US politics: Donald Trump: The emptiness behind the picture

After the assassination attempt on him, Donald Trump has once again achieved a masterpiece of political communication. With his fist raised and his ear bleeding, he shouted “Fight!” several times to his supporters before the Secret Service employees shielding him were able to maneuver him off the stage. The result is an iconographic photo. So iconographic that you could almost forget the absolute emptiness behind it.

Many saw Trump’s quick-witted reaction to the assassination attempt as the genius of an instinctive politician who, in a matter of seconds, became aware of the significance of a historical moment and took advantage of it. The raised fist has been an integral part of Trump’s repertoire for years. He showed it when he took office, after recovering from the corona infection, in the Senate and on pretty much every occasion. It is the long-term appropriation and simultaneous emptying of meaning of a symbol that looks back on a long history.

In the 19th century, the raised fist gained importance as a symbol of the labor movement. At the latest with the famous photomontage “All Fists Clenched into One” (1934) by John Heartfield, it became firmly established in the symbolism of revolutionary left-wing movements. In the Spanish Civil War, the international brigades raised their fists in salute in the fight against the putschists led by General Franco; in Italy it was considered the anti-fascist response to Benito Mussolini’s Roman salute. At the 1968 Olympics, African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute during their medal ceremony to protest discrimination and racial hatred in the United States. The women’s movement adopted the fist in combination with the Venus symbol as a graphic emblem. The raised fist was always a symbol of resistance, often of the powerless against the powerful. The raised fist was shown by those who were ready to fight for a vision or utopia of a more just world.

In this sense, the raised fist of the multi-billionaire and former President Trump is their co-opted perversion. A gesture from the powerful for the powerful. Donald Trump presents himself as a friend of the workers – but in reality he is fighting for nothing but himself and is showing the way to the gravediggers of American democracy.

As pathetic is the raised fist in front of the waving US flag, so great is the emptiness that lies behind it. Trump could just as easily have announced a new shoe collection or an update for the next iPhone. Pathos and personality cult have long been enough to make supporters erupt in celebration and the rest of the world, especially the Democrats, to remain in a state of shock. Neither one nor the other would come up with the idea of ​​combining this gesture with the demand for a better world. But left-wing forces in the USA currently have little to counter the imagery of the media professional Trump, not to mention the decrepit Joe Biden.

Through his constant media presence, the ex-president has managed to graft his intellectual inner life onto a large part of the public. The Trump microcosm has become a macrocosm with the participation of the world public, in which every available resource flows to Trump, who is always at the center. And so all the power that the iconography of such a moment can develop in a society is absorbed by the ego of one man. A tragic situation, because in the intellectual vacuum that has arisen around Trump and his supporters, a radical conservative project has long since formed that is preparing to nip in the bud any chance of social progress in the USA in the future. The libertarian-conservative Heritage Foundation’s plan, which goes by the name “Project 2025” and is over 900 pages long, is tough. Under the next Republican presidency, state authorities are to be crushed and filled with loyalists, taxes are to be reduced for the rich and increased for those on low incomes. The minimal government health care system that provides care for the poorest Americans is to be slashed and workers’ rights are to be dismantled. Climate protection should be abolished completely and oil drilling rights should be massively expanded. Plans for abortion, the education system and the military are not even mentioned. In short, it is a wish list from America’s super-rich and ultra-conservative elite, which has always sat comfortably at the levers of power through think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.

Its boss Kevin Roberts himself sees his plans as a “revolution” that “remains bloodless if the left allows it.” However, the entourage of demands that would like to move into the White House in Trump’s slipstream has little in common with a revolution in the sense of a reversal of the balance of power. Ultimately, it envisages the massive cementing and expansion of existing power relations. In view of this, there is almost something macabre about the fact that Trump called on his audience in Pennsylvania, where there are presumably few beneficiaries of his politics, to fight with a raised fist after the failed assassination attempt, as if the Trojans were letting the Trojans build the horse themselves. It is an empty present that could soon be replaced by a bleak future. Americans must once again resist the temptation to fill this vast void with one man’s show.