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The Trump era has given us many strange and uncanny images. One thinks, for example, of that almost Kubrickian 2019 shot of Donald Trump standing in the East Room of the White House beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, his jazz hands outstretched in reverence for a fast food banquet catered by McDonald’s. Or this more recent scene of the President and First Lady standing on the White House balcony flanked by the Easter Bunny while the former talked effusively about the war he’d just started. Trump, former host of TV’s The Apprentice turned Commander-in-Chief, places his hands on a mystical glowing orb with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the King of Saudi Arabia; Trump, his gaze pointed straight at the heavens, grins gormlessly while the rays of a solar eclipse mercilessly pound his retinas.
There are doubtless some other honourable mentions here. But there is something about the image above that feels superlative and — our shortened collective attention span notwithstanding — I’m actually surprised it didn’t generate further discussion. More than four months have passed and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
By way of some context: it was the Fourth of July and Donald Trump was watching himself on Fox News, though I’m not really sure that description does the shot justice. More accurately, he was watching himself watch himself watch himself. Or, alternatively, we were watching him see himself as he looked while we watched him watching himself. No description will really suffice because the picture is an Inception-like visual paradox, like something created by a recursive computer algorithm or the collision of a spaceship with a quantum singularity. Has any single image so perfectly captured either the Baudrillardian unreality of politics in the 21st century or the dissociative state produced by a world that is increasingly experienced through screens?
