Trump: Spectacle über alles : Baudrillard and Debord were Right

This article examines contemporary American political culture under Donald Trump through critical theory that emerged in France and Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s. Drawing on Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Umberto Eco, it argues that these theorists help us understand the Trump presidency and its communicational style as the convergence of spectacular mediation, hyperreal simulation, and what Eco called a culture of the “absolute fake”. Trumpism is not treated here as an aberration but as the consolidation of structural tendencies within advanced capitalist media societies—tendencies identified decades ago by these thinkers. Far from constituting a rupture in the norms of modern political and economic life, Trumpian political communication reveals the maturation of long-standing tendencies identified by French theoretical reflections on American society. Spectacle now plays a dominant role in politics, economics, law, and war as dmedia and entertainment become larger and more important parts of the economy;