Article:

Trump, Fernsehen und das neue Camp

One month after the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, Time magazine announced in a headline, ‘Donald Trump Is the First True Reality TV President’ (9 Dec 2016). But if Trump’s surprise election has proven anything, it is that we cannot afford to dismiss reality TV as ‘not real’ nor to grandly assume that the ‘reality TV president’ has infected politics with fiction. On the contrary, television is the thing that has made Trump very real – and real in a particular way, as a medium of feeling – for a large portion of the American public, precisely through his experience with and exposure on reality TV. I will offer a framework for conceiving of the way that Trump-as-medium interlaces reality TV and politics by introducing a mode of transgressive presidential behaviour that we might call ‘new camp’, a campily dramatic mode whose thrill arises not from queerly exuberant irony but rather from anger embraced as the new currency of authenticity in the theater of affect.