Back from Europe: Trump Puts Us On Like a Suit of Clothes

Did I learn anything from foreign travel? I gained something, more like a feeling than a set of ideas. Just being in France and Spain where the living is slightly different has a beneficial effect. Not sure why…. Maybe the electrons in your brain and body get realigned. At times I felt my stomach twisted in knots of anxiety. Sometimes I got the feeling my cellphone and Google Maps was the only thing between my health and safety and oblivion. Lose the phone and your whole existence goes down the drain immediately. Such is life. As Descartes famously said… I own a Samsung, therefore I am.

Been looking at my travels for some insight to explain modern life. The G20 summit happened soon after we returned. I recognized that late hour of sunset in Europe—the same in Hamburg, Germany as in France and Spain, around 10 PM. I felt slightly more familiar with the protesters because I had been on their continent just a few days before. They were rioting—maybe against capitalism, maybe against the system’s inability to deal with global climate change. The younger generations must fight for their air, water, the temperature of their air—a whole new set of issues from the Vietnam War demonstrations I remember. The issues have changed—maybe moved to a new level of complexity. The same technology and complexity that has made the West so rich threatens the health of the planet. Can people actually choose less wealth? Maybe but it’s quite a struggle.

Where does the Donald Trump phenomenon fit into the global angst. Trump knows something that almost nobody else has figured out. I found some clues in Marshall McLuhan’s writing—where I always look to understand the new, digital environment. 

People complain about Trump’s tweets, not realizing the tweets are Trump’s genius, his grasp of the present moment.

Trump tweeted this out on 1 July 2017, as an answer to his critics:

My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again.

5:41 PM

I agree with this tweet—the media world has changed and nobody wants to believe it. They want to kill the messenger. Trump alerts us to the new media environment—and we mistakenly focus on what we dislike about the man. Trump has no great loyalty to any policy or party. He is all about the medium.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s great aphorism… “The medium is the message.”

The content of Trump’s tweets is not the important thing. The fact that Trump uses twitter as his governing mechanism and image builder and that we read his tweets is what matters. 

And here is what McLuhan said in his Playboy interview of 1969:

“The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively puts on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image—like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.”