The Iconography of Trump

 

If I sound critical, it’s because I’ve been guilty of this myself.

There’s quite a cottage industry in creating AI meme videos glorifying Donald Trump. I watch them as they appear and go briefly viral because they’re funny and an often wicked thorn in the side of crazed Trump haters. But I also have to confess that I find them unsettling in a way. Part of me is asking, ‘Is this a good thing going too far maybe?’ Does the President really need more ego stroking and more hyperbolic comparisons across such a vast range of classical and popular mythology, however inoffensively intended? 

Just so we know what we’re talking about, I’m linking a few of them here, partly for your amusement and partly because they seem hard to find even a few weeks after their viral day in the sun. (Is that an instructive side effect of the meme phenomenon? Dunno.)

The most recent one, a specific catalyst for this post:

I’ll be back to talk about this one in particular…


A more or less straight up campaign ad. Maybe more than less…

This one’s fun. (Bear in mind, Google’s Blogger app does not approve of Rumble. Workaround required.)

Click on the pic to get to the vid.


Love all cleaned-up AI Deplorables. You?

Not one but two X-men videos. Who could resist the temptation?



Click on the pic to See the vid.


What’s not to like? But is it too much?

There are others that have been taken down by YouTube for violating “Community Standards,” and we all know what sticklers they are for Standards. The notification of YT’s dudgeon and disappointment with Dilley in particular are almost touching in their tight-lipped terseness as to cause.

Well, that’s enough to get an idea. Two I couldn’t locate: the Trump as Santa Claus and Superman ones or the one with Trump as Scarface-cum-Saturday Night Fever was another. Now I’ll try to describe my concerns briefly and then let you go about your business.

The images of crowned royalty and heroic monumentalism on a melodramatic scale unnerve me somewhat. One seems atavistically nostalgic for the British monarchy we fought Revolution to escape, and the other seems, ahem, approaching Stalinist in its look and feel. The AI aspect of the renderings of people, especially evident in the first vid above, bother me too. The Trump they’re showing us is obviously him but a bit off, which reminds me of the Japanese CGI discovery called “the Uncanny Valley,” a likeness to someone real that is too close not to cause a feeling of discomfort in the watcher. It’s the subject of the depiction but it’s not the person depicted. I have a related problem with the idealized AI portrayals of Trump supporters in that video, all so handsome and quasi-angelic looking. We’re no angels, as someone said in a famous Bogart movie way back when. If we were, if I were, I wouldn’t have laughed as much as I did at this Dilley effort…

Click the pic for the vid. Rightly or wrongly, the term used 
so frankly here carries a lot more baggage than it used to.

Superhero uniforms are still uniforms, and there can be enough of the Lion, Eagle, and Wolf symbolism. Trump is neither a king nor a god, and I’m pretty sure none of those who support him really want him to be. The appeal of the symbols is more emotional than logical. Emotion has its place, but it can become a hindrance. It wrote a warning months ago about the risk of overlooking how dangerous the savior/messiah archetype might be if Trump won the election. Nobody paid much attention to it at the time. It still applies.

We’re already at the stage where this kind of iconography will be used against us. It does feed into the ‘authoritarian’ meme the Dems have been squeezing out of their playbook for years now. I confess I felt almost a sense of relief when the Babylon Bee posted a ‘scoop’ the other say about Trump launching an all government investigation to find the person who had nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. A refreshing reminder of the good old days when people in the humor biz could make fun of both sides without causing any kind of uproar.

I’ll end on a conciliatory but still cautious note.there have been lots of comparisons lately of Trump to George Washington (some by Trump himself), so it’s worth noting that the Father of his Country, when asked how the President should be referred to, expressed a preference for the the epithet ‘His High Mightiness.” I kid you not.

Didn’t happen though. I don’t believe MAGA supporters are going to succumb to Orwellian idolatry in their perspectives on Trump 2.0. I just think we should keep on eye on the way we all play the meme game.

Fair enough?














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