Don’t Misunderestimate the Donald (Like We Did)

Abstract

The spectacle of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign calls for a reconsideration of some of the key arguments we made in our 2009 book, Demystifying Business Celebrity. In that book we downplayed the significance of individual celebrity personalities in order to highlight the importance of the industrialized process of celebrification. But Trump’s very singular personality clearly exerts its own form of agency—somehow appealing to his supporters, and increasingly alarming to many others. In tandem with a set of cultural anxieties, gendered and racialized phobias, economic disparities, and new social media avenues for the expression of populist violence and rage, the industrialized process of celebrification we described in our book has functioned to elevate, and not to diminish, the significance of the particular set of reactionary and narcissistic pathologies Trump embodies. Whether he succeeds in his campaign or not, we should all be worried.