A Brief Splash of Clarity: Trump, Reiner, and Public Moral Projection

Donald Trump is a jerk.

"This is the trenchant, illuminating analysis I look forward to from Random Dangling Mystery," I can hear you saying. And it's true, we cut right to the dark unseen heart of things around these parts. Brace yourself, 'cause this goes deep.

Okay, so everyone knows that Donald Trump is a jerk. His numerous political opponents and other sundry disapprovers, those vaunted legions of "haters and losers", all know this, and if it's not primary to their disapproval, it's secondary or at least tertiary. His supporters, be they contingent or unquestioning, might quibble a touch (there is no lack of absolute unreasonable hagiography of the man in the propaganda fever swamps of the Right) but the more frank among them would likely ultimately grant the sobriquet as well. The MAGA acolytes would simply find it laudable, a sign of strength and power, whereas the haters and losers would class it among his disqualifying faults.

Such a dichotomous formulation, its dividing line the definitional partisan threshold of American and indeed global politics and society at our fraught present moment, is as close to common consensus as our fractional times have to offer. The values and characteristics that Trump's opponents despise are (often if not uniformly) the ones that his fans adore. Presidents of the United States of America have long been symbolic avatars of political and social identity, and Trump has supercharged this tendency with his boundless appetite for attention, his insatiable ego, and the vast friendly media landscape that seeks to build him up as the exemplar of the American volkisch soul.

But what happens when this dichotomy wavers? When the more divisive aspects of his personality – like his seemingly bottomless capacity to be a nasty, catty jerk, or his positively herculean robustness of naked corruption and self-interest – prove even too much for his loyal legions? Trump has very frequently been too much for normal people, but only on fascinating occasions has he been too much for his dedicated cult.

January 6th, 2021 was one such occasion. It's been disavowed and bulldozed by years of MAGA propaganda and sympathetic Republican and conservative movement discursive support, but in the immediate aftermath of the "Stop the Steal" rally and its unleashed angry, violent mob besieging the US Capitol to prevent the Congressional certification of Trump's Democratic opponent Joe Biden's 2020 election victory over him, a potentially decisive cadre of Republicans joined liberals and many independents and even many politically unengaged Americans in being aghast at the outgoing President's conduct, his fomenting of his mob of insurrectionist loyalists. In the first blush of the events, it was clear what it was and why it was heinous. But then something happened.

Another less-Trump-centric case in this vein was the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. The circulation of the video of Floyd's suffocation at Chauvin's hands left little doubt as to the brutality of the event, nor of its status as a clear homicide (a conclusion reinforced by the medical examiner and later Chauvin's charging and conviction for Floyd's murder). Even right-wing figures (most notably Ben Shapiro) were open and clear in their shock and in recognizing the lack of ambiguity around the murder question. But then came the largest anti-racism protests in American history, and again, something happened.

This fleeting acknowledgement by right-wing observers of the horrible reality of a current event in common with the rest of the political spectrum before an eventual retreat into a comforting propaganda fiction of denial and reinforcing aggrievement that maintains the righteous superstructure of fantasy that defines contemporary conservatism seems to me to rise to the level of an observable and quantifiable phenomenon. And such a phenomenon requires nomenclature, lest that belaboured previous sentence serve as an eye-glazing definition to be repeated at each iteration. And so I would humbly suggest a coinage: the Brief Splash of Clarity. Like a splash, it's impossible to miss when it happens, a highly perceptible irruption along the surface reality, but once the splash has settled and the waters have returned to their wavering equilibrium, it's like it never happened.

A third example of the Brief Splash of Clarity can be discerned in the past week, when upon the shocking and tragic stabbing death of filmmaker, actor and liberal political activist Rob Reiner and his wife in their Los Angeles-area home (evidently and even more tragically perpetrated by their son, who had struggled with addiction), President Donald Trump took to his discursive safe space of MAGAist Twitter clone Truth Social to post one of his rambling proclamations on an unfolding event.

I won't share or even attempt to summarize what Trump or one of his groyper troglodyte aides pumped out into the world, but suffice it to say that while most of the rest of the internet expressed sadness and memorialized Reiner as one of Hollywood's greatest directors (in particular for a legendary run of films in the 1980s and early 1990s) as well as a genuinely good dude, the President let out a mix of half-hearted rote memorialization and venomous partisan invective at a former opponent, concluding with a darkly unhinged suggestion that should Reiner have been slain by a MAGA follower, he would have deserved it.

Liberals and normies were largely disgusted, though that is a daily reaction to Trump in leftish spaces. But conservatives balked as well, with even some of his loyal allies criticizing the post and even suggesting he shouldn't have sent it out into the world. Both Trump's venom and the criticism of it from his own side has faded from the news cycle, though it's yet to curdle and twist into a public demonstration of his value to his loyal hordes as much as simply been ignored until it goes away. Still, a Brief Splash it was.

Brief Splashes of Clarity are interesting to me as case studies in how right-wing discourse operates, and the role that conservative movement propaganda plays in conditioning that discourse and those receiving and disseminating it. Something that political and cultural analysis has grappled with through the Trump era (and even well before) is why political actors and consumers on the Right say and do the clearly terrible and immoral and wrong things that they do. "Vice signalling" and "the cruelty is the point" have been thrown around as larger explanatory frameworks, with the anonymity and detachment of online discourse and the totalizing irresistibility of propaganda firehoses especially on the internet buttressing those observations.

Essentially, saying and believing and doing immoral things is incentivized by the right-wing political machine, with its dominant outrage attention complex and overmediating oppositional defiance disorder to everything that it understands as being part and parcel of the existing liberal order, very much including any hint of acting towards any conception of the public good. This paradigm works so well largely because of its expansiveness and malleability, allowing for any and all delineations lying between conservatives being evil demon spawn delighting in inflicting harm on others and conservatives being so entirely and helplessly captured by the propagandistic manipulations of the right-wing elite that they have no real control over their thoughts and actions. Whether a critic wishes to attack or absolve, this framework admits any permutation.

I don't think Brief Splashes replace or contradict those attempts at understanding, which if it wasn't clear I don't find particularly satisfying even as they are the most easily accessed and deployed. If anything, they might serve to suggest that conservatives know that it's wrong to believe that Trump is good and strong, that a treasonous partisan mob are a legion of brave patriots, or that cops don't target minorities with discriminatory violence. The Splashes might also be predictive tremors, hints of weakness and fissures and forthcoming schisms; certainly Trump looked like he might actually be finished in the wake of January 6th (and the narrative of how he came not to be is a sad tale for a future historian) and the reaction to his Reiner post comes in an atmosphere of his perceived political weakness as well.

There's nothing that people love to do on the internet more than diagnose strangers' psychological states despite a marked paucity of observed evidence and therapeutic expertise, so perhaps I won't attempt that with a diffuse big tent of millions and millions of Americans and fellow travellers from elsewhere. But watching for and registering these Brief Splashes of Clarity might offer signs and symptoms of potential localized cures to a larger epidemic, and they're worth the effort for that reason.