His painfully revised muscles pulsate with veins and lumpy, busy sinews. Ridiculous is not the correct word. The image reminds me of Mark Leyner’s description of a woman with “the face of an elderly crone and the body of a male Olympic swimmer,” who surreptitiously raided henhouses at night to devour chickens. Yes, AI Trump unknowingly replicates Mark Leyner’s singular genius for unpredictable gags. The thigh-smacking version of Donald Trump, revised as Superman, has been cloaked in some sort of nostalgic dress from a preindustrial culture – perhaps the gladiatorial robes worn bravely in an arena dreamed up in the minds of cannabis inspired, adolescent art students.
With AI we now have the capacity for a brand new category of absurdity – we can take the fascist pastime of lying to a plateau that the Nazis could only dream of. A man poised just two Big Macs shy of a massive coronary can be remade instantly into a heroic man of disciplined action. Trump, who spends his days slumped in front of FOX News downing fries and diet cokes with absent-minded indifference to his own demise, appears before us as if he had been training to rip open the bowels of creation and reassemble the world in the manner of an angry Jehovah.
Hitler and his entourage of misshapen eugenics-obsessed ideologues – including chinless Heinrich Himmler, clubfooted Joseph Goebbels, obese Hermann Göring and mad-as-a-hatter Rudolf Hess – never could square the Nazi inner circle and the superman fantasy. Hitler depended upon the only influential woman in the Nazi hierarchy, Leni Riefenstahl, to concoct visually powerful masculine myths.
Fascism always confronts the obstacle of reality, and depends on the visual distortions of media to create subconscious connections in the minds of the viewer. Susan Sontag pointed out that Riefenstahl used Hitler as the “mediator” between the audience and eugenic perfection. In Riefenstahl’s film, “Olympia,” the camera continuously jumps from slow-motion footage of victorious athletes to interspersed images of the Führer in his role as spectator. The athletes are consecrated in the gaze of the Führer. It is as if physical accomplishments only become whole when the leader recognizes them.
Donald Trump, however, has no similar role in the pantheon of American sports ritual. Whenever Trump shows up at the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the World Series, or the NBA Finals, he is contemptuously greeted with prolonged booing. Therefore, Trump’s route to the heights of masculinism has taken a detour into the most jaw-dropping corners of narcissistic pretense. The oblique lie associating Hitler with 1936 Olympic feats, has become transparent in Trump’s version of himself. Seeing this squalid, half dead wreck of a physique decked out in bogus sinews reminds us that fascist leaders have no barrier to constrain mendacity. In the micro-phallic escape into fascist fantasies, the Flaccid States of America have been abducted into a world of fakery sustained by a trillion-dollar armaments industry and the cheap manipulation of AI.
Trump’s shallowness now takes historical shape in Iran. What is the Iranian war but a massive flex of faux US muscle exposed in real time. Ever since WW II we have been trying to reconcile ourselves – objectively a nation sprawled on couches, fattened by wings, fries and Coca-Cola- with our military image of ourselves, invincible and fierce. And who is Donald Trump but everyman stumbling grossly, nauseously from a binge on Burgers, Fries and Cokes, but unable to escape from the incongruous fantasy of himself as a representative of male perfection. American masculinism is unlike any other, stretched to the breaking point by the sheer distance between American fantasy and American reality. The space separating masculine prowess and wanton indulgence has been revealed in Iran, where no amount of military budgeting can alter the inevitable narrative. The soft underbelly of America cannot be revised by AI trick photography. The Strait of Hormuz (the abstract collapse), reified by the skyrocketing prices at the pumps and on the supermarket shelves, competes with an endless stream of lies about US military dominance.
Mid-twentieth-century fascism, with its grandiose propensity for spectacle, for Riefenstahl’s wide-angle lens depictions of blond racial ecstasy, crashed head-on with the destiny of Stalingrad. Nazism had a 12-year run of non-stop murder fueled by mass delusion. MAGA is the clown car sequel to the Third Reich – a murderous orgy applauded by the consumers of AI Trump images.
Iran, in the words of CounterPunch writer, Nicky Reid, “smokes a cigarette and cracks its knuckles.” As Leni Riefenstahl’s fans learned eighty years ago, camera tricks can only go so far.
This piece first appeared on Phil’s Substack.
