2025-01-17 05:09:37      点击：814

For anyone who has dedicated the better part of the past decade to trying to affix meaning to the words spoken by Donald J. Trump, there is something transcendently satisfying about the news that as of this week, there is nothing left to be parsed. There is just the dancing, and perhaps that can only be witnessed but never understood. At a town hall meeting in Oaks, Pennsylvania, this past weekend, the former president, finally even himself grown weary of his words and language and audience questions and answers, opted to just crank out the tunes and, well, boogie down for 39 minutes to a playlist of his own choosing.

Ever since he came hurtling down that escalator at Trump Tower and started jabbering about rapists and Mexicans, we have all gone half mad trying to decide whether to take Donald Trump literally but not seriously, or seriously but not literally, or finally, as the New York Timesnow quaintly characterizes it all, as the communications of a man prone to “improvisational departures,” from the script of a normal campaign stop (or increasingly from reality itself). But the truly essential thing is that after eight years of media dedicated to this effort to pin the language on the donkey, it is finally and conclusively clear that Trump’s words do not matter. Maybe the only thing that matters is the Dance.

I am not going to link here to the two dozen articles I have written in the years since 2016, attempting to graft agreed-upon meanings to free-floating Trumpian output because, like the rest of the press, I once mistakenly believed that politics, policy, law, and elected office somehow correlated to language and words with shared public meaning. I wasted at least an entire year trying to find the legal, enforceable meaning of his assorted speech acts. Dumb. As the Times further reported this past weekend, many Trump supporters appear to like him precisely becausethey actually don’t believe anything he says. The slippery incoherence is a feature, not a bug. And, as their pollsters noted, “in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 41 percent of likely voters agreed with the assessment that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.” The character flaw now lies in those attempting to understand and believe him, not in his inscrutability. And by those lights, the Dada of a dance recital in lieu of a town hall makes perfect sense.

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We in the press have been talking for the past few weeks about the widespread media propensity for “sanewashing” Donald Trump—a critique holding that corporate media can’t resist making the former president sound normal, simply because that’s how we have always covered political candidates and because it’s the only way to comprehend electoral politics. But with the Pennsylvania event, we may have just skidded imperceptibly past sane-washing and directly into dance-washing, wherein the press need not even attempt to translate insane speeches and social media posts into legible ideas, because it’s vastly easier to simply watch him dance. We may have finally been forced to abandon the nagging reportorial need to translate Trump’s words into promises and pledges, and leaned back out cozily into simply appreciating the former president’s ineffable sway and fist pump, and his rapturous enjoyment of show tunes.

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If it were still 2016, the American public might well notice that one of the two candidates for the commander-in-chief spot on the ticket has entirely given up the obligation to say words to win office. The American public might even be outraged by a candidate that had grown bored of answering questions but wants us to watch him dance. But by 2024, this switch is experienced mainly as a relief. Why expend energy trying to deconstruct which parts of Trump’s pledges to rout out immigrants and jail his critics are programmatic and which parts are merely smoke? It’s all smoke now. It’s the Studio 54 election.

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With three weeks left until Nov. 5, if anyone asks why this presidential contest is so unbearably close, you can surely remind them that it’s because we’ve landed in the language-optional era of failed democracy, in which millions of voters who no longer believe in politics, or the media, or even the stability of language itself nevertheless find it soothing to watch their preferred candidate sway and grind to tunes for which we all, weirdly, know all the words by heart. Whatever else has collapsed, the immutability of “It’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A” is the one thing we can all still rely upon. Words that signify nothing beyond the fact that words themselves have finally failed.

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