/lit/ - Literature

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”–Goethe,

It will be interesting to see how academics choose to interpret the Trump presidency after the fact. Although you will find no better analysis than in this humble post, dear reader.
On one level, it is indeed quite challenging to find an even-keeled, non-partisan, balanced analysis of Trump's tenure as president. Failure to do so is to fall prey to the very political polarities which he manipulated to come to power, polarizations which were already there long before he was elected and which there was no means within the establishment to address. Trump's rhetoric is intentionally designed to force you to pick a side, and so any attempt to moralize his behavior immediately cancels out any attempt to get at the truth behind his screens and obscurations.

The moment you morally label something, good or bad, you stop thinking about it. And this is why you cannot find any good analysis on Trump, save for a few rare precious sources, because everything that is said about him is motivated by power and not by truth.

What exactly, then, is the true meaning and ramification of Trump's presidency? The conclusions to take home are multiple. Personally I discount the whole narrative about creeping fascism. What Trump does expose is a critical faultiness in the American political system. He brings to light how much of a house of cards it is, while Democrats function to hide it. This is of inestimable value, even if it wasn't Trump's intention. He exposed the dysfunction for what it was. Which brings forward the possibility that, with the facts now exposed, something might be done about it.
Trump's rampant distortions of the truth, his assault on the media, his defiance of political correctness, and the whole gist of "post-truth" politics, is also a kind of stress test. He states the "other side", of the matter, bringing to light the fact that for purely subjective matters such as "which direction the country should go" there is no exact truth, there is only the will to believe. The epistemological warfare that Trump waged, intentionally or not, recalls, perhaps not coincidentally, Putin's strategies. It is revealing too that Democrats engaged in the exact same tactics, such as the series completely baseless conspiracies and rumors they used to attempt to discredit Trump.
Trump was a master of spin--he is antifragile: he gains from disorder. By distorting reality to such an extent, he shows precisely how much the government was capable of lying, so that future political liars will have a much harder time of it.
While I can only scratch the surface in this post, the general principle I am working towards is that despite his apparent simpleness and crudity, Trump symbolizes phenomena that far exceed and transcend him.