by Naomi Klein
What reality television and professional wrestling have in common is that they are forms of mass entertainment that are relatively new in American culture, and they both establish a curious relationship with reality—one that is both fake and still somehow genuine at the same time.
With WWE, every fight is fixed, everybody knows that it’s rehearsed. But that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment in any way. The fact that everyone is in on the joke, that the cheers and boos are part of the show, increases the fun. The artifice is not a drawback—it’s the point.
Wrestling and reality TV both thrive on the spectacle of extreme emotion, conflict, and suffering. They both involve people screaming at each other and pulling each other’s hair out and, in the case of wrestling, beating the crap out of each other. But at the same time as you’re watching it, you know it’s not real, so you don’t have to care; you get to be part of the drama without having to feel any empathy. Nobody cries when wrestlers get slammed and humiliated, any more than we were meant to cry for The Apprentice contestants when Trump fired or humiliated them. It’s a safe place to laugh at suffering. And it was all part of preparing the ground for that Igor of all things fake, Donald Trump. Fake body parts, fake wrestling, fake-reality TV, fake news, and his whole fake business model.
And now Trump has grafted this same warped relationship to reality onto his administration. He announces that Obama wiretapped him in the same way that a wrestler declares he’s going to annihilate and humiliate his opponent. Whether or not it’s true is beside the point. It’s part of rousing the crowd, part of the theater. The Apprentice may be off the air, and Trump may have retired his WWE career, but the show is still on. Indeed, it never stops.
Newt Gingrich, who has been a pretty faithful cheerleader of Donald Trump, was asked shortly before inauguration what he thought of the president-elect’s decision to keep his position as executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice. His answer was quite revealing. He said Trump was making a mistake because he “is going to be the executive producer of a thing called the American government. He’s going to have a huge TV show called ‘Leading the World.’ ”
And that’s exactly what’s happening. The Trump Show is now broadcasting live from the Oval Office. And from Mar-a-Lago, which is even more like a TV show because its well-heeled members provide a built-in live studio audience. And it’s clear that this is precisely how Trump sees his presidency too, as the executive producer of a country, always with an eye on the ratings. Responding to the suggestion that he might fire his gaffe-machine of a press secretary, he reportedly said, “I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”
It’s with the same brash showmanship that Trump is now navigating—or failing to navigate—the promises he made to bring back the bygone days of booming factories and blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages, promises that he would impose a “Buy American, Hire American” policy (never mind that his own empire is built on outsourcing and exploited labor).
This posture is as authentic as the violence he enacted when he appeared to take on a WWE wrestler in the ring, or when he was choosing from among contestants on Celebrity Apprentice. Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many US companies are no longer manufacturers at all, but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors. He may be able to bring back a few factories, or claim that he did, but the numbers will be minuscule compared with the need. (There is a real way to create a great many well-paying jobs—but it looks nothing like the Trump approach. It requires looking to the future, not the past, as we’ll see in the final chapter.)
Trump’s game plan, which is already under way, is to approach the unemployment and underemployment crisis in the same way he approaches everything—as a spectacle. He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs—most of which would have been created anyway—and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the job numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative, just as he learned to do on The Apprentice, and just as he did on his very first day as president, insisting, against all objective evidence, that his inauguration crowds had been historic.
This is what Trump does, and has always done. In 1992, when his empire was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy thanks to a series of bad investment decisions, he didn’t deal with the situation by getting his finances in order. Instead, he threw an elaborate “comeback party” for his investors and financiers at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which culminated in Trump—wearing satin boxing shorts and red boxing gloves—punching through a paper wall to the theme song from Rocky. This is a man who thinks he can solve anything with the right stage-managed performance, and very often in the past he’s been proven right. So just as he spun and performed his way out of bankruptcy, he is convinced he can do the same with the country’s economy.
Fake News, Alternative Facts, and the Big Lie
If we know anything for certain, it’s that hard facts don’t matter in Donald Trump’s world. With Trump, it’s not so much the Big Lie as the Constant Lies. Yes, he tells big ones, like the time he implied Ted Cruz’s dad had a role in assassinating JFK, and his years of lies about Obama’s place of birth. But it’s the continuous stream of lies—notoriously offered to us as “alternative facts”—that is most dizzying. According to a Politico investigation, this is quite deliberate: “White House staffers do much of their lying for sport, rather than to further any larger agenda,” even competing over who can “smuggle the biggest whoppers into print.” Though these claims are based on anonymous sources, and so may themselves be lies, the story fits with what we know about Trump: what good is reaching the pinnacle of power if you can’t bend reality to your will? In Trump’s world, and according to the internal logic of his brand, lying with impunity is all part of being the big boss. Being tethered to fixed, boring facts is for losers.
And so far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized upon this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created—the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing first family free of major scandals for eight years. And these were all good things. But, too often, these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians, or the deportations of roughly 2.5 million immigrants without documents during Obama’s term, or his broken promises to close Guantanamo or shut down George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”
In Canada, many liberals are displaying the same kind of selective blindness. Dazzled by the progressive messaging of our handsome prime minister, they are letting him hang on to many of his predecessor’s disastrous policies, from the indefinite detention of many immigrants to ramming through tar sands pipelines (more on that later). Politically, Justin Trudeau is very different from Donald Trump, but for his staunchest supporters—who often behave a lot like fans—his celebrity has a similarly distorting effect. This new “Trudeaumania” reminds us that conservatives aren’t the only ones capable of confusing engaged citizenship with brand loyalty.
Of course, Trump’s successful attempt to sell his white working class voters on the dream of a manufacturing comeback will eventually come crashing down to earth. But what is most worrying is what Trump will do then, once it’s no longer possible to hide the fact that coal jobs aren’t coming back, and neither are the factory jobs that paid workers eno
ugh to provide their families with a middle-class life. In all likelihood, Trump will then fall back on the only other tools he has: he’ll double down on pitting white workers against immigrant workers, do more to rile up fears about Black crime, more to whip up an absurd frenzy about transgendered people and bathrooms, and launch fiercer attacks on reproductive rights and on the press.
And then, of course, there’s always war.
The Apocalypse Show
Acknowledging that Trump’s presidency is being produced like a reality show in no way diminishes the danger it represents—quite the opposite. People have already died in this show—in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in the United States—and many more will meet the same fate before it goes off the air. In March alone, a UK-based monitoring group recorded allegations of more than 1,500 civilian deaths from US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, higher than ever recorded under Obama.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show. Blood-sport reality TV is, after all, a science-fiction cliché. Think of The Hunger Games, with its reality TV spectacle in which all the players die but one. Or The Running Man, another film about a televised event where the stakes are life or death. (Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, reportedly described the bombing of Syria as Mar-a-Lago’s “after-dinner entertainment.”)
The most chilling part is that, as I write, Trump has only just started playing his version of The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games with the full arsenal of US military power as his props—and he is getting plenty of encouragement to keep upping the ante. When Trump launched Tomahawk missiles on Syria, MSNBC host Brian Williams declared the images “beautiful.” Just one week later, Trump went for more spectacle, dropping the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal on a cave complex in Afghanistan, an act of violence so indiscriminate and disproportionate that analysts struggled to find any rationale that could resemble a coherent military strategy. Because there was no strategy—the megatonnage is the message. Mass communication through bombs.
Given that Trump ordered the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in combat before, and given that he did this just twelve weeks into his presidency and with no obvious provocation, there is little reason to hope he will be able to resist putting on the show of shows—the televised apocalyptic violence of a full-blown war, complete with its guaranteed blockbuster ratings. Well before Trump, we had wars fought as televised entertainment. The 1990 Gulf War was dubbed the first video-game war, complete with its own logo and theme music on CNN. But that was nothing compared with the show put on during the 2003 Iraq invasion, based on a military strategy called “Shock and Awe.” The attacks were designed as a spectacle for cable news consumers, but also for Iraqis, to maximize their sense of helplessness, to “teach them a lesson.” Now, that fearsome technology is in the hands of the first reality TV president. We need to get ready, a subject I’ll return to in Chapter 9.
Hollow Man
If there is one real aspect to the festival of fakery that is the Trump presidency, it’s the hunger at the heart of it. The sheer insatiability. Trump likes to talk about how he doesn’t need more money—he has more than enough. Yet he just can’t help selling his products at every opportunity, can’t stop working every angle. It’s as if he suffers from some obscure modern illness—let’s call it a brand personality disorder—that causes him to slip into brand promotion almost involuntarily. He’ll be giving a political speech and then, suddenly, he’s talking about how beautiful and expensive the marble is at a Trump hotel, or gratuitously telling his interviewer, when discussing how he ordered a lethal bombing of Syria, that the chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago is “the most beautiful…you’ve ever seen.”
That unquenchable hunger, that hollowness at the center, does speak to something real—to a profound emptiness at the heart of the very culture that spawned Donald Trump. And that hollowness is intimately connected to the rise of lifestyle brands, the shift that gave Trump an ever-expanding platform. The rise of the hollow brands—selling everything, owning next to nothing—happened over decades when the key institutions that used to provide individuals with a sense of community and shared identity were in sharp decline: tightly knit neighborhoods where people looked out for one another; large workplaces that held out the promise of a job for life; space and time for ordinary people to make their own art, not just consume it; organized religion; political movements and trade unions that were grounded in face-to-face relationships; public-interest media that strove to knit nations together in a common conversation.
All these institutions and traditions were and are imperfect, often deeply so. They left many people out, and very often enforced an unhealthy conformity. But they did offer something we humans need for our well-being, and for which we never cease to long: community, connection, a sense of mission larger than our immediate atomized desires. These two trends—the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture—have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.
I’ve always taken solace from this dynamic. It means that, while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can’t fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you’ve thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fill the void again. It’s the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it’s a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption.
But it’s always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force—the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die. And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we’re at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).
As we’ll see in Part IV, many movements and theorists are working toward just this kind of shift in culture and values. Before we get to that, though, there are a few more important trails we need to follow to help us understand how we ended up here.
PART II
WHERE WE ARE NOW: CLIMATE OF INEQUALITY
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CLIMATE CLOCK STRIKES MIDNIGHT
Let’s rewind a bit, to the week Trump won. At that moment, I was reeling from witnessing not one catastrophe, but two. And I don’t think we can understand the true danger of the Trump disaster unless we grapple with both of them.
As I mentioned, I was in Australia for work, but I was also very conscious that, because of the carbon involved in that kind of travel, I might not be able to return for a long time. So I decided to visit, for the first time in my life, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, a World Heritage Site and the earth’s largest natural structure made up of living creatures. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
I spent a lot of time underwater as a kid. My father taught me to snorkel when I was six or seven, and those are some of my happiest memories. There was always something amazing to me about the intimacy of the interactions with ocean life. When you first swim up to a reef, the fish mostly scatter. But if you hang out for a few minutes, they stop seeing you as an intruder and you become part of the seascape to them—they’ll swim right up to your mask, or nibble on you
r arm. As an anxious kid, I always found these experiences wonderfully dreamlike and peaceful.
As the Australian trip approached, I realized that my feelings about seeing the Reef were tied up in my being the mother of a four-year-old boy, Toma. As parents, we can sometimes make the mistake of exposing kids too early to all the threats and dangers facing the natural world. The first book about nature that a lot of children read is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, which is all about pollution and beautiful places being turned into garbage and all the animals dying and disappearing and choking. It’s really scary. I read it to Toma when he was two and watched the terror cross his face. And I thought, “No, this is completely wrong.” Now we read stories about fast-talking squirrels and books that celebrate nature’s beauty and wonder. Even if I know these books are about species that are on the brink of extinction, Toma doesn’t need to worry about that yet. I figure that my job is to try to create as many positive experiences as possible that will attach him to the natural world. You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it.
I also wanted to go to the Reef in my role as a journalist. Over the previous two years, something unprecedented in recorded history had happened. Because of record-breaking temperatures, more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been impacted by what’s known as a “mass bleaching event.” It’s hard to stress just how cataclysmic the bleaching has been. When coral is bleached, those beautiful, intensely colored creatures—an ecosystem as rich and teeming as the Amazon rain forest—turn ghostly and bone-white. Bleached coral can recover, if temperatures quickly go back down to normal levels. This time, they hadn’t gone back down—so almost a quarter of the Reef has died.