In a speech in California, Trump decided to provide his skepticism that there was really a drought in California. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the massive demands in cutbacks on water consumption, despite the everyday experience of local californians, Trumps comments still gained ground (Solis, “Donald Trump”). The comments served to provide the same outlet Trump had been previously providing, that one cannot trust the media or the government but he is the sole purveyor of authority.
In order to work as a political message, I believe that such work requires a long history of prior television exposure. Different media do indeed have different immediate effects, but the long term effects are less understood. It is tacitly understood that Trump works less by content and more by the performative dimensions that TV allow. TV does not engage, rather it disengages; unlike newspaper and radio which require specific kinds of engagement that tend to preclude larger parts of the population taking narratives for granted in the same manner as tv. If this message were given without the context of embedded expectations for Trump, the message would collapse. However, here, and in all trump dialogues, the message is not in what he actually says, but the image that he can convey. Such an image requires that an audience be engaged in a media that allows for their mind to disengage and hence be less susceptible to distinguishing when they are simply believing by deference to authority and mistaking it for thought. If the only method for Trump’s ability to relay messages to the public was in the Newspaper, all the charisma would collapse under the simple language; Trump could not write a coherent paper without his message collapsing, his messages all require additional forms of engagement in order to tailor his speech to the “average american.
Works Cited
Solis, Steph. Donald Trump Tells Californians There Is No Drought. USA Today, 26 May 2016. Web. 26 May 2016.
