What is Donald Trump? Forms of ‘Celebrity’ in Celebrity Politics

The ‘Celebrity’ in Celebrity Politics

Much of the literature on celebrity politics has been taken up with the question of definition. If the claim is that the ‘celebrity politician’ is significantly different from the ‘traditional politician’, then it is reasonable to ask how and in what way they are different. Typically and unsurprisingly, the definition of the ‘celebrity politician’ has focused upon the political dimension of the phenomenon, to the exclusion of the celebrity dimension.

The standard reference point for many definitions of the celebrity politician has been Darrell West and John Orman’s (2003) Celebrity Politics. They identify five categories of ‘celebrity politicos’ (West and Orman, 2003: 2): political newsworthies, legacies, famed nonpoliticos (elected officials), famed nonpoliticos (lobbyists and spokespersons) and event celebrities. Their categorisation is framed by the political scene, and the categories refer to those within that scene who have achieved some kind of celebrity status. The categorisation itself is dependent upon the origins of the fame ‘and the consequences for our society and culture’ (West and Orman, 2003: x). What this latter refers to is, in fact, the operation of the political system and the engagement of voters in it. Their story is one of ‘crisis’ in the political system and the harmful effects of celebrity culture on politics (West and Orman, 2003: 14, 111–119). Their argument informs their definition, with the result that the character of ‘celebrityhood’ is seen only in negative terms and in relation to a prior set of assumptions as to who should be involved in taking political decisions (West and Orman, 2003: 116).

My own response (Street, 2004) to West and Orman was an attempt to both simplify their definition and offer a more neutral account of the phenomenon, in which the focus was on the nature of the political involvement. I distinguished between the celebrity politician (CP1), the aspiring political actor who adopted celebrity techniques, and the celebrity politician (CP2), the celebrity who engaged with politics but did not aspire to political office or responsibility. As others have argued, my approach was guilty of oversimplifying the idea. Hence, David Marsh et al. (2010), in a detailed review of the literature, argue for the need to move beyond a categorisation based on either the origins of the ‘celebrity-ness’ (qua West and Orman) or the nature of their involvement in politics. Their own fivefold categorisation was generated by combining the sphere from which the celebrity politician emerged (celebrity vs. political) and the nature of their relationship to politics. This yielded the following typology: celebrity advocate, celebrity activist/endorser, celebrity politician, politician celebrity and the politician who uses others’ celebrity (Marsh et al., 2010: 327). While re-introducing complexity, this approach does issue in a richer appreciation of the political role played by celebrity politician and retains an open-mindedness (contra West and Orman) to the consequences of such interventions. However, it also retains an indifference to the ‘celebrity’ dimension of the phenomenon. There is no attempt to distinguish between types or forms of celebrity. The distinctions are between kinds of political engagement, not of celebrity enactment.

In his book Celebrity Politics, Mark Wheeler (2013) has offered the most substantial account of the phenomenon, one in which he makes valuable comparisons across time and space. He too, though, begins with an attempt to define the term. In doing so, he sets himself apart not only from West and Orman but also from the approach adopted by ’t Hart and Tindall that underpins Marsh et al. He criticises the latter for not ‘going beyond party systems or political institutions to seek the meaning of the democratic worth of celebrity activity. This ignores celebrity engagement in entertainment-driven or populist forms of politics’ (Wheeler, 2013: 24). To this end, he argues for the need to take style more seriously and to make use of those who work on the interface between politics and cultural and media studies (e.g. Drake and Higgins, 2006; Van Zoonen, 2005).

There are signs that such an injunction is being followed in one of the most recent contributions to the literature. Matthew Wood et al. (2016) introduce the contrast between the ‘everyday’ celebrity politicians (ECP) and the ‘superstar’ celebrity politician (SCP). This distinction is designed to allow for ‘the differentiated and often contradictory ways in which “celebrity” is constructed’ (Wood et al., 2016: 583). It is a response to the idea that there have been shifts in ‘celebrity society’ and in the ways by which the idea of celebrity is acquired and allocated. Using the example of Boris Johnson, they argue persuasively that their two types – ESP and SCP – develop through different media strategies and operate differently within the political realm.

Wood et al. (2016: 585–589) separate out the media platform, the marketing technique and the performance role in charting the acquisition of political celebrity. Their approach allows us to see, particularly in respect of the last element, how ‘celebrity-ness’ can adopt a range of styles. This further sensitises us to how celebrity politics might operate. Once again, though, these stylistic questions are, I would suggest, too simply divided between the ‘everyday’ and the ‘superstar’. Each one, as the coverage of Trump suggests, might contain a host of different performative modes, each with their own consequences for citizen engagement and political influence. These various possibilities are well illustrated by the coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Donald Trump as a Celebrity Politician

It is widely assumed that Donald Trump is an example of ‘celebrity politics’, a view that, as we’ve seen, he himself endorses. He has been described as having a ‘mastery of celebrity politics’ (Schafer-Wunsche and Kloeckner, 2016: 2). His role on the US version of The Apprentice is taken as direct evidence for this assumption (Kuper, 2017b; Nussbaum, 2017a). But even without this element of his curriculum vitae, his career would have established his credentials as a celebrity politician. From his earliest days, he has sought and attracted the kind of media attention that guarantees attribution of the label ‘celebrity’, and his occasional ventures into politics have derived from, or depended upon, the fame and notoriety that he has acquired.

The writer Andrew Sullivan (2016) observed that ‘the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter’, while others have added to Trump’s celebrity cv his responsibility for the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants, a televised Rolling Stones show, cameos in Zoolander, Home Alone 2 and Sex and the City, and adverts for Pizza Hut. The Financial Times (Silverman and Bond, 2016) offered this summary:

Although he has never held elected office, he is a hands-on, detail-oriented professional showman whose career as a crowd-pleaser spans his entire adult life. The over-the-top character presiding over mass rallies and shaking up television talk shows has been rehearsing for years.

In similar vein, Eliot Weinberger (2016: 8) argued that Trump:

discovered that celebrity could be more lucrative than real estate. In the great American huckster tradition of ‘a sucker born every minute’, he realized he could make a small fortune convincing all those losers out there that they can be winners too. As he wrote: ‘I play to people’s fantasies’.

In 2000, the man himself was predicting the course of his own career in similar terms (as quoted in the Daily Beast, 2016):

Many people find it outlandish that someone from outside professional politics should seek the American presidency. … There is much wailing among pundits that we have become a celebrity culture in which athletes, movie stars, and businessmen are considered for public office. Sure it helps that 97 percent of people know who I am. But after that voters are looking for accomplishments and qualifications. Mine? I run a billion-dollar corporation. I have created thousands of jobs. I keep a constant eye on the bottom line to make sure my company is profitable. Perhaps it’s time that America was run this way. … I stand for getting things done. … The whinnying culture critics and media hacks are ridiculous when they bemoan the rise of celebrity culture and warn about the decline of traditional political values. They’re on somebody’s payroll.

What Trump’s self-assessment does, like those of others, is to suggest that his electoral success derives, not just from being ‘well known’ but for being known in a particular way for doing particular kinds of things.

What is less commonly observed is another theme. This is not about who Trump is, but what he is. It is a truth almost universally recognised that he is not a ‘politician’, either because he fails to meet the standards expected of a democratic representative or because he expresses no desire to be such a figure. But if he is not a politician, what is he? What role is he playing and what kind of drama is taking place?

For the writer George Saunders (2016: 58), the answer lies in seeing ‘American Presidential campaigns’ not as a debate about ideas but ‘about the selection of a hero to embody the prevailing national ethos’. This, of course, begs a further question. If the aim is to be a ‘hero’, what type of hero are we talking about? Heroes come in many forms, from Forrest Gump to Superman, from The West Wing’s President Bartlett to House of Cards’ President Underwood.

Such questions have run through much of the coverage of Donald Trump. Journalists, novelists and commentators have sought to capture the appropriate metaphor, simile or analogy for Trump’s political persona. Emily Nussbaum (2017b: 66) in the New Yorker saw Trump as a 1980s comedy act, like the notorious Andrew Dice Clay. Where Barack Obama’s ‘sophisticated small-club act … was dry and urbane’, Trump ‘was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest’. ‘[Trump] was the insult comic’, continues Nussbaum, ‘the stadium act, the ratings obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers’. This comparison is not just an aside, it forms part of an argument as to what kind of politician Trump is:

Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked as he tested catchphrases (‘Lock her up!’; ‘Build the wall!’) for crowd response.

For Nussbaum, Trump’s political persona is not just like that of a 1980s stadium comic; this is how he operates. He is a 1980s comedian. As one Trump supporter said, ‘He’s spending his own bucks – therefore he doesn’t have to play the politically correct game. He says what we wish we could say but we can’t afford to anymore’ (quoted in Von Drehle, 2016: 24).

Other writers have adopted this same kind of argument but have drawn from different fields of the entertainment world, most obviously that of television. James Poniewozik (2016), for example, sees Trump in terms of TV formats:

his tale has remained a kind of ’80s prime-time soap of aspiration and ego. … [H]e cited his TV ratings the way another candidate might boast of balancing a state budget. Mr Trump’s primary win was like having a niche hit on cable. … In programming terms, his campaign is nostalgia based content – that thing you used to like, I’m gonna bring it back again! He’s a classic TV show rebooted for Netflix: that old stuff from back in the day, but edgier and uncensored.

In Time, David Von Drehle (2016: 25–26) suggested that Trump’s role in The Apprentice did not just make him famous but gave him the particular kind of fame endowed by reality shows, as opposed to other TV genres: ‘the craftier characters of reality TV experience a different kind of stardom from the TV and movie idols of the past. Fans are encouraged to feel that they know these people, not as fictional characters but as flesh and blood’. The suggestion here, as with Nussbaum and others, is that – by identifying the cultural genre in which Trump works – we can explain his political persona and, by implication, his success. Entertainment television and comedy, though, are not the only cultural forms used to account for Trump and Trumpism. Indeed, they are not the most common. That honour goes to the world of popular music.

Mark Singer (2016: 22, 36), in his book Trump & Me, twice quotes a Trump associate as saying: ‘Deep down, he [Trump] wants to be Madonna’. Quite which of Madonna’s many incarnations they have in mind is unclear, but it is evident that the insight is intended to tell us something about Trump’s self-image and about how this accounts for his behaviour. He wants to be a star as much as a politician. He wants to be adored as much, if not more, than he wants to be admired.

Bob Lefsetz (2016) takes the analogy with popular music one step further in a piece titled ‘Trump Is a Metal Band’: ‘Yes, Donald Trump is a rock star, if you go back to what that once upon a time meant, someone who adhered to his own vision living a rich and famous lifestyle who cared not a whit what others said’. And for Lefsetz, it is the genre that holds the key to Trump’s ability to command an audience:

Metal … [s]old out arenas when no one was watching. Ain’t that America, where despite garnering dollars the establishment shies away from that which it believes is unseemly. And the reason metal triumphed was because it was the other, it channeled the audience’s anger, it was for all those closed out of the mainstream, and it turns out there’s plenty of them.

A similar comparison occurs to a journalist who finds himself at a Trump rally, in the ‘standing area directly in front of the stage, a kind of Trumpian moshpit …’ (Freedland, 2016: 27). The music writer Simon Reynolds (2016: 14) also sees Trump in the guise of a rock star, not, though, that of heavy metal but of glam rock: ‘Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and the glam rockers share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention’.

And so it goes on. Trump’s rise to power has prompted all manner of such literary devices to tell his story – most recently in Martin Wolff’s (2018: 22) Fire and Fury, in which the President is described as ‘a real-life fictional character’ like the wrestler Hulk Hogan. Other, more explicitly political comparisons have, of course, also been made with populist politics of all kinds, with the rise of Nazism, fascism and so forth. Explanations have been couched in terms of his personality traits and psychology. And there have been the inevitable explanations in the language of psephology and of post-democracy. It might be objected, therefore, that to focus on Trump-as-celebrity is to miss the underlying reality and to dwell only on the desperate effort of journalists and others to make sense of what they are witnessing through the language and approach of their respective professions.

My argument is, however, that, insofar as Trump does fit the notion of the ‘celebrity politician’, these attempts to find an appropriate way of capturing the nature of his ‘celebrityhood’ are important and necessary. It speaks to a set of issues and concerns that have, I think, been neglected in the way that we (political scientists) have studied the phenomenon.

The Implications of Putting the Emphasis on the Celebrity

The need to focus more on the celebrity aspect of celebrity politics has been noted before. Philip Drake and Michael Higgins (2006: 98–99) observed in their comparison of political speeches by Bono and Arnold Schwarzenegger how:

Bono’s performance is of a restless rock star, with a lilting, emotional voice railing impatiently against the slow pace of politics and willing it to make progress, whilst Schwarzenegger performs with a distinctive physicality embodied by his intimidating presence (his body is sculpted, muscled and barely contained by his suit) and his staccato Germanic vocal delivery that insistently recalls his career-making Terminator performances.

For Drake and Higgins, these celebrity politicians act out their politics. What they say, and how they say it, are inseparable and are articulated through the form of their stardom – as rock star, as Hollywood superhero. It is not just a matter of using their fame to garner attention, the stylistic conventions of their art also form their politics. They too are suggesting that, in understanding what celebrity politicians are saying, we need to ask what kind of celebrity role they are performing in order to appreciate what they are communicating. There are three implications of this approach.

Conclusion

These implications, and the assumptions and arguments upon which they rest, are only sketched here. However, if it is felt that the ideas of celebrity politics and celebrity politicians deserve investigation and refinement, then it does seem that there are a number of themes and avenues that warrant further examination.

Rather than seeing ‘celebrity politicians’ just as embodying a particular kind of leadership or electoral art, it is important to place them within wider political processes and trends. The rise of populism, and how this is understood, draws the celebrity politician within its ambit, as does discussion of the mediatisation and personalisation of politics more generally. For writers like Moffitt and others, the celebrity politician is often a component of these political transformations. But while contemporary populism may be dependent on the opportunities afforded by media, the ‘celebrity’ element is not a necessary feature, even if it is a common one. In the same way, non-populist politics may also issue in celebrity politics. What differentiates these celebrity politicians is the style of leadership and representation that they enact (or are seen to enact), and what sort of celebrity they are – talk show host, reality TV star, pro-wrestler and rock musician.

Wherever the celebrity politician is located in the larger scheme of things, it remains the case that the phenomenon itself needs further analysis, and an approach in which the ‘celebrity’ dimension receives equal attention with the formally ‘political’. This begins with the media representation of the politician. It might be objected that I have made too much of the tropes and habits of journalists and other commentators. The analogies on which they draw are, it could be said, just that – analogies, mere literary devices – but equally it may be that they are capturing or shaping a reality in which the role of the politician is indeed becoming that of the rock star or film star or reality TV host. And that the answer to the question ‘what is Donald Trump?’ is that he is indeed a celebrity, and media representations of him as such are key to how he operates in the political world. This, in turn, leads to the question as to what kind of celebrity we are dealing with. The answer matters for how we make sense of both how the politician is reported and how she or he is perceived.

The art of politics becomes the art of performance, the art of being a celebrity. It is important, therefore, to develop the concepts and tools that enable us to understand better how political ideas are enacted, and how audiences – ‘the people’ – are created in the act of performance. And how, in turn, the passions of the citizen-fan are elicited and orchestrated. David Marshall (2014), one of the first analysts of celebrity power, has argued recently for further study of how the affective potential of celebrity is generated by the mediated persona of the politician. Such calls need to be heeded. Understanding the celebrity politician depends on us understanding the feelings and emotions, as well as the preferences and interests, that are in play within politics. It also requires us to understand the celebrity role they perform and the style in which they perform it.