There seem to be 15 different “survival games.” The most famous of them are those with double-genre, like “survival and simulation,” “simulation and horror” or “simulation and adventure.” If the U.S. Presidency could be a game, its true nature would be listed under all those genres. We used to think that a U.S. president would be a cunning man with excellent survival skills. But by the virtue of Donald Trump’s presidency, we now know that the presidential survival game has other properties like simulation, horror and adventure, but mainly “simulation.”
I don’t want to bother you with the "simulation" and "simulacra" concepts of Jean Baudrillard, “the high priest of postmodernism;” it seems suffice to mention that the Trump Presidency is what Baudrillard calls “simulacrum:” “Copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.” Trump is not even a simulation of a president, as an imitation of a real-world process or system! (I hope that much Baudrillard keeps you satisfied as it did help me in many of exams I had on his theory!)
What Trump does and says, and what he tracks back from what he did or said (Remember! He has not gotten his new nickname is “TACO” – short for "Trump Always Chickens Out" – for nothing!) are not real; they are something that replaces reality with its representation; they are not referring to a being, a substance. The Trump presidency is a model of a real thing that has no origin or reality. Trump is living in hyperreality. The Trump White House is not an imitation or duplication, nor even a parody, of the previous 45 presidents’ administrations. He is like a psychosomatic illness. which is not a sickness in reality, but it is there!
According to Baudrillard, in our postmodern times, what we see and what we hear are the signs of the real for the real.” Not everything is a simulacrum (yet thank God!) but they may lose their common meaning or communal standing. You’d understand some political development with a very positive touch 10 years ago, but now it may have no connotation whatsoever. The notions of reality, leading to a cultural state between signs and symbols that both you and I would perceive as standing in for reality, you and I, and many others we know would perceive them as “consensus reality.”
Had Trump not come promising no more endless wars, promising to end all the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations' wars? Wouldn’t he complete what he started in his first term, bringing all the American boys and girls back home? Was he not going to speak to the mullahs in Tehran about not building atomic bombs, or to Russian President Vladimir Putin about stopping the bombing of Ukraine? Did he not "warn Israeli Prime Minister in no uncertain terms that he wants Israel to wrap up the war in Gaza by the time he returns to office by January”? (Not “to win the war, but to end it!)
The Trump we are seeing and hearing now – I should say, “the Trump we are experiencing now!" – is not the reality the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd voted for. The Trump we have right now is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s whipping boy; he is playing Trump with his ridiculous Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Netanyahu, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, has proposed the U.S. president, his largest weapons supplier and strongest political backer, as a candidate for the world’s top peacemaking prize!
Could this be real? Could this be happening in the real world? Can a sane person see any resemblance to real politics here? According to major MAGA representative Liz Wheeler, Trump does not see what his base sees when they look at the White House. Two different interpretations of reality she is talking about, each of which is as real as the other one. Because in this post-realism era, your interpretation of reality is as true as mine, which are essentially contradictory to each other and the situation they interpret. Because in postmodernist times, there is no such thing as truth. We are living in the post-truth era.
Guy Debord, a French Marxist philosopher, filmmaker and founding father of Situationist International (the avant-garde art movements of based on Dada and Surrealism) said in his best-known work, "The Society of the Spectacle," that “Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” He is so right: What we see when we look at Trump’s or any other president’s administration, we don’t see images of events, speeches, meetings, but a social relation among people, mediated by those images.
Netanyahu's nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize is not real; it is not even a joke from my perspective. For Mohamad Bazzi of the Guardian, it is absurd, “akin to nominating one’s drug dealer for the Nobel Prize in medicine.” It is not the international relations theory we studied at school; it is “a publicity stunt” and “exploitation of Trump’s need for flattery” but there is one motive behind it: to kill more Palestinians in Gaza so that it would be taken out of the “Palestinian State” equation of the “two-state solution spectacle,” international Zionism put onstage.
I can give you 1 million other examples of non-real absurdities Trump makes us fantasize about, things we have been expecting from him. In reality, when we put those images together, what we see is not the U.S. we used to. It is not a golden door with a lamp, open to receive “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” When he promised to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, the people ready to Make America Great Again never thought that the president would send police to detain immigrants among the Texas flood victims.
FAFO used to stand for “Fool Around, Find Out.” Not anymore; the first F stands for the F-word. So, we find more about survival horror and action horror games.
