The Fire and Fury affair is more about us than Trump

To start with a confession: I did not read the recent book describing the inner workings of the Trump White House. Since the publication of Fire and Fury, the American and global reaction is that of a fiasco. We ask ourselves: “How can it be that such a man, with such characteristics, is the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, the commander in chief of the biggest, richest military on earth?" Many follow this supposed fiasco, and are bewildered by the disparity between the title and the flesh, the ideal and the real.

Fire and Fury has provided a proof, or evidence to the suspicion that ‘everybody’ has held: Trump is incapable and incompetent of leading the United States and the world. This same ‘everybody’ is infatuated by this enigma called Trump, from his nomination through election and operation, the same 'everybody' that enjoys every dirty quote, misbehavior, misconduct, and wrong-doings reported in the book. The enjoyment is derived from the secondary retroactive “I knew it” moment that serves to vindicate pre-supposed knowledge. But who put that knowledge there to begin with, to follow and eventually find reaffirmation as a form of catharsis? In short, who directs this course of desire and sets its motion?

What should raise our critical awareness here is precisely this taken road of enjoyment. This common tendency, propagated and facilitated by the media, to psychologize Trump's personality is itself part of the problem and exactly what should be rejected. The tendency to understand, explain, and criticize the Trump phenomenon by psychological means is there to divert our attention from its real causes. Emile Durkheim's sociological rule provides some clarity: “Every time a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon - we may rest assured that the explanation is false”. Why? Because a social phenomenon, such as the global liberal reaction to Trump, must only be explained by other social facts.

Psychologization functions as an ideological tool to produce a repetitive form of enjoyment. Contrary to this tangential drive to psychologize, we should start by rejecting the supposed knowledge against which we compare the acquired knowledge, namely, the dirty details enclosed in Fire and Fury. To state clearly, in a Bartleby-way: I prefer not to know these little details, not to locate political significance in them. This rejection of reading the book and getting entrapped in the vortex of perverse enjoyment, should amount to another one: the rejection of the fantasy, according to which the very obscene situation that we are all in—from the complete political disorientation to utter ethical and ecological destruction—is due to Trump's flaws of character. The fantasy rests on the belief that all would be better if it were not for Trump (and his psychological flaws). Every revelation and 'new' detail reinforces this fantasy, and fuels our enjoyment.

This mode of knowledge actively repressed what the unconscious knows (and we do not), and thus repeats the fetishistic disavowal: people know that the true cause for the severity of today's situation is not Trump—but they act as if they believe it is. Following Fire and Fury's publication, not only do they believe, they know.

If we resist the temptation of knowing/enjoying, and let the repressed surface, we will see that Trump's character flaws, however true as they may be, have nothing whatsoever to do with the volatility of today's predicament. Our vision would be opened to the vast, general causes for the question posed at the beginning: How can it be?

Trump's personality is itself a reactive result of specific societal, not psychological attitudes—towards women, money, power, etc. The fantasy of what could have been without Trump, is precisely what got us Trump. This obscenity is perfectly captured in its imperfection by Plato’s remark: “one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that what we have been calling politics all along - voting and other such repetitive activities - is apparently far from it.

Psychoanalysis tells us that every repressed has its return of the repressed. People do not know what to know—what to consider as knowledge—so they decide what to know on some irrational basis. Every knowledge rests on belief. This does not mean that we cannot inject some rationality into our knowledge, and solidify our ground of belief. For this, though, our mode of thinking must shift from the will to know the ideal, to the will to change the real.