the free market space of the internet, traditional news media appeared increasingly old-fashioned, its partisan bones exposed.
In my social media feed, genuine news sites and satire content hold equal weight. Mark Zuckerberg’s latest grilling in front of Congress casts him as a temperamental child caught in a lie, albeit one concerning the political future of several nations.
Like a poisoned water supply, political discussion has been front loaded into the public mindset.
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Like every famous character, soon came the merchandising.
An array of books of varying quality and relevance to the election soon emerged, each making its own attempt at rationalising the outcome.
Michael Wolff’s Fire And Fury is bolstered with firsthand accounts of a skeleton crew maintaining the illusion of a functioning campaign and later a political administration. The book primarily documents the rise and fall of campaign manager Steve Bannon within the Trump circle, from puppet master to disgraced caricature. Fury also makes the valid point that Bannon recognised ‘Trumpism’ as a movement much bigger than one man or candidate.
James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty, ostensibly a memoir but soon became more notable for being partly an apology to those who felt he may have contributed to Clinton’s downfall in the election by announcing a reopening into investigating her emails. Comey’s likening of Trump to a mafia don is apt, specifically one memorable passage that reads like an excerpt of The Godfather, where the President demands “loyalty”.
Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged provided a bridge between Trump’s Apprentice and White House era’s, showing how little really changed between projects.
Bob Woodward’s Fear expectedly provided the most sobering account, preferring incidents such as Gary Cohn removing Trump’s legislation over withdrawing from trade pacts in the hope he would forget about it, to speak for themselves.
More lighthearted items soon hit the shelves. Tiny toy hands and mini bars of soap were spun out of Graydon Carter’s 1990 ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ remark, card games and poetry books drew inspiration from the president’s twitter feed. Even one of Game Freak’s latest Pokémon bore a resemblance to the sitting President.
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Issues that had languished for decades outside of the political discourse seemingly popped out of the woodwork in frightening new guises.
Of course, this was not entirely true. It turns out that enforcing an ever tightening thumbscrew-like combination of wage repression and tax cuts for billionaires all with the veneer of liberalism may lead to voter dissatisfaction and outright hostility towards those perceived as the “political elite”, leaving an opportunity for nationalism to fill the void.
The “Tiger Mother” myth reached new and bizarre heights with an escalated trade war with China. The United Kingdom traded a stable economy for an increasingly unhinged game of chicken against the rest of the European Union.
Elsewhere, the ghosts of Mary Whitehouse and Jack Thompson have been somewhat exhumed with some aspects of the political left, (see the ‘Joker’ non-controversy) and the right becomes increasingly preoccupied with digging up its sordid past.
The idea of the political centre-ground has become a cliché in and of itself but with every industry hit-piece, every sensationalist report and piece of lazy journalism, each side of the political spectrum appears increasingly insular and extreme.
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As of 2019, Trump has become a vortex tearing through the spheres of media and politics alike. He exists in think pieces, memes, music, television and cinema.
Musicians appear obligated to weigh in on the president with varying degrees of success. (Damon Albarn remarked “There’s no references to [Trump] on the record – in fact, any time when anyone made any reference, I edited it out. I don’t want to give the most famous man on earth any more fame, particularly. He doesn’t need it!” when promoting 2017’s Humanz)
His many linguistic gaffes, ‘bigly’, ‘yuge’, ‘covfefe’ have become semi-serious canonised entries in the English language. It’s a unique type of power when even a man’s typos can become part of everyday speech.
Regardless of which side of the political scale one is on, few would argue that Donald Trump’s shadow looms large across the decade of the 2010s in a way few may have expected at its start.
“All the worst and most destructive things [Donald Trump] does in his life are going to take place during his Presidency, and so this period seems like it should dominate any account of him. But while splattering on the pavement is the most spectacular part of the fall, it is ultimately nothing more than an inevitable consequence wholly defined by the descent. Nothing can change this…He has, at last, indisputably become a Great Man of History. Now, all that remains is to define that in all its singular bigliness, and all that remains is to define it with is his skill at overly predictable pratfalls. There is no way for this to end well for him or for anyone else.”
“But perhaps it’s most clear in his facial expression; the wounded animal stare of a man desperate to stop knowing he’s fucking up everything he ever worked for. You almost feel sorry for him. Two things, ultimately, prevent this. The first is that he is a genuinely awful person, and no amount of empathy can possibly outweigh the schadenfreude. The second is a basic principle of psychogeography: as the king goes, so goes the land.”
“There is no upside here. Nothing makes it better. Even the good outcomes are destructive beyond easy comprehension. One is left clutching at self-evidently absurd thresholds of acceptability–maybe it won’t actually be a nuclear war–the very contemplation of which represents a fundamental degradation. The truth is cold, brutal, and unacceptable: we’ve lost.” - Elizabeth Sandifier, Neoreaction A Basilisk: Essays On And Around The Alt-Right (2017)
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How does this lengthy political digression have any bearing on an industrial album released by an English electronic artist?
Well as of 2013, Gary Numan, following in the footsteps of the artists before him, had finally become an American.
