10. Trump Speak

Chapter Ten ("Trump Speak"): Trump bragged about how the US has done a "beautiful job" because "only" upwards of 120,000 and counting had died of coronavirus at the time. Although this particular example of Trump Speak had been widely commented on because the commenters did not analyze its class politics the commentary itself was a diversion that served to normalize the prevailing cynicism of Americans toward politics so perfectly captured in Trump's "mission accomplished" speech. To understand how such a comment could be so normalized that despite the "buzz" it generated it is treated as hardly worthy of serious analysis and critique requires an investigation into the cultural politics of interpretation. Such an investigation, however, requires abstract concepts that in the mainstream commentary are widely taken to be irrelevant as well as elitist. After an investigation in which I use Roland Barthes discourse theory to read the Liberal "readerly" interpretation of Trump Speak as well as the "writerly" interpretation given by Right-wingers such a Peter Thiel, I go beyond the cultural politics of interpretation by arguing for Marx's concept of the "speecherly" function of language as a relay of class. Reading, I argue, is always the cultural effect of class. Reading, in other words, is not an isolated act of "readerly" interpretation (discovering "the truth"), nor is it an ethical "writerly" performance (making "truth"). Reading, rather, is a social process that is needed to train the workforce to submit to being exploited by capital. The fact that Trump can brag about the necronomics of the US so openly and it is not exposed for what it is at bottom—the failure of capitalism—is a testament to the underlying ideological consensus between Trump Speak and his American audience.

Keywords: Trump; Barthes; ideology; Covid-19 pandemic.