Schaefer, Donovan O. “Whiteness and Civilization: Shame, Race, and the Rhetoric of Donald Trump.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Ahead of Print edition. doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1667503 Author version. Eprints of published version available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CVKKFAUIFE4JQW6GMVUB/full?target=10.1080/1 4791420.2019.1667503 “And can anyone suppose that we’ll ever figure out what happened around political correctness if we don’t see it as, among other things, a highly politicized chain reaction of shame dynamics?”1 – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling Whiteness and Civilization: Shame, Race, and the Rhetoric of Donald Trump Feels Good, Man If you wade through the Twitter subtweets of flashpoint political figures like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, you might find yourself surrounded by avatars of cartoon frogs.2 They come dressed in SS uniforms, clown wigs, MAGA hats, sunglasses, trenchcoats, balaclavas, yarmulkes, fedoras, and other accessories. Some of them have Trump’s signature platinum combover. They are all smirking. The users lurking behind them speak in a 1 sort of woozy dialect, flush with irony, bursting with internet-based inside jokes, memes spliced into memes, skillfully riding the line (or not) between offensive and innocuous. These images are the grimy offspring of Pepe the Frog, a human-bodied frog character created by the cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005. Pepe is a sort of sad-clown figure who finds himself in embarrassing situations like being caught urinating with his trousers around his ankles. Unflappable when confronted, he waves off all embarrassment with a stoner smile and his breezy catchphrase, “Feels good, man.” An upload of Furie’s comic Boy’s Club to his Myspace page around 2005 led to Pepe becoming a hugely popular internet meme in the late 2000s through the mid-2010s, spawning a baroque gallery of magnificently absurd cartoon concept art.3 But with the emergence of what has been called the Alt-Right, Pepe has taken on an irreversibly sinister index. Irish journalist Angela Nagle offers an extensive profile of this group in her book Kill All Normies (cover image: a photograph of a live frog).4 Nagle’s argument is that the Alt-Right, which she defines as including both newer “white preservationists” and old guard white supremacist groups, emerged from right-wing “chan culture,” short for 4chan, a freewheeling internet forum where disturbing images and teenagerish humor are the stock in trade. The custom Pepes with their Nazi and Trump paraphernalia commandeered the character, turning the image into an immediately recognizable mascot for right-wing racial provocation. In 2016, Pepe was designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.5 After several frustrated years working to rehabilitate the character (including by drawing anti-Trump Pepe cartoons), Furie killed him off.6 I suggest that it is no accident that the Alt-Right would magnetize to Pepe and eventually resolutely claim him as their own. The Alt-Right ethos is built around shock and offense by programmatically transgressing cultural taboos. Nagle argues that the épater les bourgeoisie 2 mindset of the Alt-Right does not materialize out of thin air. A feature of her analysis is that the online alt-right is built up in part as a reaction against increasingly precious left-wing identity politics. One of the flashpoints she identifies, for instance, is the “Gamergate” controversy of 2015, which triggered an anti-feminist backlash and “politicized a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organized tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the cultural left.”7 Pepe’s smug but goofy hangdog routine evolved into the perfect emblem for the Alt-Right’s approach to politics—a refusal to be shamed. Pepe’s shtick is to deflect every attack with a shrug. His grinning defiance of every effort to shame him became theirs. This paper emerges from a conviction that understanding the efficacy of Donald Trump’s rhetoric—both verbal and visual—requires a sophisticated attention to the dynamics of shame. Specifically, I argue here that the success of Trump’s rhetoric emerges in part through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of that shame and so mobilize behind him. This requires an attention to both sides of the equation—some of the channels by which shame circulates within contemporary American culture and the way Trump has developed a compelling set of techniques for capturing this pressure and harnessing it for his own political purposes. My line of analysis builds on the work of scholars of media, rhetoric, and communication who have considered affect theory and their home fields as a conjoined exploration of the dynamic between communication and motivation.8 These thinkers and others have also expressed particular interest in Trump’s communication techniques.9 Very often this scholarship has mapped the affective dimension of Trump’s communication to emotions like rage10 or disgust.11 Without contradicting this, my suggestion in this essay is that we need a vocabulary for 3 thinking about Trump’s rhetorical techniques that includes an attention to dynamics of shame and dignity. Rage and disgust may be closely laced into this terrain, but without a consideration of shame we lose a register of specificity in how Trump’s rhetoric works as it aims at a particular ensemble of constituencies. As Lauren Berlant has proposed, “[t]he Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free.”12 This article builds a comprehensive theory of shame, dignity, and political rhetoric around this insight. It contends that Trump responded to a situation in which the fever of white shame was boiling over, and was able to exploit that for political power through rhetorical techniques that converted shame into a felt sense of dignity. After diagraming the affect theory perspective and its usefulness in building a model of how shame shapes a landscape of political communication, the essay will closely examine Trump’s rhetorical moves. This analysis will be restricted to two domains: Trump’s speeches (as both a candidate and during his presidency) and the visual rhetoric of his face, with special attention to how images of his face are circulated.13 Affect Theory and Communications Affect theory is a field of conversations emerging from queer theory, poststructuralism, feminism, and antiracist theory. Following a loose typology developed by thinkers like Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, Mel Chen, Elspeth Probyn, and in my own earlier work,14 affect theory can be divided into two branches. In the one stream, thinkers inspired by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, like Patricia Ticineto Clough, Erin Manning, and Brian Massumi, identify affect as a radically pre-cognitive, pre-conscious, and non-conceptual force that shapes subjectivity upstream of self-awareness.15 The dominant move in communication theory has been to emphasize this Deleuzian mode.16 4 Although I will draw on the Deleuzian interpretation, my suggestion is that it is not sufficient for the purposes of an analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. I find affect theory in the second mode, what Ahmed calls “feminist cultural studies of emotion and affect”17 and I have called the “phenomenological strain” of affect theory, to be more versatile for mapping the landscape of feeling, emotion, experience, and communication.18 Where the Deleuzian approach stresses that politics can be affective, I would follow Berlant in affirming that political communication is always affectively organized: “All the messages are emotional.”19 Because Deleuzian vocabulary cannot go much farther than positing an on-off switch (affect either is or is not present), it forecloses the development of a sophisticated vocabulary of multiple formations of affect with distinct rhetorical and political effects for specific audiences. For this reason, I will not only move into detailed discussion of what some Deleuzian theorists would dismiss as emotions, but use the words affect and emotion roughly interchangeably.20 What all affect theories share is a commitment to looking at subjects not as self-ruled calculating machines, but as bodies mobilized by the unruly matrix of dense affects working their way through us. Bodies, in the affect theory picture, are coalitions of affective drivers pulling us in different directions, but loosely affiliated into a single social organism. Spinoza, one of the key background figures of affect theory, wrote that the “human body is composed of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly composite.”21 Lawrence Grossberg writes that affect “encompasses a variety of ways in which we ‘feel’ the world in our experience, including moods, emotions, maps of what matters and of what one cares about, pleasures and desires, passions, sentiments, etc.”22 Affect theory focuses on the messy felt composites of experience that sediment to become macro-level political subjectivities. 5 This has been a particularly appealing framework for scholars working on communication and rhetoric. The convergence point, for these scholars, lies in affect theory’s model of self and political subjectivity. In the affect theory picture, the self is constituted not by a sovereign, top-down, reasoning I, but by a tangle of forces. The forces run through us, we are made by them, and our decisions reflect the priorities of those forces rather than an abstract assessment of the world around us according to a standard of detached calculation. This resonates with the fundamental insight of rhetorical studies, namely, that communication is not (necessarily) effective because it appeals to the machinery of rational persuasion. Instead, rhetoric works on listeners through a range of devices that are not necessarily thoughtful—nor even necessarily discursive. Jenny Edbauer Rice proposes that, rather than a “conversational” model of communication in which the public sphere is constituted by a rationally organized stock exchange of ideas, “what underscores civic or rhetorical deliberation is arguably an affective element.”23 Joshua Gunn goes so far as to suggest that rhetorical genres “are the names of forms that are repeatedly felt, or instances of the linguistic sedimentation of an affective recurrence into code and meaning.”24 Rhetoric does not land on a flat plain. It seeks out the desires of an audience. These desires are ultimately a configuration of affects. As Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson write, “[a]ffective aesthetics links the sensual, immediate, and prediscursive responses of bodies to specific environmental energies with historically situated discursive processes and practices.”25 All of these scholars point to the fact that studies of rhetoric almost always import a theory of affect and that theories of affect that examine communication end up leaning on ideas about rhetoric. Shame, Pedagogy, Politics 6 From the time of Trump’s campaign announcement in 2015 to the present, scholars of Communication have devised a number of avenues for applying this affect/rhetoric approach to Trump’s rhetoric. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Doron Taussig offer a survey assessment of Trump’s rhetorical signature, which includes not only specific words and phrases but themes, motifs, and stylistic maneuvers. This rhetorical signature—including elements of demonization, evidence-flouting, and repudiation of institutions—“aided his cause as a candidate because it signaled a rejection of both the status quo and political convention to a constituency eager to see those things shaken up.”26 Robert Ivie has similarly focused on demolition as the “guiding trope of Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric.”27 Ivie’s conviction is that a baseline of legitimate economic grievances caused by neoliberalism set the stage for Trump by inflaming “a collective fantasy that he will get things done by shaking up politics as usual.”28 Although they do not name it as such, these scholars align Trump’s rhetorical idiom with the evocation of rage. Joshua Gunn has also worked out a theory of how Trump’s rhetoric marshals affects, but along a different axis— he emphasizes what he calls Trump’s political perversion. Gunn starts from psychoanalysis, and particularly Jacques Lacan’s typology of psychotic, neurotic, and perverse psychic formations— all of which are present in all of us in varying degrees. Gunn recasts these as rhetorical genres, and suggests that Trump’s perversion—his contagious obsession with flouting conventions and transgressing taboos—is the motor that drives his rhetorical success.29 Two book-length studies of Trump and affect from Communications scholars have also been published. Lawrence Grossberg’s Under the Cover of Chaos is a sprawling, multidimensional exploration of Trump’s relationships with predecessor movements in American conservatism.30 Like Ivie and Gunn, Grossberg suggests that Trump has managed to pleasurize disruption. “The most obvious and pervasive feature of Trump’s highly visible and almost 7 entertaining… if also terrifying performance,” he writes, “is the normalization of a frenetic chaos and hyper-activism.”31 Whereas Gunn draws his points from psychoanalysis, Grossberg suggests that it is the reveling in motion, spontaneity, and the Deleuzian concept of becoming that consolidates Trump’s command of his political constituencies. However, this is only the main axle of this wide-ranging book, which ends up also speculating on the importance of shame, anxiety, narcissism, and alienation for mapping Trump’s appeal to his followers.32 The most focused study of Trump, affect, and communication to date, comes in Ott and Dickinson’s The Twitter Presidency, which expressly argues that the aesthetic dimensions of Trump’s style are designed to resonate with what they refer to as white rage.33 They locate white rage in “the fear and anxiety surrounding the social decentering of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity.”34 Trump, they propose, is effective as a communicator precisely by virtue of his ability to ignite this latent fund of frustration. They further suggest that Twitter is a uniquely effective tool for Trump by virtue of its medium-specific affordances in favor of simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility.35 These features allow Trump to match the rhythm of white rage and seize control of it. My project here is to build on these approaches by expanding the vocabulary of affective elements used to assess Trump’s communication strategy. Specifically, I want to make an argument for including shame (and, by extension, dignity) as inflection points in this field. This interlocks with Gunn’s emphasis on perversion as pleasurable rules-breaking and Ott and Dickinson’s proposal that Trump appealed to his followers’ “memories of a bygone era in which they, too, viscerally enjoyed the unearned assets of [white, male] privilege.”36 But I propose here that shame needs to be specifically named in order to increase the precision of this analysis. This requires returning to affect theory to develop a more detailed account of shame. 8 Silvan S. Tomkins—one of the background figures of contemporary affect theory— defines shame by first abandoning the traditional psychoanalytic distinction between shame and guilt. Instead, he proposes that both share a common currency, “the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation.”37 Tomkins then assigns shame a role that is asymmetric with the other affects in his nine-piece inventory. Shame, for Tomkins, is a sort of meta-affect that conditions and positions all other emotional states. “Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears,” he writes, “yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man.”38 As Tomkins’ student Donald Nathanson writes, “shame is the dominant negative affect of everyday life…. Just as each of us longs for pleasurable excitement and reasonable amounts of joy, the ubiquity of situations that interfere with the experience of positive affect makes shame—no matter how disguised—our constant companion.”39 The reason for this extraordinary meta-status is that shame is a sort of master switch responsible for suppressing other affective responses, like joy or excitement. Shame is best understood as a hyper-dense distillation of disappointment that has been injected into a particular object in mind. It resurfaces when we re-encounter that object, extinguishing the joy that once attached to it and leaving a radioactive residue behind. “The innate activator of shame,” Tomkins writes, “is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy. Hence any barrier to further exploration which partially reduces interest or the smile of enjoyment will activate the lowering of the head and eyes in shame and reduce further exploration or self-exposure powered by excitement or joy.”40 The head bowed, eyes lowered, is the visual motif of Tomkins’ writing on shame—both a metaphor for its political effects and an actual physiognomy. For Tomkins, the face reticulates us into a social body. When we lower our head and eyes, we disconnect from pleasure. We fall 9 backwards into alienation. In this way, shame is resolutely political. “Whenever an individual, a class, or a nation wishes to maintain a hierarchical relationship, or to maintain aloofness,” he writes, “it will have resort to contempt of the other. Contempt is the mark of the oppressor. The hierarchical relationship is maintained either when the oppressed one assumes the attitude of contempt for himself or hangs his head in shame.”41 Social beings, inasmuch as they stratify themselves internally, use shame as the currency of elevation and degradation. Elspeth Probyn writes that rather than seeing shame as a toxin to be purged from the social body, we should think of it as a necessary element of embodied interliving. In particular, I would add, shame is a necessary component of pedagogy. Many scholars, including Probyn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Megan Watkins have commented on the affective dimensions of pedagogy.42 The question of the role of shame in pedagogy tends not to be a salient theme of this research, but the link is developed in Tomkins’ focus on child development.43 Tomkins proposes that parents form their children’s behaviors by shaming them around particular actions, clipping certain desires and allowing others to flourish.44 The chisel that is used to sculpt civilized subjects is shame, which chips away at some desires and produces disciplined bodies. This is where the communication field of politics loops back in. Pedagogy is not just something that happens to kids. We are always being taught by people around us. Progressive politics—in particular—the politics of antiracism, gender emancipation, queer emancipation, and of new horizons of political enfranchisement—is organized around a retraining and a reteaching of bodies. Therefore, progressive politics is a project intimately associated with shame. As critical race theorist Sharon Patricia Holland argues, racism is not simply a neutral exercise of opinion. It is maintained by a formation of pleasure, what Tomkins might identify as the thrill of 10 contempt.45 In contrast to those who see cruelty as an expression of emotional deadness, Marina Levina writes: as I think back to my childhood tormentors, I do not think of them as sad, or disempowered, or ugly in any sense of that word. I know that being cruel brought them joy—the glint in the eyes, the straightening of the posture, the smirk—the joy of the oppressor is what makes cruelty so effective as a tool of oppression.46 Holland calls this racism’s “own erotic life” and I have referred to it as the “hedonicity of hate.”47 It is precisely because racism (and other forms of racialization) is pleasurable that the effort to unravel it is so perilous. Yet this is exactly what left politics sets out to do. It extinguishes this erotics, blocking the circuit of desire for debased others through the injection of shame. In fact, we might even say that this orientation to shame is one of the cardinal principles of progressivism. Shame on the move—an openness to shame, a trafficking in shame—is how left-wing politics feels. Leftists use shame to challenge not only the politics of others, but also themselves, grinding away their own sense of comfort in a relentless project to become more sensitive, more thoughtful, more moral. The modern American progressive political project is heavily keyed to this internal disciplinary apparatus. “I’ve been shamed by feminism,” Probyn confesses. “[W]hat feminist hasn’t?”48 This reflects an openness to—maybe even a pleasure in— using shame as a technique of the self to tailor one’s own body as a more versatile and sophisticated political subject.49 The tension between left and right political orientations is, I propose, generated in part through divergent affective tastes at the level of bodies, which scale up into different political platforms and rhetorical priorities. Shame saturates contemporary politics. Bodies that once felt like the unchallenged masters of their space—white bodies, male bodies, cis bodies, straight bodies, rich bodies, citizen bodies—are being confronted, more and more, with a demand to respond to the violence trailing 11 in the wake of the comforts and pleasures they enjoy. This effect is amplified by the increasing mediation of society, that is, the way in which the density of social interactions is steadily increasing, underwritten by technological shifts. The pedagogical sphere is condensing. More interactions with more people means more chances to be shamed. We live in an increasingly saturated shame panopticon. This has led some of the former masters to a state of shameexhaustion, in which it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.50 Eve Sedgwick asks: “can anyone suppose that we'll ever figure out what happened around political correctness if we don't see it as, among other things, a highly politicized chain reaction of shame dynamics?”51 The insight of this framing lies in the way it stages political correctness as a pedagogy, a sweeping masterwork of shame designed to rip residual structures of degradation from speech. It is to be expected then, that this chain of shame would provoke a shame response, a furious refusal of culpability. This is where Trump comes in. Lauren Berlant has proposed that the political appeal of Trump does not rest in an ideological posture. “Trump’s people,” she writes, want fairness of a sort, but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren’t just about the law after all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those “interest groups” get right in there and reject what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example, when they’re just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means “I feel unfree.52 Making a consonant point, Grossberg says that rather than focusing, as some pundits do, on “resentment” as a root of Trump’s appeal, we should examine “the terror of the humiliation of being a victim. One avoids the humiliation of loss and victimage by humiliating the other, by diminishing their status and capacity, destroying their sense of pride, reducing them to a lower state of being.”53 Affect theory anchors the analysis of Trump’s rhetorical efficacy not in 12 economic opportunism, but in a particular affective configuration—the thrust and counter-thrust of shame and humiliation, leading to the rhetorical power of white defiance. The rest of this discussion will explore in detail how Trump summons this rhetorical force. White Defiance and the Rhetoric of Trump Trump’s presidential campaign announcement on June 16, 2015, is an early indicator of the driving dynamic of Trump’s rhetoric. It offers a dyad of shame and dignity, often organized around race. “Our country is in serious trouble,” Trump says, as he begins his prepared remarks. “We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.”54 This is not simply a promise of an economic turnaround. It also suggests an affective state shift. We are humiliated. Yet I deliver dignity. “When do we beat Mexico at the border?” Trump continued. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity…. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”55 This leads into Trump’s notorious “they’re rapists” line about Mexicans, in which he simultaneously slurs immigrants and then allows that some, perhaps, are “good people.” Trump also makes his first mention of his infamous wall project: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”56 It needs to be noted here that in an otherwise precise and unusually well-constructed speech, Trump doesn’t offer any explanation for why Mexico must pay for the wall. In no other scenario does a poorer nation pay for the defense of a stronger, richer nation. But this line, notoriously, becomes a linchpin of Trump’s campaign. Why do they have to pay for it? Once again, the issue isn’t the economics. It’s the degradation. Mexico has to be humiliated in retaliation for “laughing at us.” 13 Less often noted about this speech is the fact that it is not only non-Americans who get hit by Trump.57 He segues into a story about how he will beat down not only other countries, but corporate lobbyists and CEOs. This narrative line builds up to his imagined back and forth with the CEO of Ford, in which the CEO “begs” him to let him build a factory in Mexico. Trump archly refuses, using his superior negotiating clout—which he wields because he is “really rich” and has no need to rely on lobbyists to fund his campaign.58 Again, Trump is the vindicator, a scion of defiance. When Trump debuts his slogan at this event—Make America Great Again—it represents a perfect encapsulation of the affective dynamic that animates his entire campaign—a transition from a state of ignominy to a state of glory. One of Trump’s primary weapons during the primary and general election campaigns was the catchy binomial insult, such as Lyin’ Ted [Cruz], Crooked Hillary [Clinton], or Little Marco [Rubio]. This was, needless to say, a way of tearing down his opponents. But it is important to highlight how it also functioned to consolidate Trump’s status as a hub of degradation. The insult coincided with his frequent reminders that his opponents have, at various times, asked him for money or support. His announcement speech reminds us that his Republican opponents “all want me to support them. They don’t know how to bring it about. They come up to my office. I’m meeting with three of them in the next week. And they don’t know— ‘Are you running? Are you not running? Could we have your support?’”59 Ott and Dickinson call our attention to Trump’s pantomime, in a later speech, of a conversation with Obama in which he tells him You’re fired, “at which point the crowd erupted, their bodies instantaneously responding to a white man putting a black man in his place.”60 Media and affect theorist Michael Richardson points out that Trump has a tendency to amplify the charge of these insults by applying liberal dollops of disgust—at John Kasich’s eating habits, Marco Rubio’s sweat, or Hillary Clinton taking a 14 restroom break.61 Through these techniques, Trump consolidates his status as the ringmaster of shame and dignity. Trump develops this same repertoire of themes in the speeches he gives as president. In his inaugural address, Trump paints a dreary picture of the US’s many embarrassments and failures, before pivoting to the promise of his presidency. “We stand at the birth of a new millennium,” he declares, “ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow. A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights, and heal our divisions.”62 But the unifying (if still angry) rhetoric of the inaugural speech is short-lived. Trump’s rhetorical signature remains strongly marked by a programmatic division of the world into ingroups and out-groups. This is particularly the case in speeches written by his white nationalist advisor, Stephen Miller. In his speech to the Values Voters Summit in October 2017, for instance, Trump builds up a strong cushion of applause lines reaffirming the nobility of the conservative political platform. We believe in strong families and safe communities. We honor the dignity of work. (Applause.) We defend our Constitution. We protect religious liberty. (Applause.) We treasure our freedom. We are proud of our history. We support the rule of law and the incredible men and women of law enforcement. (Applause.) We celebrate our heroes, and we salute every American who wears the uniform. (Applause.) We respect our great American flag. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we stand united behind the customs, beliefs and traditions that define who we are as a nation and as a people.63 This leads into a sharper statement, in which Trump insists “[w]e are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values,” before continuing, “[y]ou know, we’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore. (Laughter.) They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct…. Well, guess what? We’re saying “Merry Christmas” again. (Applause.)”64 Trump’s move here is to constitute his rhetorical sphere as a 15 culture war battlefield. He reconstructs the trajectory where conservatives have been shamed by progressives calling them to account for exclusivism and hypocrisy and reverses the tide. Ott and Dickinson quote a supporter who gushes: “Donald Trump is not politically correct, and I love that about him.”65 And it must be mentioned that for Trump’s audience, there is a strong hit of dignity carried in the affective charge of words like salute, respect, stand up, stand united, the flag, men and women in uniform, law enforcement, Judeo-Christian values—and dignity itself. This dictionary of dignity reflects a set of swelling ideas and images, which resonate for conservatives as material manifestations of pride. This is what leaves Trump’s rhetoric, for this audience, pregnant with a hovering sense of felt glory. It is why Trump is able to trigger a cascade of applause among the values voters after every line. A few months later, in his commencement address to the US Naval Academy in May of 2018, Trump sounded the same defiant tones: Together, there is nothing that Americans can’t do. In recent years, and even decades, too many people have forgotten that truth. They’ve forgotten that our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history. In every generation there have been cynics and critics who tried to tear down America. It’s not working too well lately. But in recent years the problem grew worse. A growing number used their platforms to denigrate America’s incredible heritage, challenge America’s sovereignty, and weaken America’s pride.66 This is a sneering How dare they?—Trump explicitly defining America’s enemies as an internal fifth column, intent on sabotaging national dignity. Trump’s response is to reiterate the glory of the American nation—as well as the cravenness of its critics: But we know the truth, we will speak the truth, and we will defend that truth. America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice, and freedom, in the history of the world. And in case you haven’t noticed we have become a lot 16 stronger lately. A lot. We are not going to apologize for America. We are going to stand up for America. No more apologies. We are going to stand up for our citizens. We are going to stand up for our values. And we are going to stand up for our men and women in uniform. … We trekked the mountains, explored the oceans, and settled the vast frontier. We won two world wars, defeated communism and fascism, and put a man on the face of the moon. We cured disease, pioneered science, and produced timeless works of art that inspire the human soul.67 Here, Trump etches even more brightly the contest between those who wish to shame and those who refuse to be shamed, in part by refusing to “apologize.” This relates to Ott and Dickinson’s note that Trump is unbendable in his rule of never using the apologia, or self-justification.68 Trump never admits fault: “the fact that he exhibits no selfquestioning is appealing to his supporters, many of whom feel powerless.”69 This all interlocks with his rhetorical repudiation of allowing oneself ever to be called to account. No apology and no apologia run very close together here. His political communication is successful to the extent that he can more deeply etch for his audiences the threats to their dignity and establish himself as the vector of its restoration. Trump’s attacks on athletes protesting racial injustice are another specimen of this technique. In the wake of the ongoing protests—for instance, by players such as Colin Kaepernick, who began a practice of taking a knee during the national anthem as a response against anti-black police brutality—Trump has frequently flung scorn during his rallies and interviews. At a September 2017 rally, for instance, Trump proposed that a team owner’s response to a protesting player should be “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired!” “For a week,” Trump continued, the owner would “be the most popular person in this country. Because that’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect for everything we stand for.”70 In an interview with Fox and Friends eight months later, immediately after a new NFL policy banning all players who 17 engaged in protest, Trump reiterated that players who refused to abide should be removed from the US altogether: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”71 This rhetorical mechanism is the epitome of Trump’s method. Taking the side of whites who have been confronted with their complicity in a system of racial disparity, he assures them that rather than feeling ashamed, they should take revenge on those who have sought to challenge their sense of ease. A racialized dynamic is skillfully converted into an affective battlefield, mobilizing political power. However, it is important to look at the affective dimensions of Trump’s communication even outside of discourse. As Ott and Dickinson observe, not only is it the case that “[w]ords can appeal to the body and can be structured rhetorically for the purpose of this embodied aesthetic appeal,” but “the non-symbolic parts of rhetorical performances—the grain of the voice, the order of the words and their rhythms, the form of the gestures—are organized invitations to precognitive affect.”72 According to the journalist Chuck Todd, Trump is acutely sensitive to these aspects of communication to the extent that Trump will, after taping a television interview, rewatch the tape in the studio with the sound off, studying his own face.73 The Trump script—the ticker tape of words coming out of his mouth—is an important part of the Trump emotion machine, but is not actually sufficient for his political purposes. Ideological grenades are only part of Trump’s arsenal. He is able to mobilize a very particular suite of affects that amplify the anti-shame salvos of his political profile external to the words he says. Trump’s face, I would suggest, is a major component of his ability to orchestrate shame. Tomkins’ refrain, “Head bowed, eyes lowered,” is exactly what Trump never does. He rarely looks down during speeches, instead staring evenly at the horizon or flicking his gaze up and to 18 the side when he needs to pause. There’s a strange vertigo effect one gets in paying close attention to Trump’s face while he speaks. Although Obama, for instance—like most speakers— would frequently glance down to collect his thoughts, Trump is conspicuously out of sync with your expectation of when someone would naturally lower their gaze. The intentionality of this use of Trump’s face can be seen in the careful curation of Trump’s public image during his campaign and his presidency—a strategy to maximize exposure of images of Trump as a controlling, dominating figure. Trump has gone through a series of official and semi-official portraits as both a candidate and president.74 His Twitter and Facebook avatar—effectively the face of his primary and presidential campaigns from 2015-2016— shows him unsmiling, rigid, dominating, glaring. There is a hint of a smirk at the corner of his mouth and just a trace of a sneer tugging up the right side of his upper lip. But the first thing you see is someone who sees himself as no-nonsense, completely in charge. (This is why, as Todd notes, there is almost no footage of Trump laughing.)75 In his first officially released presidential portrait, Trump’s demeanor is even more menacing. His expression is the same, but sharper. Twin dots of light just below his pupils amplify the intensity of his expression. According to a photographer interviewed by Vox, these “catchlights” indicate a conscious decision to light the president from below, a “bizarre” choice amplifying the drama of the image—think Vincent Price or the flashlight-under-the-chin technique for telling ghost stories.76 The incipient sneer is slightly more developed. He is hunching forward, as if impatient or ready to lunge. As photography professor Michael Martinez told Vox at the time, this is an unprecedented offering in the genre of presidential photography: “what he wants to project” is that “he’s gonna intimidate people.”77 [Fig. 1] 19 In October of that same year, Trump’s White House released a new official portrait. This one, however, showed Trump grinning—much more along the lines of previous official photographs of presidents.78 This is the standard image that seems to be distributed in signed prints of Trump available online. But the picture is not displayed on his website, his Twitter page, or even his Facebook page. As of this writing, Trump’s Facebook and Twitter page have reverted to the earlier Twitter avatar. This is also the current profile picture on Trump’s Facebook page, but there are four in total in the gallery. Three are variations of the original. One, with over 800,000 likes, is the inaugural portrait. (Fig. 1) The power of this face—a face that obliterates shame—is clearly not lost on Trump, hence he moves it to the foreground while sidelining other images.79 And this is why, when Trump’s images are recirculated by his admirers, they almost invariably pick up the glaring, stony images, not his official, smiling portrait. For example, Julian Raven, an artist living in upstate New York, used Trump’s Twitter avatar as the basis of his painting “Unashamed and Unafraid,” in which Trump’s face dominates the foreground while a screeching bald eagle emerges from the horizon of the painting, trailing an American flag in its talons.80 This rendition of Trump’s Twitter avatar retains its frigid stare—visually echoed by the glare of the attacking eagle—and unsmiling mouth. Gunn, Ott, and Dickinson all propose that Trump’s “grotesque” appearance—his unnatural skin and hair color, for instance—are part of his appeal to his followers.81 I disagree. The effulgent sincerity of “Unashamed and Unafraid” testifies to the fact that Trump’s followers find his body and face glorious rather than garish. In addition to being represented on shirts, posters, and the side of a truck, the painting was displayed at the Conservative Political Action Committee 2019 convention in Maryland. The 20 painting is an imaging of the aggressive reassertion of dignity in the face of shame, a sort of calland-response reaction from Trump’s audience to his no-apologies rhetoric. When Trump was caught on tape practicing a speech on his way to address Congress in March 2017, pundits were surprised that he seemed to be rehearsing the facial expressions he would use to amplify the impact of his words. In between reading the lines on the freshly printed pages in his hands, he exercised the specific affects he wanted to convey. We see Trump cycle through three practiced expressions: a sneer; an almost-ecstatic, ferocious pieta in which Trump stares upward with an open-mouth grimace; and a sort of triptych in which Trump mimes three glares in rapid succession, bobbing his head and sharpening his stare with each beat. [Fig. 2] Trump knows that the root of his power is his face and tunes his instrument accordingly. The visual rhetoric of Trump’s body— “controlling, coercive, and conceited, a combination of traits that embody white privilege and hypermasculinity”—is a necessary augmentation to the Trump script. It consolidates his status as the humiliator-in-chief. 82 Conclusion: The Labyrinth of Attitudes J.D. Vance, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur from rural Ohio who has taken it upon himself to become an apostle of conservative values to coastal liberals, sees the same shame dynamics in Trump’s rhetoric that I do. In a 2016 essay on how Trump’s “antiwar” message resonated with rural whites, he proposed that “Americans today look to a Middle East that is humiliatingly worse off than the way we found it. The burden of this humiliation fell hardest on Republican strongholds… [such as] the South, rural areas and the working and middle class.”83 Each time Trump lashes the Republican establishment for their failure to win in the Middle East, Vance writes, “each time he shrieks about our country no longer winning, I can hear Mamaw cheering.”84 It is exactly Trump’s repudiation of shame that establishes his power base. 21 But Vance totally sidesteps the issue of race, disingenuously implying that Trump’s (inconstant) antiwar stance was the driver of his campaign, ignoring Trump’s library of techniques for humiliation—especially racial humiliation. Trump’s supporters (and, to a lesser degree, Trump himself) aim to refute the accusation of racism by pointing to the racial diversity to be found among Trump’s associates and employees. As Imani Perry notes, the classical understanding of racism as prejudicial intent layered on top of articulate, hierarchical beliefs is not adequate for thinking about the 21st-century political field. Perry’s post-intentional definition of racism proposes that racism percolates through us, often outside of our field of awareness.85 As scholars such as Holland and Levina propose, racism is better thought as an effect of a field of desire, as something that bodies want, often without realizing that they want it.86 In the twilight of overt racism, a massive shadow apparatus of instrumentalized racialization—used to elevate oneself by enveloping others in shame—thrives. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is in many ways a meditation on the relationship between race and dignity—an existential necessity he claims white liberals have largely missed.87 But Baldwin goes further. In studying anti-black racism, he attributes it to a pathology within American whiteness itself. A deeply carved white self-loathing thirsts for a distraction, a conduit for its own tangled energy. “[I]t is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives,” Baldwin suggests, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes.88 The labyrinth of attitudes—the racialized citadel they called “civilization”—is passing away. As the old economy of dignity collapses, white shame seeps to the surface leading to an urgent 22 desire for the shame of others as recompense. This produces a rhetorical field ripe for exploitation. This proposal to install white shame in the lexicon of analytical terms for understanding the rhetorical field Trump commands is only a starting point. A more textured account of how shame works as a resource for rhetoric is still needed. What is the alchemical relationship between shame and rage, for instance? Does shame potentiate rage, producing a psychic system in tension—more liable to explode? Are these affects more closely related than Tomkins suggests? When does shame prompt retreat and when does it prompt retaliation? Is there a political difference between the shame of those who have been systemically marginalized and the shame of those who have been schooled out of their racism by the stern lessons of political correctness? And—most perplexingly—why does nationalist rhetoric so often look like a sort of structured (self) subordination—usually under a masculine leader? Think of Alt-Right early adopter Milo Yiannopolis referring to Trump as “Daddy.” The rhetorical dynamic between self, group, and leader is part of a recipe for repudiating shame, but we need a more sophisticated attunement to how it also involves a specific canalizing of shame. Shame, Tomkins writes, “is an affect of relatively high toxicity… it strikes deepest into the heart of man… it is felt as a sickness of the soul which leaves man naked, defeated, alienated, and lacking in dignity.”89 Indexing shame as a foundational stratum of the way bodies become societies helps to make sense of the twisted landscape of our politics today. Where pundits puzzle over an invisible war over resources and why anyone would vote against their economic interests, cynical politicians have long since realized that they can weaponize the identitarian logic of whiteness into an electrifying rhetorical machine for overruling shame. Notes 23 1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 64. 2. Many thanks are due to several people who have encouraged this project, first and foremost Gregory Seigworth, who invited me to speak as one of the plenaries at the “Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space” conference in Lancaster, PA, in 2018, then helped me workshop the paper for publication, and to my colleague Anthea Butler for reading the paper and urging its publication. Thanks also to Tat-Siong Benny Liew for the invitation to present this work at the “Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval” conference at the College of the Holy Cross, and to Kevin O’Neill for an invitation to the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Participants and audiences at these events provided invaluable feedback, especially J. Kameron Carter and Devin Singh. Thanks to Rob Spicer for calling my attention to the Chuck Todd interview. Lastly, I’m very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for this journal who provided generous and focused reports that have significantly shaped this final version. 3. Jessica Roy, “How Pepe the Frog Went from Harmless to Hate Symbol,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pepe-the-frog-hate-symbol20161011-snap-htmlstory.html (accessed March 21, 2019). 4. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017). Nagle’s own conclusions bear passing similarity to my own in this piece, but she is ultimately sympathetic to the Alt-Right’s ardent refusal of shame. 5. Roy, “Pepe the Frog.” 24 6. James Vincent, “Pepe the Frog Is Officially Dead,” theverge.com, May 18, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15577340/pepe-the-frog-is-dead-matt-furie (accessed March 21, 2019). 7. Nagle, Kill All Normies, 24. 8. Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 1-41; Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New’: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 200212; Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 1-28); Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson, The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage (New York: Routledge, 2019). An excellent introductory survey of the interrelationships between affect theory and communications and rhetorical studies can be found in Brian L. Ott, “Affect in Critical Studies,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. J.F. Nussbaum, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 9. In addition to those listed previously, see Lawrence Grossberg, Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right (London: Pluto Press, 2018); Joshua Gunn, “On Political Perversion,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2018): 161-186; Robert L. Ivie, “Rhetorical Aftershocks of Trump’s Ascendency,” Res Rhetorica 2 (2017): 61-80; Robert J. Ivie, “Trump’s Unwitting Prophecy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 20 no. 4 (Winter 2017): 707-717; Kumarini Silva, “Having the Time of Our Lives: Love-Cruelty as Patriotic Impulse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 79-84; Marina Levina, 25 “Whiteness and the Joys of Cruelty,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 73-78; Michael Richardson, “The Disgust of Donald Trump,” Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31, no. 6 (2017): 747-756. 10. See, for instance, Ott & Dickinson, The Twitter Presidency. 11. See, for instance, Richardson, “Disgust of Donald Trump.” 12. Lauren Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions,” The New Inquiry, August 5, 2016, accessed July 21, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/trump-or-political-emotions/. 13. This restriction is partly owing to space restrictions, and partly to the fact that other aspects of Trump’s communicative strategy, such as Twitter, have been amply studied. See Ott and Dickinson, The Twitter Presidency. 14. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Elspeth Probyn, “A-ffect: Let Her RIP,” Media/Culture Journal. 8.6. (Dec. 2005) http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/13-probyn.php (accessed March 21, 2019); Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 15. Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): 1-33; Erin Manning, Always More than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). See also Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). 26 16. See, for instance, Grossberg, Cultural Studies; Papacharissi, Affective Publics; Rice, “The New ‘New.’” For a discussion, see the oft-cited definitional framework put forward by Eric Shouse: “feelings” are seen as “personal,” “emotions” as social expressions that can be deceitful, and “affects” as pre-personal, pre-conscious, and fundamentally exterior to awareness, which is what makes them transmissible between bodies. Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” Media/Culture Journal 8, no. 6 (Dec. 2005), accessed March 21, 2019, http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. 18. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 13; Schaefer, Religious Affects, 37. 19. Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions.” 20. See, for instance, Rice, “The New ‘New,’” 201. A more detailed vocabulary that draws a procedural distinction between these terms may have utility further down the road in this discussion, but it is not necessary for my purposes in this essay. 21. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 44. 22. Grossberg, Cover of Chaos, 11. 23. Rice, “The New ‘New,’” 211. 24. Gunn, “Political Perversion,” 173. 25. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 31. 26. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Doron Taussig, “Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump,” Political Science Quarterly 132, no. 4 (2017-18): 641. 27. Ivie, “Rhetorical Aftershocks,” 62. 27 28. Ivie, “Trump’s Unwitting Prophecy,” 708. 29. Gunn, “Political Perversion,” 170. 30. Grossberg, Cover of Chaos, xi. 31. Grossberg, Cover of Chaos, 3. 32. Ibid., 98-107. 33. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 3. 34. Ibid., 29. 35. Ibid., 61. 36. Ibid., 41. 37. Silvan S. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 133. 38. Ibid., 133. 39. Donald L. Nathanson, “Prologue: Affect Imagery Consciousness,” in Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition, ed. Bertram P. Karon (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008): xix. 40. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 134-5. 41. Ibid., 139. 42. Elspeth Probyn, “Teaching Bodies: Affects in the Classroom,” Body & Society 10, no. 4 (2004): 21-43; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Teaching/Depression,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 4, no. 2 (2006), accessed November 17, 2018, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/heilbrun/sedgwick_01.htm; Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 269-285); Megan Watkins, “Pedagogic 28 Affect/Effect: Embodying a Desire to Learn,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 1, no. 4 (2006): 269-282; Megan Watkins, “Thwarting Desire: Discursive Constraint and Pedagogic Practice,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20, no. 3 (May-June 2007): 301-318. 43. Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition, ed. Bertram P. Karon (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008), xxxvii. 44. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 153. 45. Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 46. Levina, “Whiteness and the Joys of Cruelty,” 75. 47. Holland, Erotic Life of Racism, 107; Schaefer, Religious Affects, 123. 48. Probyn, Blush, 75. 49. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume Two (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 10. 50. This is not to claim that shame should be expunged from politics. But it does indicate that left progressivism has become increasingly sophisticated in its understanding of politics without a meta-reflection on the invisible affect/labor economies underwriting this process of sophistication. 51. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 64. 52. Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions.” 53. Grossberg, Cover of Chaos, 98. 54. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2015, accessed March 21, 2019, http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/. 29 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ivie’s commentaries in “Rhetorical Aftershocks” and “Trump’s Unwitting Prophecy” do not mention this feature, for instance. 58. “Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech.” 59. Ibid. 60. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 35. 61. Richardson, “Disgust of Donald Trump,” 747. 62. “The Inaugural Address,” The White House, January 20, 2017, accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/. 63. “Remarks by President Trump at the 2017 Values Voter Summit,” The White House, October 13, 2017, accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefingsstatements/remarks-president-trump-2017-values-voter-summit/. 64. Ibid. 65. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 49. 66. ABC News, “Pres. Donald Trump Gives Commencement Speech at U.S. Naval Academy | ABC News,” YouTube video, 3:02:04, May 25, 2018, accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2lmMm47wJ0. 67. Ibid. 68. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 8. 69. Ibid., 46. 30 70. Sophie Tatum, “Trump: NFL Owners Should Fire Players Who Protest the National Anthem,” CNN, September 23, 2017, accessed May 26, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/22/politics/donald-trump-alabama-nfl/index.html. 71. “Fox and Friends,” Fox News Network, May 24, 2018, accessed May 26, 2019, https://insider.foxnews.com/2018/05/23/president-donald-trump-fox-friends-thursday-ms-13north-korea. 72. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 31. 73. Glenn Thrush, “What Chuck Todd Gets about Trump,” Politico, December 30, 2016, accessed March 21, 2019 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/chuck-todd-donald-trump-offmessage-podcast-233066. 74. Greg Price, “Donald Trump Actually Looks Happy in His New Official Portrait,” Newsweek, October 31, 2017, accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/trumpportrait-happy-697317. 75. Thrush, “What Chuck Todd Gets.” 76. Jacob Gardenswartz, “What’s So Strange about Trump’s White House Portrait? Experts Explain,” Vox, January 26, 2017, accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/26/14376784/trump-portrait-white-houseexperts-explain. 77. Gardenswartz, “Trump’s White House Portrait.” 78. Price, “Trump’s New Official Portrait.” 79. There is no formal reporting on this, but it seems that as of this writing Trump’s official portrait still has not been fully circulated for display in US airports. Conscious decision, or ineptitude? 31 80. Julian Raven, “The Trump Painting Unafraid & Unashamed The First Presidential Trump Portrait” 2015, accessed July 21, 2019, https://thetrumppainting.com/ 81. Gunn, “Political Perversion,” 173; Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 44. 82. Ott & Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, 36. 83. J.D. Vance, “Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates with White America,” The New York Times, April 4, 2016, accessed July 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/opinion/campaign-stops/why-trumps-antiwar-messageresonates-with-white-america.html. 84. Ibid. 85. Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 42. 86. Holland, Erotic Life of Racism; Levina, “Whiteness and the Joy of Cruelty,” 75. 87. Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 54. 88. Ibid., 43. 89. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 148. 32