Trump, the Magic Candidate

No one is safe from his spell.

The following essay is not just about Donald Trump. It is about the last three weeks in American politics — among the craziest in recent memory. This moment, moreover, has a chief protagonist.

This essay shows Tara Isabella Burton at her best. In 2020, Tara published Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, where she explored “the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.” In today’s piece, Tara takes the next step: she looks at how these new priests and prophets are impacting our politics.

It’s the type of analysis you won’t always see in a mainstream political news outlet. It goes deeper, into the spiritual underpinnings of our restless political summer.

Enjoy!

Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

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We keep looking at that photograph: Trump’s fist bump, his scowl, the blood on his ear. We who support Trump, and we who oppose him. We mock it. We regret it. We put it on T-shirts. We make it into memes. We don’t stop looking. 

It reminds me, in mood if not in form, of a strangely beautiful Monsieur magazine cover from 2012. An elegantly dressed man and woman in 1930’s attire sit sipping champagne while Paris burns around them. “While the world ends,” the translated caption reads, “the party continues.” It’s an evocative image because it speaks to deeply human conflicting desires: for beauty, for safety, and for an interesting life — maelstrom viewed from a distance of security. The end of the world, toasted with champagne. The end of the end of history. It’s a kind of icon of chaos: pointing to a sense both that anything could happen, and that anything will always be rendered to us as art.

It is precisely that hunger — for something that sits on the knife’s-edge between distant entertainment and dangerous reality — that makes us so vulnerable to the particular strain of vitalist magic that Trump has harnessed so successfully in campaign and presidency alike. It is a fulfillment of, if not exactly a spiritual need, then an aesthetic one adjacent to it. We want something real, delivered to us through the medium of artifice. It’s the place where religious and aesthetic hunger meet. 

I am no Trump supporter, and never have been. But it would, I think, be ridiculous to deny the power of that photograph. It would also, I think, be ridiculous to deny that its power comes not just from the angle or the lighting or even the event itself, but from the role it plays in the cult of Trump: a cult that, over the past few years, has become less of a cult of personality and more the coalescence of a wider American aesthetic-spiritual tendency towards conflating primal excitement, inchoate “energy,” and its subsequent manifestation in the Internet-fueled discourse cycle. It’s the sacralization of politics-as-vibes where our emotional desires, translated into clicks, and into votes, cannot but become reality. At least, until the next news cycle.

Over the past few years, Trump has, more often than not, demonstrated witting or unwitting mastery of this vibe cycle. Indeed, over the past few weeks — at least until Joe Biden stepped down as the Democrats’ presidential candidate (more on that later) — he might have seemed like the luckiest man alive. Not only did he survive the assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally, but he managed to do so with such bombastic élan — conveniently captured on photograph — that he managed to control the news cycle.

The discourse, rather, was dominated not by the assassination attempt itself but by Trump’s staggeringly photogenic response to it: the bloodied ear, the defiant raised fist. Coming on the heels of weeks of pundit-led hand-wringing about Joe Biden’s disastrously enervated performance in the candidates’ first debate, the image doubled — to the dismay, but begrudging respect, of even many liberals — as the perfect campaign poster: Trump’s preternatural vitality as a rejoinder to the geriatric sclerosis not just of Biden himself, but of the liberal order he represented. Within hours, Elon Musk — X’s CEO, and a former Trump skeptic — had endorsed the former president, adding: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”

As Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times, “The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of [Trump’s] status as a man of destiny … a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.” The Trump photo wasn’t just a political coup, in other words. It was also a religious one: a marriage of circumstance, content, and form so palpable it managed to harness — among Trump’s supporters and worried detractors alike – a collective sense of the chaotic sublime. T-shirts bearing the image of the photograph were available — and sold out — within hours of the attempted assassination attempt. As Trump himself put it to the New York Post: “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen.”

Donald Trump is no stranger to the use of religious iconography. During the run-up to the 2016 election, as well as throughout his first campaign, he welcomed the attempts, however forced or incongruous, of his white evangelical base to cast him in the mold of a “Cyrus”: the Persian king who, though not a follower of Yahweh, was nevertheless a “vessel” for divine will. Yet at his core, the iconography Trump evokes — wittingly or not — is rooted less in the theological vocabulary of Christianity than in a far more nebulous spiritual grammar. Rooted in nineteenth-century vitalism and in occultism, as well as in the American nineteenth-century spiritual craze known as New Thought, this grammar is, for many of us in post-secular America, the closest thing we have to a shared civic religion. It is central to understanding both left-coded accounts of “positive energy” and the authoritarian tendencies of a re-enchantment-seeking right. It is the grammar of magic. And Donald Trump has, for the past few years, at least, the greatest magician of all.

By magic, to be clear, I do not mean to claim that Donald Trump is literally a wizard, or that he can do spells, or levitate, or anything else that breaks the laws of science as we know them. Rather, I believe that Trump’s success — as a “powerful poster,” as a maker of memes — lies in his ability to channel a wider, vaguer, collective contemporary American spiritual, political, and aesthetic tendency. This tendency is based not just in America’s (roughly) Christian religious heritage but in a distinctly modern, distinctly Internet Age set of “magical” cultural attitudes about the self and its power. In this ethos, reality and truth are fundamentally fungible: downstream of, and subject to, our own desires.  

This kind of “magical thinking” is rooted in a historical — and, particularly, a nineteenth-century — resurgence of interest in magic as a kind of spiritualized Nietzscheanism: our ability to successfully bend reality into the image of what we most wish it to be. This typical nineteenth-century magician is not the alchemist who could successfully turn metal into gold, or create a potion that would let him live forever. Rather, he is the magician who, by convincing everyone that metal is in fact gold, successfully sells it and makes a small fortune.

Once, this way of thinking was transgressive, dangerous, limited to alchemists, bohemians, Satanists, and other coteries of counter-cultural thought. Now, we live in an era in which in which 50 percent of Americans say they believe in “manifesting” — basically, a modern version of New Thought. By “manifesting,” one attracts material success through a quasi-magical process of visualizing it — and 20 percent say they’ve tried it. We’re all magicians, now — or at least like to think we are. As the New Thought writer Norman Vincent Peale — Trump’s onetime personal pastor — put it in his 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking: “When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.”

Whether Trump has, in fact, literally manifested his way into the presidency, he has spent the past eight years as both proponent and personification of this tendency: both in the circumstances of his own life and in his wider ability to create infinite ripples of discourse. Wittingly or not, Trump controls the memes — and with it, the political, cultural, and economic reality those memes have helped to create, by influencing how we think, talk, and write, and on which headlines we click. He has captivated our attention — the fundamental currency of the Internet economy — in part because we perceive in him, whether it’s with horror or delight — something capable of enthralling us.

Part of this “something” is the fact that Trump represents the apotheosis of manifesting culture. But part of it, too, is the way in which his uncanny ability to treat the national stage as a venue for entertainment ties into a related hunger: our desire to see the world as, if not exactly enchanted, then nevertheless interesting. “Make America Great Again” and “the Rise of American Fascism,” are mirror images of each other. They are both grand historical narratives that offer us, regardless of our political valence, the seductive promise of being part of a world-historical moment. The assassination-attempt photo is compelling not only because Trump has, however implausibly, survived. It is compelling because it ties into Trump’s wider self-presentation as a chaos candidate whose election propels us firmly into a world order where anything could happen. 

In this, too, Trump owes something to the magical tradition. In the nineteenth century, as now, occultism held particular fascination for those, particularly on the political right, disillusioned with modernity: with what they saw as the alienation and ennui engendered by the soft and ostensibly easily, feminized life lived under liberal modernity. In the absence of traditional aristocratic or military hierarchies, which (they believed) had correctly preserved distinctions among different ranks of human beings, it fell to the enchanter — he who could effectively manipulate not just his own desires but those around him — to assume his rightful role at the top of the new social order: and to re-create it in his images.

As the Italian occultist (and noted fascist) Julius Evola wrote, “The essential task ahead requires … giving birth to an Order. This elite, differentiating itself on a plane that is defined in terms of spiritual virility, decisiveness, and impersonality, and where every naturalistic bond loses its power and value, will be the bearer of a new principle of a higher authority and sovereignty.”

Central to this particularly reactionary strain of occultism was a fascination with virility, with masculine erotic power, and indeed with a nebulous sense of life-force-as-energy. This fascination, in turn, had  its roots in a school of thought known as “vitalism.” Braiding science and spirituality alike, historic vitalism — which reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — sought to identify, in essence, the “spark” that distinguished living beings from non-living ones. 

Taken up by occultists like Evola, however, vitalism had a particularly political dimension: the conflation of the Nietzschean superman, the enchanter and the strongman. The strong personality, capable of harnessing his own masculine life-force and, through it, those of others, would be the mage capable of overturning the sclerosis of dull history and return us to the primal era of myth.

Since 2016, this particular strain of vitalism, both in and beyond its specifically occult-tinged context, has become increasingly popular in what is now known as the New Right. Yet even people not well-versed in internecine fights among fringe conservatives have found a specifically vitalist appeal in the rise of the Trumpian Right. As Libertarian Tyler Cowen recently wrote: “The ‘Trumpian Right,’ whether you agree with it or not, has been more intellectually alive and vital than the Progressive Left, at least during the last five years, maybe more.  Being fully on the outs, those people were more free to be creative.” Trump’s iconic image  is also an advertisement for enchanted chaos: a political realm that at least claims to be distinct from stultifying business-as-usual.

There is a fundamental nihilism to this particular vision of enchantment. If reality is, indeed, only ever what we make it, magic is nothing more than the successful expression of our will. Dark enchantment and solipsism become indistinguishable from one another. The pact with the devil turns out to be a loss of faith in the idea that anything outside our own selves matters. The religion of vibes works only in the absence of a belief that enchantment could ever come from something real — let alone something good.

If the command of Internet memes is inseparable from the command of the invisible current running through our universe, then what we are left with, a Trumpian enchanter, is the very alienation so many of us are running away from. Magic turns out to be only an illusion, after all. 

But if we have learned anything from fairy tales and the Faust stories, it is that, when it comes to soul-selling magical pacts, the house usually wins. Deals with the devil, after all, rarely end with human beings as permanent victors. Already, between the first draft of the essay and the final one, the vibes have shifted once more, at least for now: Joe Biden has stepped down as a presidential candidate; Kamala Harris has emerged a surprisingly meme-worthy proposition (“laughing Kamala,” as far as Trumpian epithets go, not only lacks luster but renders her tantalizingly chaotic herself). Trump’s own convention speech managed to produce not a single newsworthy soundbyte.

The sacralization of aesthetic desire breaks down: desire, after all, especially aesthetic desire, is as fickle as it is powerful. Nobody, not even Trump, can ride the waves of aesthetic chaos beyond the point where ordinary mortals become bored, desirous of fresher meat and danker memes. In harnessing our worst and most solipsistic impulses, he has also committed himself to dependence upon them: when we grow bored, whether that’s in this election cycle or another news cycle yet to come, the magic stops working, or else it starts working for somebody else. Insofar as our Internet-fueled discursive system runs on the energy of vibes, it is also subject to them. Nobody can ride the tiger forever.

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