The resistance to Trump is currently tripped up by a disagreement over rhetorical tactics. The question, to use Michelle Obama’s terms, is whether to go high or low – to invoke the lofty constitutional principles Trump violates or to stoop to his own mud-wrestling tactics and call him a liar and (who knows?) perhaps a criminal, as well as a fraud, an oaf, a sleazy groper and an egomaniac as absurdly puffed-up as the nappy-clad balloon that bobbed above Westminster during his visit earlier this month.
In this account of the mental malaise that made Trump possible, Michiko Kakutani chooses to go high, or highbrow. She explains him as a postmodern phenomenon, a product of the deconstructionist assault on absolutes that raged through American universities in the 1980s: Trump’s erstwhile tactician Steve Bannon, co-opting leftist jargon for the “alt-right”, describes his mission as “the deconstruction of the administrative state”, which means replacing governance with a paranoid reign of chaos.
Kakutani even relates Trump’s chronic mendacity to the slippery tricks of once-trendy literary critics who, beguiled by the theorist Jacques Derrida, argued that all statements are relative, or ironically reversible. This pedigree hardly befits a dimwit who boasts of never opening a book, didn’t write those published in his name and can’t stop watching television long enough to read the daily security briefings prepared by his advisers.
Trump, obsessed with visibility, prefers to dispense with bothersome words. After television interviews, he often asks for a playback with the sound turned off: his concern, according to the NBC journalist Chuck Todd, is “to see what it all looked like”, so he watches “on mute”. What he says doesn’t matter, so long as his teased and tinted quiff remains unruffled, his orange tan unblotched.
The outrage and contempt Kakutani feels are warranted, but her philosophical attitude to the Trump phenomenon leaves her wallowing out of her depth, despite the onerous booklist she attaches to her slim essay. The decades she spent as chief book reviewer for the New York Times have made her adept at slicing and dicing the ideas of others and every second paragraph here is a quotation from one of the authorities she consults. Because she relies on a liberal consensus, the same points are numbingly made over and over again. She bangs on about “filter bubbles” in social media and the “content silos” in which Twitter users immure themselves; she is equally relentless about the Russian “troll factories” and “bot armies” that disseminated lies during the 2016 election campaign. Buzzwords recur so often that I worried about suffering tinnitus while reading.
More than once, Kakutani claims that Brexit is Trumpism by other means, yet Trump’s racial and religious bigotry is surely uglier and crasser than any of the deluded falsehoods promulgated by the Leave campaign. Brexiters are nostalgic fantasists, in retreat from a larger world; Trumptards seek to uphold America’s swaggering dominance in that world, if necessary by destabilising sovereign nations and disrupting their alliances. Brexit is an isolated act of suicide, at worst pathetic and pitiable, whereas Trumpism fondly contemplates genocide. Members of Kakutani’s family, as she recalled in a recent article, were sent to internment camps for Japanese-Americans set up in California after Pearl Harbor, a prototype for the cages in which Trump’s enforcers have penned the children of illegal immigrants in Texas and Arizona.
The book’s best pages deal with Putin’s propagandist Vladislav Surkov, a former trainee theatre director and advertising executive who currently stage-manages the Kremlin’s black arts of make-believe and, as one of Kakutani’s sources puts it, keeps Russians “reeling with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists and the CIA”, just as Trump ignites his zealots by excoriating Mexican rapists, Muslim jihadists and European freeloaders who rob Uncle Sam’s piggybank. The ideological differences of the cold war have been erased; now the shared concern of the kleptocrats in Washington and Moscow is “power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth”.
Elsewhere, Kakutani’s sociological mantras and indignant anathemata are repeated helplessly or even desperately, in an unwitting case of the “confirmation bias” that she officially deplores. Liberal guerrillas will have to do better than this if they hope to salvage American democracy. Ridicule, employed so effectively by the carnivalesque demonstrators who dogged Trump during his trip to the UK, would be a more effective weapon: a man who lacks humour and the humanity it vouches for has a mortal terror of being laughed at. Mikhail Bakhtin, a literary theorist absent from Kakutani’s bibliography, thought that the festive mockery of a mob could bring about “the defeat of power, of all that oppresses and restricts”. Perhaps it will be the pin from the inflatable Trump baby’s diaper that punctures Potus, letting out the hot air that keeps him aloft.
• The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani is published by Harper Collins (£10). To order a copy for £8.50 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
