Political dance: Richard Sennett on Louis XIV

Explanations of Trump’s actions or the question of his motives “behind them” (Goethe, Nietzsche), which are bound to the primacy of language—or in line with Jürgen Habermas: of “communication” and “deliberation”—⁵³ do little to help us understand Trump. This is true if only because language is not the exclusive means of political expression. Nobody complained about Louis XIV because he danced, and his nickname “Sun King” is not due to his sunny reign, but to a dance performance by the fifteen-year-old in which he shone like the sun. In fact, Louis XIV’s dance and performance have more to do with Trump than his self-proclamation as “King” of New York⁵⁴ would suggest.

In his most recent book to date, published in 2024, The Performer. Art, Life, Politics, Richard Sennett writes about Louis XIV and the creation of his “aura as a charismatic figure”: “in Louis’s case, charisma became a physical presence created by art.”⁵⁵ The parallel to Trump lies not so much in baroque “hair-styling and make-up”, but in a political and artistic⁵⁶ performance that manages without words.

Louis XIV serves Sennett as an example—there would be others: “This is not in fact such an unusual story”—of how “political performance presence could be taken to an extreme”, and this explicitly by a “performer [... who] dr[e]w on a repertoire of non-verbal expression.” Sennett argues that the nobility at Louis’ court were tired of chaos and wished for a return to the old order: “Tired of violent disruption, the aristocrats [...] found something reassuring about the royal display of physical prowess, repeated night after night.” Couldn’t the same be said for Trump’s voters, who are fed up with globalization and digital disruption and who listen to Trump’s promises of American reindustrialization day after day? And the parallels go further. Just as Louis danced at court, Trump stages himself in Mar-a-Lago: “[When] Louis danced in public [...] the evenings of dance shift[ed] ‘from the sovereign mingling with his subjects, and among and with them, to the sovereign as director of a choreography centred on himself alone’.”⁵⁷

It is therefore not surprising that Trump sees himself as a sun god and holds himself up as such. Wolff writes in Fire and Fury: “[A]nyone who had proximity to the president had leverage, the more proximity the more leverage. Trump himself you could see as a sort of Delphic oracle, sitting in place and throwing out pronouncements which had to be interpreted.”⁵⁸ This is, once again, the idea of the hermeneutic challenge posed by Trump’s ‘endless talk’, which Wolff illustrates twice here: on the one hand as the scene of a divine oracle in ancient times, and on the other as the medieval feudal practice according to which visible proximity to the ruler determines one’s influence over him.⁵⁹ Following on logically from seeing Trump as a Delphic oracle, Wolff continues: “Or as an energetic child, and whoever could placate or distract him became his favorite. Or as the Sun God (which is effectively how he saw himself), the absolute center of attention”⁶⁰—or, in Sennett’s words referring to Louis XIV: “a Sun King around whom planets of aristocracy revolved”.

Trump’s court and the machinations of his courtiers in New York, Mar-a-Lago and Washington have been described by many but, particularly impressively as a quasi-Shakespearean dynastic drama in Wolff’s Fire and Fury. The point here, however, is Trump’s performance, outlined in analogy to Louis XIV.

Notes

1. ⁵³Jürgen Habermas: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990, p. 340. Cf. on “discourse ethics”, which “binds the validity of norms to the possibility of reasoned agreement on the part of all”, insofar as these “assume the role of participants in the argument”, ibid. pp. 39-41.
2. ⁵⁴www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html (6/6/2025).
3. ⁵⁵Richard Sennett: The Performer. Art, Life, Politics, Dublin 2024, pp. 117 and 119.
4. ⁵⁶The fact that Trump is an artist sui generis can hardly be denied. On the artist complex, in addition to the quote 63 and footnote 69, see also Horst Bredekamp: Der Künstler als Verbrecher. Ein Element der frühmodernen Rechts- und Staatstheorie, München 2008, where Bredekamp describes, among other things, a scene with Pope Julius II whose “spatially staged theater of punishment and remission of punishment” is reminiscent of the scene with Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House (pp. 28-31 and 65).
5. ⁵⁷Sennett, The Performer, pp. 117-119.
6. ⁵⁸Wolff, Fire and Fury, p. 70.
7. ⁵⁹“The pictorial representation of banquets [...] show the lord of the court [...] in the center [...], with decreasing order of precedence to the right and left. [...] It was always a special honor for the guest if the host let him sit next to him or near him.” Joachim Bumke: Höfische Kultur. Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, vol. 1, München 1990, p. 251.
8. ⁶⁰Wolff, Fire and Fury, p. 70.