Donald Trump and Demiurge Politics
Donald Trump’s campaign ran on a platform of absolute “truth”, wherever he may find it: in declaring that there were only two genders, in the rigorous optimization of government policies with DOGE, and with the truth behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
However, the issue with this praxis is that social mechanisms are systems that go beyond truth. This is the heart of postmodernism (which, amusingly, Trump slashed research funds toward). The discursive practices around a Thing make it true or false, not a property of the Thing-in-Itself. Look at gender: Is there anything biological about dresses being feminine pieces of clothing? Is there anything biological about wedding traditions?
Postmodernism says no, but the emotions are real. The discursive procedures around a thing-itself, the belief-in-a-fantasy is true. I can acknowledge that a jacket does not contain any mystical “beauty-factor” in it, but nobody else acknowledges that truth: so I call the jacket beautiful. Misconstruing the signifier’s place in the socius for its magical properties creates a simulacrum: that “accursed share,” that surplus-meaning given a magical tint.
The Trump Administration’s decision to reduce gender ideology down to what they perceive as “concrete truth” is not more accurate than the postmodernist “everything is valid.” Rather, it is merely misconstruing the mystical “postmodernist-true” of gender expression with the biological basis of sex. The Trump Administration says “yes, I know there is nothing about my vagina that makes me a woman: Yet, because everyone else believes it, I must call myself a woman.” The actual “truth” of gender is not really “out there.” Rather, it signifies a set of unrelated political beliefs
This applies to material truths as well. Trump promised a concrete truth of who really assassinated JFK: The CIA or a lone shooter? The Trump Administration, by running on that platform, presupposes that who really killed JFK is a fact that is metaphysically “out there,” perhaps in the files they keep telling people they’ll leak. But a take that the left and the right reject is this: What if it was the perfect crime, and whatever you believe just signifies a set of related political beliefs? For those who believe it was a lone shooter, they signify their belief in the goodness of the US government and a rejection of conspiratorial thinking. In contrast, for those who believe in the CIA plot, it represents the exact opposite. Which one is it? The truth is disconcerting: it doesn’t matter. The evidence, just like the evidence for where “sex and gender” really “are”, is infinite in both directions.
Is this too disconcerting to stomach? The idea that there will never be a “real” answer for certain material truths that seem tantalizingly close? The inverse is also terrifying: Imagine a world where a near-omnipotent being dangles the concrete truth in front of you, only to constantly jerk it away at the last second, leaving you struggling to determine what is and isn’t real. This is the world we live in today; this is the platform the Trump administration runs on.
French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard formulates modern consciousness within the idea of the demiurge. This mythical creature promises absolute truth to its worshippers, dangling the thing-in-itself in front of them and then dragging it away at the last second. Baudrillard argues that the only way to resist the Demiurge is by rejecting the notion of an absolute truth: first, in places where its social contingency is more relevant, such as gender expression. But Baudrillard stresses that many other things we take for granted as true are also “simulacrums,” which are lies that are so engrained into our base reality they have as much causal effect as the truth.
Baudrillard’s base-reality theory can be more easily understood with, surprisingly, interior-decoration. His 1968 book, The System of Objects, observed that furniture advertisements had become “tautological-” Now that wooden-flooring and concrete-flooring were both made out of plastic resin, there was no base-reality of 'warmth and nature' that either flooring-advertisements referred to: the only thing remaining was cultural connotation. There was no base reality these floors created. A wooden floor only created warmth because it used to denote a closer connection to nature.
Baudrillard and his contemporary, the cultural critic Slavoj Zizek, believed that this theory extended far beyond house-flooring and furniture: Zizek coined the idea of “divine violence,” a violent act that ruptures someone’s base understanding of reality. Baudrillard and Zizek believed that divine violence, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the October 7th attack, or perhaps even the riots after Hurricane Katrina, could only be “unexplainable,” as many people perceive it, if one lived in a state of “hyper-reality.”
Hyper-reality is the world of full belief in the truth of the demiurge: Americans who only paid attention to local news, Israelis who only bought state propaganda, or neoliberals who could not understand the depths people go to during poverty are at risk of treating their corresponding acts of violence as “divine--” simply resulting from nothing. Yet the attacks had material bases: it is because of non-referential news that deals with hyper-reality rather than base, material reality that these attacks are acausal.
What is to be done? How do we come to know what we don’t know we don’t know? Baudrillard and Zizek both argue that the first step is to start not by re-evaluating your shakiest beliefs, but rather, the existence of your most strongly-held beliefs. After all, the Trump administration’s policies only make sense to someone who strongly believes in the materiality of socially contingent truths, such as gender or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What are the strongest beliefs you hold? What axiomatic truths have the potential to reconstellate, a potential you simply haven’t looked at properly? What of material reality is left after you throw out the world of appearances?
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