Defiled power: Trump’s lust for desecration

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it, the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter jet labelled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of faeces on them. White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully amplified the clip, writing that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

It’s no longer surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as colonies to be subdued. This is a man who told the military to use cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations and who has sent troops and federal agents to terrorise Los Angeles and other cities. His attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine that they barely make headlines.

What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhoea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. Rulers, by contrast, tend to guard their dignity. But not Trump.

A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism surrounds Trump and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.

There’s a tension when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level, he and those around him have an instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate classical aesthetics; an executive order on federal architecture called for designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigour and stability” of American self-government. Yet Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden to resemble the patio at Mar-a-Lago, and crews are now demolishing parts of the East Wing to build a ballroom.

The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from AI slop — the tackier and more juvenile, the better. Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese anime film. Last week, when HuffPost asked who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming Trump–Putin meeting, press secretary Karoline Leavitt replied, “Your mom did.” She was trying to insult a journalist, but instead revealed herself as a gross parody of a professional spokesperson. The administration now plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn — an idea straight out of Idiocracy.

The Trump gang’s compulsion to cheapen everything they touch is more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. One might expect it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which aids communities in both red and blue states.

Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the small-government zeal of figures like Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandise the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. Another part seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits to his dominance.

In The Emergency, an allegorical novel by George Packer, the Trumpist lust for desecration finds fictional expression. The book’s conflict between self-righteous Burghers and paranoid rural Yeomen culminates in plans to bombard the city with faecal cannons — a metaphor that, in light of Trump’s video, feels eerily prescient. “There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” Packer writes. “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”

Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine reconciliation with those who want, above all, to befoul us.

The New York Times