Dancing Trump

Donald Trump sees himself as the Ernest Hemingway of the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Yet the question of what lies beneath or behind Trump’s words is misleading. Language critique and hermeneutics slide off him, as do categories such as lies and fake news. As a political entertainer, Trump is not a speaker; he is a dancer and musician. Trump’s truth is basically what he is performing at the moment (and only as long as he is performing it). Trump speaks and dances, just as the Roman god Janus looks in one direction, and the other, at the same time.

This is how Trump undermines the possibility of making him the subject of jokes and satire. Whether Trump appeals to truthfulness or rescues AI-generated kittens, contradiction and caricature go nowhere. For social media, reacting to Trump means applauding. The final irony of the age of retweets and memes, which Trump helped to create and accelerate enormously, is the self-abolition of irony.