Recent events – from the Capitol siege in 2021 to the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania – only reinforce the difficulty of evaluating Donald Trump outside the context of his audiovisual persona, a media phantom that seems to be becoming more and more real.

Even the most cynical observers of Trump’s multimedia exploits might not have anticipated this turn of events. The dodged assassination attempt seemed almost orchestrated for this audiovisual wizard, who virtually single-handedly ushered in a new era of political communication. The incident instantly sparked an avalanche of secondary media productions starring Trump, from postmodern mashups (see the overlap between the former American president’s face and Van Gogh’s self-portrait with his ear cut off) to genuine visual distortions (comparing the precise decisions of the VAR system in football to the bullet’s wayward course, a kind of ballistic offside). I don’t mean to belittle the incident or glorify the protagonist – rather, I simply observe, from the sidelines, a striking alignment between the audiovisual nature of the event and Trump’s showman persona.

For while that scene unfolded indisputably in reality – with a bullet leaving a very real mark on the billionaire’s flesh – what’s more intriguing is how he immediately reappropriated it as an image. By “image”, we must understand not only Trump’s ability to generate visual content about and with himself but, as philosopher Jacques Rancière would say, a certain connection between the visual and the verbal. From the mighty Trump Tower with its gilded logotype, a name that has become almost synonymous with vulgarity, to the recent racist comments aimed at Kamala Harris, the man is an inexhaustible creator of symbols, key moments, and flashes that accurately reflect the contemporary era.

Trump appears to have applied this rule of excessive, immediate spectacle to the political game, where the passionate relationship between leader and people mimics direct interaction, facilitated by the social media interface, in deep disdain for the archaic codes of political communication

Returning to the assassination attempt, the inspiration with which the former president stood up and muttered, confused but unyielding, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” under the American flag, as if he instinctively sensed the moment’s potential to become a historic emblem, is, without a doubt, spellbinding. The narrative transitioned from documentary to fiction. Here, Trump did nothing more, nothing less than seize an external (and potentially fatal) opportunity and skillfully fold it into his own messianic narrative, already rich with grand scenes, but this one undoubtedly surpassing them all.

The moment aligns with Trumpist ideology precisely because it summarises it in its key words, almost like a motto. Although spontaneous, the clip does have the clarity of an obsessive, robotic mise-en-scène. And it creates a kind of continuity with the fateful moment of the Capitol invasion in January 2021, when Trump’s fanatic supporters tried to disrupt the democratic process of installing his successor, Joe Biden, storming into the Capitol building. TVs roared then as they did now, with the appalling flow of amateur footage – a replay loop of this defiant attitude towards democracy exhibited by the participants – serving as the main vehicle for disseminating information and a potential source of even more dangerous popular outrage. At that time, even former President Trump – otherwise the main agitator, who had urged the crowd to “fight like hell” against the November election results – was caught off guard by the scale of the events, eventually conceding to Biden in a tweet asking his hordes to go home.

With this new iteration of “fight!”, the loop closes: from that “We fight for Trump!” chanted by attackers in an unprecedented scene for modern America, the country’s former leader has regained possession of his own image, the one he wielded so skillfully throughout his term, thanks to the truly symbolic gesture of standing back up. Once again, Trump’s limited vocabulary proves effective, with a handful of buzzwords thrown around at every opportunity – “tremendous”, “amazing”, “fight” – forming a small constellation of coincidences and incantatory associations.

In a recent book published in France, Fictions de Trump: Puissances des images et exercices du pouvoir (i.e. Trump’s Fictions: The Power of Images and Exercises of Power), theorist Dork Zabunyan states, “Donald Trump has achieved, perhaps without intending to, what every critique of American cultural hegemony generally seeks to highlight: the narratives and images that have shaped America’s collective imaginary constitute the foundation of its hegemony.” Indeed, looking at the longer term, what is striking about the Trump persona is the fantastic persistence, paired with great intuition, with which he has cemented his ubiquitous place in America’s collective mind. A true jack-of-all-trades in his own way, Trump seems to have grasped early on the potential for climbing up the power ladder that omnipresence in the media guarantees. Like the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, a pioneer in the field, and following in the footsteps of former movie actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan, whose figure he amplifies, Trump has cemented a unique image in America’s pop psyche, multiplying his appearances without fear of kitsch or bad taste.

The hats Trump has worn throughout his life cannot be fully encompassed even with a quick rundown. From author – via ghostwriters – of motivational financial books (see the famous The Art of the Deal) to cameo appearances in various lowbrow soap operas (among others, the unforgettable brief appearance in Home Alone 2), Trump has claimed a space – let’s call it “public discourse” – which he has unabashedly exploited for personal benefit. Not all his activities are purely anecdotal, however. More substantial is his occasional but regular role as a wrestling promoter. This sport, recently serving in cinema as a metaphorical exploration of American psychoses in films like Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014) and The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023), seems to have been a perfect match for a Trump seeking perfectly accessible entertainment that displays a primitive masculinity, staged not so much for physical performance but for pure spectacle, devoid of substance, whose known outcome does not diminish at all the primal passion it arouses in the audience.

As Roland Barthes wrote in his defining essay, The World of Wrestling, “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.” Applied to Trump’s philosophy, these lines seem almost prophetic, and perfectly valid. For Trump appears to have applied this rule of excessive, immediate spectacle to the political game, where the passionate relationship between leader and people mimics direct interaction, facilitated by the social media interface, in deep disdain for the archaic codes of political communication (“each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion that rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result,” Barthes writes in the same essay).

The parallel between wrestling – with its violent body grammar – and President Trump’s political approach doesn’t need to be forced. Still, it places us on the track with Trump’s overarching strategy to secure supremacy in the spotlight, turning his body – his slogan-shouting voice, his legendary hairstyle, his gestures – into a dominating sign of power. The man is loud, incapable of keeping a low profile. As Zabunyan argues, Trump opens a new chapter in the saga of “love of power”, one that turns his omnipresence in the media into a tool akin to pornography. Not only because Trump’s ties to the adult industry are well-documented, nor because his aggressively sexist outbursts (like the infamous 2005 “locker room talk” that eventually leaked to the public) are numerous. But also because, as the theorist points out, “if there’s a pornography of Trump, it lies in this belief in subjecting others to his will with the aim of achieving his fantasies (sexual, but also of economic success and social ascension) without restraint.” Exploiting his position of power, Trump bends reality – whether an unfavourable historical consensus or an opinion contrary to his views – to his own all-powerful will.

In other words, this pornographic logic transcends its obvious connotations to become, in an economic and political climate of immediate, rapacious, and unilateral fulfilment of one’s needs, the overarching logic of society. Thus, Trump fits right in. Through the vulgarity of his stances, his disregard for historical truth, and his affronts to democratic policies, he epitomises these times we live in. Most strikingly, Trump’s career didn’t split in two upon the 2016 election. On the contrary, it seems his prior professional path was preparing this ground, creating an ideal launchpad for him, as though the presidency was simply the natural evolution for the media persona known to all of America. Trump thus radically refuted the “optimistic” predictions of observers who couldn’t fathom a link between the host of The Apprentice, who ended each episode with the iconic “You’re fired!”, and the occupant of the Oval Office. Yet the identity was absolute: as leader of the free world, Trump extended this anti-social and conservative vision, turning the complex task of governing a nation into just another showbiz routine.

Trump’s flair for all things visual has become proverbial – to the extent that a relevant critique of him is increasingly difficult to imagine. Such critique would need to avoid both a position of superiority over a character considered degrading, unworthy of the high office he held, and ironic-fatalistic lamentations, as both attitudes risk overlooking the concrete features that make Trump a true media powerhouse. (And one who, regardless of the unprecedented ordeals he’s endured – legal convictions, compromising private revelations – appears unshakable.) Colonising our imaginary on all fronts – whether through official news channels, which he has infiltrated as an owner, or the endless flow of social media – Trump is the very embodiment of capitalism, a figure that generates confusion and resignation, the feeling that he cannot be replaced, that even the alternative ultimately leads back to him.

Trump’s flair for all things visual has become proverbial – to the extent that a relevant critique of him is increasingly difficult to imagine. Such critique would need to avoid both a position of superiority over a character considered degrading, unworthy of the high office he held, and ironic-fatalistic lamentations, as both attitudes risk overlooking the concrete features that make Trump a true media powerhouse.

Yet this impasse must be overcome – not only because mere outcries and reflexive condemnations serve to keep him at a safe distance without yielding any new understanding, but also because his real, unsettling contribution to shaping the present cannot be underestimated. From Sarah Cooper, the American actress who became famous for lip-syncing Trump’s scandalous speeches, subtly undermining them through deadpan irony, to Ali Abbasi, the renowned director of this year’s The Apprentice, an auteur film about Trump’s early career, many have recognized the former president’s ability to offer, through his own person, a key to understanding the contemporary. This impulse to question Trump’s image through images signals a broader recognition of the need for critical discourse within the same medium – perhaps the most effective tool to destabilise the Trumpist audiovisual edifice from within. Studying these audiovisual stimuli is no longer an escape from the world (as if images were the opposite of raw reality) but an immersion into a torrent of reality that today is mediated at every turn by screens.

“Moving images are undoubtedly the main vector by which signs of power circulate and permeate our lives today,” reminds us Zabunyan. Against this catastrophist imagery of Trump looming like a leviathan over the media flow, it’s essential to understand how, nowadays, new images establish a much more confusing and complex power dynamic between creators and viewers, who are called upon to swap roles and saturate daily life with audiovisual content. Screens do not just generate simulacrum – it would be very simple to do without them if that were the case – they shift and diversify how we experience the world. To acknowledge the presence of screens means understanding the specificity of our time without condescension. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, “to be complicit with decadence, even to accelerate it, to perhaps salvage something, to the extent that it’s possible.”

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.