Understanding Trump-- A Struggle for Images

An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present election is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.      

Anyone who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.

TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national image-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s having a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.

But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological. 

(Marshall McLuhan, 1968)