Preemptive Impunity: The Constituent Power of Trump's Make America Great Again Movement

Abstract

How and why have freedom and social hierarchies and exclusions become fused in Trump's America? What causative factors can explain the emergence within twenty-first century US political culture of a movement notorious for its attacks on basic norms of tolerance, civility, and human decency? In their efforts to respond to such questions, prominent historians, political commentators, and theorists have correlated Trump's rise to political power in terms of his transmogrification of a large segment of the American populace into US liberal democracy's fascist totalitarian Other. While Trump's illiberal pronouncements and actions do indeed bear a resemblance to the political behavior of European fascists, the Americanness of Trump's conquest disposition might be better understood as his resurrection of an archaic variant of liberalism practiced by American settler colonists throughout the expansionist era of US history. How did President Trump persuade or provoke a broad swath of US citizens, who were for the most part accustomed to consider the principles and institutions of liberal democracy essential components of American democracy, to regard his settler conquest disposition as representatively American? What enabled Trump to advocate with preemptive impunity the demolition of liberal institutions and principles? How could he serve simultaneously as the president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and leader of an insurrectionary movement of latter-day settler colonists? In an effort to address these questions, this essay engages Trump's March 23, 2011, endorsement of Birtherism; Trump's unauthorized transfer of power at the January 20, 2017, inauguration; Trump's August 12–15, 2017, statements about the Charlottesville protest; and Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection as distinct but interrelated moments in Trump's production of this settler-colonist conquest disposition.

Introduction: Trump's Revivification of Settler Colonist Conquest Culture

For close to a quarter century, members of the foreign policy community throughout the transatlantic world embraced Francis Fukuyama's thesis in The End of Ideology and the Last Man that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the dissemination across the planet of the triumphant US model of liberal democracy, humankind had arrived at the end point of its ideological evolution. Fukuyama (1992) said it was the exhaustion of a systematic, viable alternative that sealed the comprehensive victory of US-style liberal democracy. Yet voters who cast ballots in electoral insurrections that mushroomed across European countries in 2016 and 2017 threw this consensus into crisis when they stood united in their revolt against this model of global governance (Zielonka 2018; Holmes and Krastev 2020). Milestone events included the 2016 UK vote to secede from the EU, the drastic increase of support for France's National Front, the insurgence of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in Italy and the ANO party in the Czech Republic, the decision by leaders of right-center parties in the Netherlands and Austria to embrace the policies of the Far Right to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch and the October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections, the mutation of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's campaign platform into the template of governance for Poland's Law and Justice Party, and the elevation of the reactionary Alternative für Deutschland into the Bundestag.¹

Political commentators have customarily sorted the 2016 US election of Donald J. Trump into this series.² However, if we situate Trump's election wholly within the context of these European revolts against the hegemony of the US model of liberal democracy, we risk losing sight of Trump's anomalous relationship to liberal democratic institutions and principles as well as the liberal international order founded on them.³ Trump differs from other political figures in this series because he is at once the elected head of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and the self-declared leader of an insurrectionary movement whose members are intent on subverting the foundational principles of US liberal democracy and dismantling its core institutions.

During his term in office, Trump introduced difficult to reverse changes in representations of the United States and its historic role in the world. Unlike nearly all his predecessors in the Oval Office, Trump refused to identify American democracy as historically unique, morally superior, or ideologically exceptional. Trump considered the obligation to maintain the nation's reputation as the world's exemplary liberal democracy an impediment to the United States’ assertion of economic and military dominance. He replaced Fukuyama's ideological valuations with strictly economic criteria to determine the winner and loser of a geopolitical contest. Regarded from Trump's perspective, winning entailed the rejection of any moral or ideological responsibilities that might interfere with getting the better of a potential adversary. In a ruthlessly competitive world, Trump believed that only a loser would choose to be tethered to moral constraints (Holmes and Krastev 2020). With the postwar economies of Japan and Germany as case in point, Trump complained that the United States had no business rehabilitating enemies that it had decisively conquered in World War II into competitors in international trade. Why, Trump wondered, should the United States Americanize nations it intended to dominate militarily and economically?

And yet, as the political theorists Jan-Werner Müller (2016) and John B. Judis (2016) have sagely observed, no matter how much Trump may have wanted to decouple the US populace from long-standing liberal principles and institutions, neither he nor the participants in the Make America Great Again movement are antagonistic to American democracy as such. Building on Judis's and Müller's observations, Fareed Zakaria (1997, 2016) diagnosed the Trump movement's antipathies as the symptomatic disposition of a globally ascendant political formation that he calls “illiberal democracy” whose participants pose a special danger to the norms and institutions of American liberal democracy. In her 2017 monograph, Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown (2017: 208) indicated the dire consequences of this emergent political formation when she warned that if American liberal democracy were ever to be fully supplanted by this illiberal alternative, a foundational “platform of critique” and “source of radical democratic inspiration and aspiration” would disappear altogether from US political culture. While in office, Donald Trump nonetheless based his mode of governance on the supposition that America's return to global dominance necessitated severance from the liberal principles and institutions that Zakaria and Brown believe foundational to US national identity.

For at least the last seventy-seven years of United States history, the liberal strand of American democracy seemed so deeply interwoven in its political fabric that it could not be pulled apart without doing irreparable damage to the nation. How are we to understand the Americanness of a populist movement notorious for its attacks on equal rights, civil liberties, constitutionalism, and basic norms of tolerance and inclusion? How and why have freedom and legitimized social hierarchies and exclusions become fused in Trump's America? What causative factors can explain the emergence within twenty-first-century US political culture of Trump's Make America Great Again movement (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018)? Across the post–World War II era, weren't US citizens instructed to expect this sort of intolerant and uncivil behavior from the illiberal totalitarian Other against whose mode of fascist governance US liberal democracy was set in a relation of insuperable enmity? In their efforts to respond to such questions, prominent historians, political commentators, and theorists have correlated Trump's rise to political power in terms of his transmogrification of a large segment of the American populace into the nation's fascist totalitarian Other (Snyder 2021). While Trump's illiberal pronouncements and actions do indeed bear a resemblance to the political behavior of European fascists, the Americanness of Trump's conquest disposition might be better understood as his resurrection of an archaic variant of liberalism practiced by American settler colonists (Robinson 2017; Rana 2010).

Accounts of the nation's origins premised on Alexis de Tocqueville's exceptionalist assumptions pass along a historical narrative that describes American democracy as based on the political ideals of individual liberty, equality, rule of law, and consent, emanating from Enlightenment centers in Europe to the nation's founders and onto the rest of the globe. According to de Tocqueville (2000), Americans were shielded from the inegalitarian difficulties plaguing Europe, and its earliest leaders essentially solved the problems posed by feudalism and class conflict. However, as a matter of historical fact, the nation emerged from revolt and warfare, and the historical agents responsible for the nation's emergence were Anglo-American settler colonists whose freedom practices were incompatible with European Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Anglo-American settler colonialism complicates colonialism understood as a relationship to a distant ruling authority in that Anglo-American settlers did not simply extract wealth and return to the metropole (Rana 2010; Veracini 2021). Anglo-American settler colonists displaced Indigenes and replaced them on the land they expropriated.

In Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that when American settlers won independence from England, they acquired through this victory exclusive right to extinguish American Indian entitlement to occupancy and retroactively disallowed Native Americans the condition of ownership that the court defined as an exclusively Euro-American faculty that did not preexist the right of discovery. Echoing John Locke, Justice Marshall described American Indians’ uncultivated relationship to land as proof there was no inherent right to property and that only the appropriation of land through labor provided the rights of ownership. Since Marshall the constitutional justifications for American liberal individualism have been that rights are given substance by property, and made private in acts of appropriation settled through entitled ownership, which in turn is the basis for the self-determination of possessive individuals (Bruyneel 2021; Young 2018; Wolfe 2016).

The settlement of America involved the expropriation of land, a campaign of genocidal violence against the land's inhabitants, the exploitation of the labor power of slaves forcibly uprooted from Africa, and a successful revolution against a European imperial power. Establishment histories and popular fictions of the nation's beginnings routinely disaggregate American settler colonists’ successful overthrow of British tyranny from their freedom practices of enslavement and American Indian killing (Anker 2022). Such popular accounts invariably refuse to acknowledge that the precondition for the settler colonist understanding of American liberty was “both the expansion of slavery and the expropriation of indigenous groups” (Rana 2010: 22). In his 2010 monograph The Two Faces of American Freedom, the historian of law Aziz Rana redressed this lapse by excavating the military, economic, and legal apparatuses interconnecting American settlers’ notions of individual personhood, self-rule, free trade, private property, and other core values of American liberal democracy with the practices of Indigenous dispossession, enslavement, economic exploitation, environmental devastation—what Rana calls the “second face of American freedom”—responsible for their development.

Acts of nation-making violence constitute the infrastructure for the “settler liberal” notions of freedom underpinning American liberal democracy. For more than three centuries settler colonialism set the ideological and structural parameters for collective life and provided the basic governing framework for American life (Rana 2010). American conceptualizations of freedom as founded on the rejection of state tyranny, self-governance, rule of law, and uncoerced labor were intricately dependent on settler colonists’ violent expropriation of Native land, subjugation of American Indian populations, law-making frontier violence, indentured servitude, and slave labor. In The Two Faces of American Freedom, Rana explains that throughout US history the right to individual liberty and the emancipation from tyranny were inextricably tied to the right to dispossess, the freedom to exploit, and the power to oppress.⁴ Aspirations for economic independence and democratic self-rule were deeply enmeshed in assumptions about settler imperial power and the need for external rule and control over Indigenous and dependent communities, and these assumptions in turn rested on a project of continual expansion and the formation of an imperial settler state.

Rather than an unevolved historical trace, settler colonialism might be understood as a precondition for the emergence of both Trump's unemancipatory democratic movement as well as the principles and institutions of liberal democracy to which Trumpists are inalterably opposed (Young 2018; Bruyneel 2021). Trump was speaking as the avatar of a twenty-first-century settler conqueror when he expressed the intention to liberate himself from any and all obligations, responsibilities, or commitments that might hobble his drive to “keep winning” (Anderson 2017). Trump discovered that it was his particular fondness for this persona that enabled him so gladly to countenance the interdependence of American civilization and the acts of barbarism that achieved it (Young 2018).

Trump models the subversively archaic disposition of settler colonists who exercised the rights of conquest and ostentatiously displayed the freedom practices of exploitation and extractive and predatory capitalism (Herzfeld 2021). With this settler conquest disposition as retrotopian warrant, participants in Trump's movement take delight in connecting their individual and collectively shared experiences of freedom to preexisting social hierarchies (Bauman 2017); they correlate self-reliance to anti-Black violence, conjoin economic prosperity to environmental destruction, and construe self-possession as the freedom to dispossess others.

However, before Trump's settler conquest disposition could be credibly taken to represent the nation's interests, he needed a significant portion of the American electorate to acclaim his transgression of liberal norms and activities as representatively American. To achieve this objective, Trump had to overcome formidable obstacles within the domestic sphere that can be formulated as interrelated questions. If liberal democracy constituted for the majority of Americans the hegemonic iteration of American democracy, why should a markedly large group of US citizens accede to the decoupling of American democracy from the liberal principles and institutions to which it seemed inextricably linked? What enabled Trump to advocate with apparent impunity the demolition of liberal institutions and principles? Why were the legislative and judicial branches of the US government unable to protect these institutions and norms from Trump's efforts to dismantle them? How was Trump able to turn extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white nationalist militias into quasi-legitimate actors in American political discourse? How could he serve simultaneously as the president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and leader of an insurrectionary movement?

In an effort to address these questions, I have divided the remarks that follow into sections that engage five distinct but related conjunctural moments in the trajectory of Trump's movement. I intend to clarify the criteria for the selection of these inflection points and their interrelationship as the exposition unfolds.

Birtherism: A Lie Too Big to Be Untrue

The origins of the Make America Great Again movement can be traced back to CNBC newscaster Rick Santelli's borrowing the venerated name of a colonial era Tea Party insurrection against British tyranny to dignify the February 19, 2009, rant he directed at Barack Obama's stimulus package on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange (Baker 2015). The next day Republican Congressman Dick Arney, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Koch brothers, and fifty representatives of sundry factions of the Republican Party held a conference call to share ideas on how to turn Santelli's four-minute harangue into the verbal call to arms of a grassroots insurrectionary movement.

To capitalize on the generalized domestic insecurity that emerged in the wake of the 2007–08 global financial crisis, the symbolic engineers of this as yet nonexistent movement focused on Obama's efforts to change the provisos of the social contract pertaining to health care as the alarum that would conscript new recruits to the Tea Party. President Obama aspired to change health care policies at a conjunctural moment when the US body politic had undergone a frightening depletion of its vital energies, and the American middle class was experiencing the foreclosure of its customary forms of life. White men who felt dethroned by the offshoring of union factory jobs, the nationalization of the auto industry, the disappearance of affordable housing, the shrinkage of pension funds and retirement benefits, sensed a correlation between America's declining status in the world of nations, the diminution of their economic well-being, and the loss of white male entitlement (Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018; Kelleter 2020). To stoke the vindictive white rancor at the core of the Tea Party movement, Arney described Obamacare as the continuation by economic means of the terrorist attack on the homeland on September 11, 2001 (Pease 2010).

Rather than becoming signatories to the first Black president's social contract, members of the Tea Party movement collaborated over social media outlets, talk-radio call-ins, Facebook postings, and Internet chat rooms in the construction of a collectively authored conspiracy narrative that situated Obamacare within a framework designed to translate aspects of Bush's War on Terror into the Tea Party's antagonism to Obamacare (Pease 2009; Ackerman 2021). This quasi-epic fiction portrayed President Obama as a Kenya-born Black Muslim terrorist who had obtained a forged US birth certificate to usurp the office of president, take over control of the nation's political and economic institutions, commandeer the financial ruin of the United States, and forcibly detain the Americans who resisted his tyranny in concentration camps (Smith and Tau 2011).

As the so-called Birtherist narrative circulated across alt-right communication networks it underwent revisions that shaped and were reshaped by the desires, grievances, fears, and political demands of a growing aggregate of its cocreators. Americans who contributed to this political fiction articulated their mistrust of President Obama's Americanness to liberal elitism, job loss, members of minoritized groups jumping the queue, and an array of related issues that Obama's presidency was made to signify. Birthers transferred the composite of their mistrust onto lurid speculations concerning the authenticity of President Obama's birth certificate. The fear and the terror that a Black Muslim terrorist had penetrated white American citizens’ most intimate levels of social belonging to get elected president comprised the affective vectors motivating Birtherism's collectively authored fantasies (Remnick 2011).

On June 25, 2009, the Nigerian American right-wing political commentator L. E. Ikenga published an essay titled “Obama, the African Colonial” that added a reverse colonization plot to this affectively charged concoction. Depicting President Obama as Muslim Africa's revenge for Bush's War on Terror, Ikenga (2009) wrote that “despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel.” Rush Limbaugh opened his June 26, 2009, talk-radio show with a transmissible tweet rendition of Ikenga's argument, which forewarned listeners that “[Obama] wants to turn this into a Third World country. . . . The only way to try to do this is to just attack the private sector and deplete it of its resources, of its money, of its capital, which is exactly what he is doing.” Limbaugh intensified the consternation of call-ins who wanted to know more when he added, “We've elected somebody who is more African in his roots than he is American, loves his father who is a Marxist, and is behaving like an African colonial despot” (Willis 2010).

Andrew C. McCarthy, the federal attorney who led the terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman before becoming a contributing editor at the National Review, grafted a Black Muslim conspiracy theory to the Birtherist frame narrative in his 2010 monograph, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. As “proof” of the “grand jihad” referenced in the title, McCarthy described Barack Obama's repeal of the ban on openly gay service members and his endorsement of same-sex marriage as indisputable evidence of his collusion with leaders of international Islamic movements to impose a secular leftist adaptation of Islamic Sharia law on US citizens.

Birtherism may be a political fabrication, but it is a fiction that possesses the performative power, what Slavoj Žižek (2009b) calls the symbolic efficiency, to shape and occasionally generate events in the political field. What matters to the participants in the collective authorship of Birtherist fictions is the way these narratives are organized in response to enframing anxieties over imagined and real threats to the survival of their American way of life. Was the election of Barack Obama a species of historical vengeance for American settler colonists’ ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Native peoples and enslavement of American Africans? Was Obama going to construct concentration camps for white Americans modeled on the slave plantations and American Indian relocation centers of their settler-colonist forebears? These questions could not be answered by facts because they inscribed Obama within an order made in the image of the questioners’ real fears (Pease 2010).

Following Žižek (2009a), I would argue that far from offering an escape, the political fictions that Birthers traffic in actively generate an alternative social reality as an escape from a traumatic actuality. The collectively authored Birtherist narrative circulating across alt-right media platforms has what they once believed an impossible matter of fact at its foundation. The intractable factuality of Barack Obama's election as the first African American president designated that part of their practical reality that the producers and consumers of Birtherist conspiracy narratives could not accommodate without relinquishing belief in the ongoing viability of white regulatory control of the nation. Birtherism enabled participants in the production, consumption, and circulation of this interactive fiction to shape their reality practically so as to control what could not be incorporated within it. Only the restoration to power of white superintendence of Black lives could nullify the spectacle of a Black man being in charge of the Tea Party's America.

With this interactive political fiction as backdrop, Donald Trump's presidential campaign officially began on March 23, 2011, when he asked the cohosts and audience of The View, a popular daytime television talk show, “Why doesn't he show his birth certificate? There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like” (Krieg 2016). In posing variations of this question on numerous occasions and in different settings, Trump presented himself as a conduit for the circulation of a preexisting narrative whose value he signally enhanced by impressing the Trump brand (Mazzarella 2019). At the time Trump asked this question he had not formally announced his candidacy for the presidency, he had not taken part in either the production or the consumption of Birther narratives, he had not offered an alternative vision of America, and he had not yet come up with the idea of integrating segments of the Tea Party and other political, religious, economic, and social factions into the Make American Great Again movement. However, the moment Trump transferred this “Big Lie” from the precincts of disreputable alt-right communication networks to the center of the presidential race, he seized control of a vast voting bloc consisting primarily of white nationalists in the Tea Party and other extreme factions on the Far Right who regarded Obama as “more African in his roots than he is American.” By taking public ownership of this preexisting, collectively authored political fiction, he also claimed proprietary rights to the surplus productivity of the fantasies that Birtherism coalesced.

Before Trump's takeover, the Tea Party was a leaderless, reactionary fringe group lacking strong ties to the Republican Party whose members were best known for the tricorn hats, Gadsen flags, and other colonial era regalia they kitted out when staging protests of Obama's African colonial despotism. Speaking and acting from the subject position of aggrieved white entitlement already opened by the Tea Party's fierce antagonism to Obama's policies, Trump transformed the Tea Partiers’ heterogeneous, inconsistent, counterinsurgent, politically reactionary motives and purposes into the agentic, insurgent, white settler nationalism of the Make America Great Again movement. When Trump asked the question, he summoned into virtual existence the political movement to which he conferred ontological reality in the hundreds of rallies he has held since he officially announced his candidacy for the office of president on June 15, 2015.

Trump won the loyalty of this voting bloc because he did what no reputable Republican candidate for president would have risked doing. By questioning the validity of President Obama's birth certificate, Trump unashamedly conjured in the historical present a constellation of nonsynchronous scenes—of a white man compelling an African American to show his freedom papers, of a white poll worker demanding an African American voter's proof of citizenship, of white immigration officers stopping an African for interrogation at the nation's border—from the intractably nonprogressive facets of United States history that Trump's question synchronized.

Trump's question confronted the first Black president of the United States with the demand that he show incontrovertible evidence of his certification as a “natural-born” American citizen. At the same time that Trump's called for empirical proof of his birth certificate's validity, he assumed a bellicose attitude eager to decertify any document purporting to legitimate Obama's presidency (Serwer 2020). Obama did in fact release the long-form version of his birth certificate on April 27, 2011 (Pfeiffer 2011). It verified that he was born August 4, 1961, in Kapi'olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. That certificate of live birth would have sufficed in a court of law. But Trump's question had not brought the president before a judge; it hauled him into a people's court composed of white settler nationalists from the nation's past and present. The day after Obama published the document, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump's campaign, described President Obama's exhibition of his birth certificate as a response to Trump's demand to see his papers. “Having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States,” Miller said (Helsel 2016). Miller's statements notwithstanding, Trump continued to express Birther uncertainties for years after, and to this day has never declared his unqualified belief that Barack Obama is a birthright citizen of the United States. Not a month after President Obama displayed his long-form birth certificate, on CNN, Trump told Wolf Blitzer that “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate” (Krieg 2016).

Trump's citation of what “a lot of people” find dubious about Obama's birth certificate explains why he never found believable, incontrovertible proof of the authenticity of Obama's certificate. Trump had staged his inquest into the circumstances of President Obama's birth as the basis for a twenty-first-century colonial encounter. Trump understood that the ingrained beliefs on which Birtherism is based cannot be falsified because they are entangled in the deep-rooted conviction held by nineteenth century settler colonists and a broad swath of his contemporary supporters that no African American can possess the identity credentials required to become a legitimate candidate for the office of president (Serwer 2020).

During his presidential campaign Obama had correlated the moment Martin Luther King Jr. called the “fierce urgency of now” with his campaign's rallying cry “Yes, we can!” Participants in Obama's grassroots movement encouraged voters to believe their ballots could redeem the nation's “original sin” of slavery (Coates 2012). They cast the 2008 presidential election as a redemptive turning point that would empower twenty-first-century Americans to actualize an American dream that had previously been deferred to an unattainable future. Trump's questioning opened a space of dubiety between the matter of historical fact that Obama was elected president of the United States of America and the legitimacy of the birth certificate documenting his right to be that person. The serial uncertainties Trump associated with the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate instigated doubts that empirical certification procedures could not fully and finally invalidate. There is no certification that can decisively put an end to the legion of Birther doubts saturating the gap between Obama's presidency and its certification. Without a certifiably legitimate response to Birthers’ skepticism, Trump's questioning all but reinstated the qualifier “deferred” to the dream that Obama's election victory actualized. When he situated America's telos in its white settler slave-power past, Trump cast Americans’ election of the first Black president as a historical anomaly rather than an irreversible step forward into the nation's “post-racial future.” Trump's repeated enactment of this settler-colonist transaction did not simply contravene Obama's redemptive vision of America; it overturned its historic efficacy by inciting a temporal rollback to an America wherein a hetero-patriarchal, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant settler-colonist disposition claimed preemptive rule over the nation's past—and future (Mamdami 2015; Lewis 2017; Young 2018; Byrd et al. 2018).

Settler colonialism is not a bygone historical era or a mode of historical eventfulness whose significance was eliminated with the overthrow of British rule. It is a transhistorical condition of eventfulness that remains formative while also changing over time (Gregory 2004; Byrd et al. 2018; Bruyneel 2021). The series of different yet politically intertwined scenes of subjugation that Trump's question elevated into representation comprised separate historical enactments of America's settler-colonial division of humanity. Although they took place as distinctly different historical events, these incidents are nevertheless imbricated within the ongoing iterative eventfulness of the disposition of settler colonialism that Birtherism continues. These enfolded processes constitute American settler colonialism as a structural yet sequential event (Bruyneel 2021; Veracini 2021; Robinson 2017; Byrd et al. 2018; Kim 2022). Trump reperformed this structural event at the moment he took up the position of the American settler to confront President Obama with the question about the legal certifiability of his birth certificate.

In extracting his interrogatory stance from the collectively authored Birther narrative, Trump activated scenarios of decertification that otherwise lay dormant within Birtherism's virtual archive. Trump's iterative questionings did not merely render Obama's decertification imaginable; they activated a retroactive procedure of denaturalization that added the quality of natal alienation to Obama's body at the instant of his birth. From the moment he articulated this inquest that threatened to dispossess the first Black president of his right of citizenship, Trump modeled and authorized the conquest mentality of a prototypically American settler colonist. Trump's usage of Birtherism to question the certification of Obama's presidency turned the collective responsible for the production of this discursive resource into the latter-day settler nationalists that he mutated into a legitimate political constituency.

That Trump had not merely quickened these vindictive specters but had done so with pride-filled impunity warrants the recognition that the institutions of American liberal democracy could do nothing to prevent their recurrence (Chomsky 2016; Patel 2017). Trump has made it a policy not to put himself in a position where he can be assigned culpability for a potentially criminal action or enterprise. Trump never professes to speak solely for himself. He reportedly starts each day by collating, curating, and distilling his followers’ tweets, blogs, and other messaging into executive tweets that at once discern and purport to give expression to the constituent power of the Make America Great Again movement (Johnson 2016). In his engagement with these twenty-first-century settlers, Trump includes the possibility of insurrection against the normative constituted order as a potentiating motive for their aggregation. Although he aligned this people's movement to his purposes, Trump nonetheless claims to depend on their constituent right to revolution as the warrant for his impunity.

In the rallies that followed his announcement to campaign for the presidency, Trump depicted the United States as a settler conquest nation in which winning was a permanent ontological condition. Trump believed it axiomatic that America's standing as a conquest culture endowed its nation-making violence with the temporal authority to impede modes of historicization that would replace or overthrow it. He viewed the winning or victory culture of his movement as akin to a settler colonist settlement in that it was always threatened by terrorists from within and without. Trump associated this disposition with American settlers’ rights of revolutionary conquest and instructed rally-goers to refuse to feel either personal guilt or collective shame for their forebears’ having routed foes whose unwillingness to accept defeat was inherited by their twenty-first-century descendants. Trump never regarded as admirable the resistance of Indigenous peoples or rebellious slaves or the British loyalists the settlers defeated. However, he wholeheartedly identified with the settler conquest disposition of Andrew Jackson, the US president who overthrew a British imperial army in the War of 1812, who carried out American Indian removal policies, and who put down slave rebellions.

At press conferences and during stump speeches, Trump took pleasure in exemplifying the ethos and bearing of President Jackson.⁵ He urged members of the Make America Great Again movement to personify Jacksonian colonial conquest mentality in confrontations with radical Muslim terrorists, feminists, members of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, undocumented immigrants, and to protect the Republic against other twenty-first-century versions of enemies who did not know how to stay vanquished. Trump also directed settler-nationalist bellicosities against an ensemble of domestic antagonists whose campaigns for social justice, equal political and civil rights, and reparations for historical wrongs threatened to deprive the Real Americans in his movement of their birthright privileges of supervisory control of the nation.

Trump's people structure their belief in Trump's affectively real facts on their need to disbelieve in the truth of the progressive liberal narrative that has relegated them to the trash bin of history. US historian Greg Grandin speculates that when Trump was deliberating over effective slogans for his presidential campaign, he decided that the promise to build a wall at the nation's southern border would ignite a collective reawakening of America's settler-colonist frontier mentality. It was on the frontier that American settler colonists arrived at their inegalitarian and white nationalist understanding of America insofar as it entailed “putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty as what set them apart from the people of color they put down” (Grandin 2019). The demand that Trump “Build that wall!” along the US-Mexico border stands as a stark reminder that American settlers’ representative freedom practices involved unregulated acts of extralegal nation-making violence aimed at racially marked “savages” within as well as on the other side of the nation's border (Grandin 2019; Anker 2022).

The Make America Great Again movement is not about citizens of the United States, and its members do not primarily identify as Republicans. Trump's American people consider themselves the wellspring of nation-making power out of which the United States emerged and believe in their bones that the bedrock America they inhabit constitutes the sacred homeland of true nativist belonging. America's elect, the people Trump leads, do not describe themselves as citizens of the United States but as Real Americans. The Trump movement has always been about the reconstruction of the settler- colonist division of humanity through the construction of an internal border distinguishing who belongs and who doesn't; who counts and who shouldn't; who can wield power and who must be subject to it. It is they, and not the liberal elite, who are the Americans who set the rules and model the behavior to which immigrants who wish to become citizens of the United States must conform and who are ever ready to take up arms against every threat, foreign and domestic, to the American Way of Life (Gingrich 1984; O'Neill 2020).

Shortly after he announced his intention to run for the presidency, Trump's future speechwriter and national security adviser Michael Anton (2016a) authored a series of polemical manifestos under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus that lent academic respectability to aspects of Trump's campaign that his critics dismissed as laughable ineptitude. With Birtherism as the background concept shaping his argument, Anton took pains to falsify two of the foundational tenets in the credo of American liberal democracy. “ ‘Diversity’ is not ‘our strength,’ ” Anton (2016b) remarks of the first of these precepts. “It's a source of weakness, tension and disunion.” Anton (2016b) offered a more elaborate rationale to shed doubt on the historical accuracy of the second of these foundational beliefs: “America is not a ‘nation of immigrants’; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants, and later still not to, and who may justly open or close our doors solely at our own discretion, without deference to forced pieties.” As warrant for his rejection of the aspirational ideal of welcoming the foreign-born, Anton (2016a) writes, “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty . . . provide [Democrats] ringers to form a permanent electoral majority.”

Like Anton, Trump differentiates immigrants from the past and present white settler nationalists who revile them. Members of Trump's movement do not regard themselves as part of a nation of immigrants. American settler colonists differ from immigrants in that, unlike the latter, settlers were intent on eliminating preexisting societies rather than becoming part of them (Behdad 2005; Pease 2008; Mamdami 2015). In Trump's reckoning, an immigrant is a person who is permanently out of place. It bears repeating that Trump did not confine the classification “immigrant” to persons recently admitted entry to US territories; he extended the condition of being out of place within United States territory to all people of color no matter whether their place of birth was Africa, Latin America, South America, Asia, the so-called Middle East, or the United States of America (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021). To advance his effort to designate all people of color immigrants, Trump used a version of the legal fiction Orlando Patterson calls “natal alienation” to expand Birtherism's provenance. Chief Justice Roger Taney fabricated this fiction in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case to explain why African Americans, no matter whether born in Africa or the United States, could never acquire the condition of national belonging (Patterson 1982; V. Brown 2009).

Political commentators have successfully exposed the tissue of lies, distortions, and half-truths that Birtherism braids together. However, whether Birtherism is factually true matters less than the congeries of historically factual white supremacist scenarios it scatters across the contemporary political landscape. Trump's supporters behave according to the emotional logics saturating what Brian Massumi (2015b) describes as a “politics of affect” that enmeshes emotions and cognition in an inextricable knot.⁶ His followers’ attachments to Trump's affectively factual fictions are stronger than the objective facts his critics present to expose them.

What Trump's opponents and critics refuse to recognize or even acknowledge is the ineluctable fact that Trump's question generated a materially real twenty-first-century event that drew on the settler-colonist repertoire of scenarios, themes, settings, antagonists, and protagonists enmeshed within the Birtherist narrative. This Birtherist fiction cast Donald Trump as a twenty-first-century leader of American settlers involved in a colonial struggle with an African Muslim undocumented immigrant who had usurped the sovereign power of the presidency to conduct a domestic war on terror against American citizens. Trump had in effect announced his candidacy for office by subordinating the first African American president to the sovereign power of the collective movement that Trump's question personified.

By confronting Obama with this question about the legality of his birth certificate, Trump took up a subject position that turned President Barack Obama into the condensed signifier for an assemblage of political, economic, and social actors and activities to which Trump's movement set itself in a relationship of insuperable antagonism (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2005). When repeated at Trump rallies, the question facilitated the consolidation of settler power from the very highest level of leadership to the most granular structure of feeling to which this power owes its social, cultural, and political longevity. Interpreted from the perspective of Birtherism's true believers, Donald Trump's question recovered sovereign nativist control of the United States of America at the precise moment he forced the nation's first Black president to show proof of legal belonging.

If Trump did not want the long-form birth certificate, what bureaucratic procedures did Trump and his political constituency want to set into operation when they questioned the official certification of President Obama's birth? Among other matters, Trump wanted to know what process of authorization in a white nation made it possible for the son of an African immigrant from Kenya to be verified as the president of the most powerful country on earth. More specifically, Trump's question wanted answers as to how and why all the safeguards installed in the bureaucratic infrastructures that organize the American political system in ways that would have and should have made impossible the certification of the son of a Kenya-born African as president failed to accomplish that purpose.

Over and above all else, Trump's questioning conveyed the demand to know why state-authorized bureaucratic processes responsible for specifying the details surrounding Obama's birth had not already done the work of decertification. Bureaucratic decertification procedures rely on the nation's sedimented history of settler lawfare, settler-colonist warfare, US settler imperialism, and ongoing settler-colonial capitalist predation that instituted the American system of governmentality at its founding and continue to sustain it (Coulthard 2014; Kim 2022). Trump's ongoing inquest could cite the pre–Civil War legal fiction of natal alienation and radical kinlessness as ample legal precedent for prohibiting African Americans from ever belonging to the nation as free citizens; if necessary, it could requisition the property laws that were fashioned by the judicial branch of the post–Civil War expansionist state to grant westward moving white settlers’ preemptive ownership of any Indigenous land they homesteaded and the right to construe whiteness itself as a status property tangentially related to inegalitarian property rights (Frederickson 1982; Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1995; Rana 2010; Issar 2021; Nichols 2018).

When situated within the context of his insurrectionist movement, Trump's casting doubt on the validity of Barack Obama's birth certificate can be viewed as serving a set of interconnected psychosocial purposes.⁷ This fantasy did indeed gratify the antagonistic disposition of a movement whose members took obscene enjoyment in Trump asking a question that harbored the potential penalties of the loss of US citizenship, detention, deportation, and the possible capital punishment of America's first Black president.⁸ However, given its calculable effectiveness within the US socio-symbolic order, Birtherism might be better understood as a long-term political stratagem designed to take advantage of preexisting decertification procedures within the bureaucratic infrastructure of the American political system.

In its standing as a question asked on behalf of the American descendants of settler colonists, Trump's interrogatory tapped into whiteness as the default operative ideology of what political theorist Charles W. Mills calls the “racial contract.” According to Mills the United States of America was, like other British settler-colonist nations, built on the self-evident assumption of white supremacy. As such, it installed one set of rules that applied to white persons and another to nonwhite subpersons. This system of dual governance utilized expropriation, slavery, colonization, and cultural deracination as interrelated modes of domination. White American settlers based the legalization of slavery on the religious belief that it benefited uncivilized nonwhite people; they justified seizing the land and resources of nonwhite people by claiming that only white men possess the moral capacities prerequisite to owning property. Race regulates the American social contract by dividing the contractual parties into two asymmetrical, noncomparable groups: the persons who comprise the party to whom the social contract assigns its rights and liberties are white, unmarked citizens; the subpersons who lack complete contractual identification with the rights and liberties of white US citizens are racially marked (Mills 1999; Pateman and Mills 2007).

As the qualifiers marked and unmarked suggest, Mills apprehends white supremacism as a pre-political disposition deeply rooted in American history that continues into the present as the unmarked, because foundationally presupposed, conveyor of US culture's normativity. Functioning as a multilayered, interlocking infrastructural network that relays taken-for-granted, mostly preconscious beliefs and attitudes concerning racial, ethnic, political, social, and economic inequalities, white supremacism works in tandem with global, racial, and settler-colonial modes of capitalism, patriarchy, sexism, and heterosexism and multiple racialized matrices of domination and exclusion that together support unequal labor, housing, and financial markets. Racist nativism regulates the relationships between the United States and other nations by the denial of entry to specific ethnic, racial, or national groups; nativist racism legitimates the hierarchical distribution of civic entitlement to specific groups of immigrants and their descendants after entry has occurred (Frederickson 1982; Harris 1993; Behdad 2005; Pease 2008; Bandar 2018; Louie and Viladrich 2021).

Mills wrote The Racial Contract to expose this white supremacist infrastructure of the American system to critical contestation rather than social reproduction. Because of the benefits and entitlements inherent in the racial contract, however, Trump and members of his movement are adamantly opposed to any alteration of its foundational assumptions. Throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump treated Birtherism as a reparation of the breach of the racial contract resulting from the election of the first Black president (Remnick 2016). While the manifest content of Birtherism may be a “Big Lie,” that lie reveals the otherwise latent truth that settler-colonist white nativism is so deeply rooted in the foundations of the American juridico-political system that it cannot be extricated without throwing the entire system into disrepair (Elkins and Pederson 2005; Simpson 2014).⁹

Trump's people did not need to cite Charles Mills to warrant their belief that the election of Barack Obama meant that a subperson who lacked the full contractual rights and liberties of white US citizens was now in charge of enforcing the US social contract. They considered the asymmetrical, dual governance assumptions of the racial contract indistinguishable from the Americanness of their way of life. As I will explain at the conclusion to these remarks, in their effort to disallow the transfer of presidential power to Joseph R. Biden, the members of Trump's movement turned Birtherism into the de jure authorization for their efforts to decertify the votes of any and all African Americans who filled out a ballot in the 2020 presidential election (Remnick 2011; Serwer 2020; Kagan 2021).

An Unauthorized Transfer of Constituent Power: President Donald J. Trump's Preemptive Impunity

The Inauguration Day ritual of a peaceful transfer of power presupposes a modicum of continuity between the incoming presidential administration and the preceding regime. This ritual is also supposed to safeguard what the New York Times Editorial Board (2021) describes as the foundational premise of a democratic republic: “A republic works only when the losers of elections accept the results and the legitimacy of their opponents.” Although it went virtually unnoticed at the time, Trump had made clear why he could neither offer such an assurance nor undertake a peaceful transfer of power in the scenario he added to his official inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2017. The unauthorized enactment Trump surreptitiously included in this public rite of passage worked like what psychoanalysts refer to as a deferred action in that it would take a subsequent event, in this case the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, to make legible the irreversible subversion this surplus action potentiated.¹⁰

A presidential inauguration offers a classic example of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a ceremony of symbolic investiture in that this ritual in the civic liturgy provides procedures, symbols, and speech acts the public requires to witness and work through the potentially disruptive effects that might ensue when a US president undergoes replacement by a political opponent. Bourdieu (2000: 243) defines an investiture ceremony as a ritual that establishes the difference between a public office and an officeholder as the precondition for a public to witness an ordinary mortal person “partake of the sempiternity and immortality of the public office they temporarily incarnate.”

In his canonical description of the transformative effect of a rite of symbolic investiture on the body of the officeholder, Bourdieu alludes to Ernst Kantorowicz's ([1957] 1985) notion of the “King's Two Bodies” that distinguishes the mortal body of the officeholder and the sublime body utterly devoid of natural defects that is inherent in the office: “As representatives they (the officeholders) partake of the eternity and ubiquity of the office which they help to make exist as permanent, omnipresent, and transcendent, and which they temporarily incarnate, giving it voice through their mouths and representing it in their bodies, converted into symbols and emblems to rally round” (Bourdieu 2000: 244). No duly elected officeholder can coincide with the second or immortal body of the Office of the President. However, in “The King's Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, and Presidential Sacrifice,” the political theorist Michael Paul Rogin (1987: 82) explained how three of Trump's precursors in the White House aspired to replace the “the Body natural . . . subject to all infirmities” with “the Body politic . . . utterly devoid of natural Defects and imbecilities.” President Trump differed from previous occupants of the Oval Office in that at the time of the official oath-taking he remained doubly interpellated to two separate, conflicting personae. He was fastened to the Office of the President of the United States on the one hand, and on the other, he identified as the leader of an extra-constitutional movement.

Noting the irremediable incompatibility between Trump's behavior and the bodily practices and behavioral dispositions inscribed in the office, Trump's detractors have denounced him as an impostor possessing neither the comportment nor the temperament nor the know-how prerequisite to occupy the office (Shrum 2017). Rather than conforming his behavior to the mores and customs of the Office of the President, Trump occupied it as the refusal to embody or personify the norms and mandates of the presidency. Befittingly, Trump's unpresidential deportment communicated a different meaning to members of his movement, who considered it an apt expression of their leader's usurpation of the office (Beinart 2018; Kay 2017).

Bourdieu's account of a felicitous investiture ceremony affords a particularly generative vantage point to explain how the scenario Trump added to the January 20, 2017, altered the import and efficacy of the inauguration ceremony. Bourdieu (2000: 243) does not provide an explicit account of an unsuccessful investiture ceremony, but he does explain how an elected official's difficulty in bodily taking up the symbolic function of a public office can precipitate an investiture crisis that is “always present in inaugural moments.” This is the case “because the appropriation of the function by the nominee is also the appropriation of the nominee by the function: the nominee enters into the function only if he agrees to be possessed bodily by it, as is asked in the rite of investiture” (244). In the following description of the expected disposition of the person undergoing the ritual, Bourdieu also provides criteria to understand why Trump's January 20, 2017, inauguration ceremony might not have yielded the expected result: “He must be personally invested in his investiture, that is, engage his devotion, his belief, his body, give them as pledges, and manifest, in all his conduct and speech—this is the function of the ritual words of recognition—his faith in the office and in the group which awards it and which confers this great assurance only on the condition that it is fully assured in return” (243). With the precision of a canonist, Bourdieu remarks that a public investiture ritual quite literally secures and legally protects the person undergoing this solemn ceremony against the accusation that the event has validated “the delirious fiction of the impostor . . . or the arbitrary imposition of the usurper” (242). With this observation, Bourdieu implies that if the person going through the ceremony is not “personally invested” in or has not bodily taken up the official symbols and emblems of the office, the investiture ceremony could misfire in the sense that it might not succeed in turning a candidate answerable to the accusation of being an impostor or usurper into, in the case of Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States of America (Soros 2017; Tabachnik 2019).

Bourdieu (2000: 244) goes on to state that an investiture crisis might transpire at an inaugural event should an elected official either refuse or fail to be “bodily taken up by the symbolic function of the office.”¹¹ Trump brought about an investiture crisis when he delivered an inaugural address just after taking the presidential oath—“I do solemnly swear . . . that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”—that made clear that he had no intention to perform either of the functions he had just solemnly sworn faithfully to execute (Wittes and Jurecic 2017).

As discussed above, the primary purpose of the inauguration ceremony was for Trump, the newly sworn president, to invest himself in and getting bodily taken up by the symbols, emblems, and other accoutrements surrounding the ritual of a peaceful transfer of power that Democrats and Republicans alike have celebrated for more than a century as what make the United States an exemplary liberal democracy. The inauguration of the forty-fifth president of the United States was supposed to be the sole investiture ceremony that took place on January 20, 2017. However, to underscore the “very special meaning” of this event, Trump's speech writers, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, placed this ritual into contestation with an alternative investiture ceremony staged for the insurrectionary movement Trump continues to lead.

Trump did not run as a normal presidential candidate; he ran as the operative will and embodied voice of a movement whose members felt that they had been set aside by twenty-first-century realities. They wanted Trump to usurp the office of the president and use it to transgress constitutional statutes and rules and transform the coordinates of the national polity. In keeping with these aspirations, moments after taking the solemn oath to “execute the responsibilities of his office and to protect and defend the constitution,” President Trump performed an activity that the Constitution did not authorize, and that discontinued the long-standing tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Rather than appropriating and being appropriated by the symbolic function of receiving, bodily taking up, and personifying the peaceful transfer of power, Trump invested himself in a contrary activity that precipitated a self-division to which the ambiguous referent of the pronoun “we” in this passage calls attention: “Because today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another—but we are transferring power from Washington, DC and giving it back to you, the American People.” The “we” that is “not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another” is significantly different from the “we” that is “transferring power from Washington, DC and giving it back to you, the American People.” The “we” involved in the relay of power within Washington, DC, institutions and structures (presidential administrations, political parties) is a placeholder in a series of preexisting socio-symbolic networks of political actants and self-executing activities. But the “we” who arrogates the authority to give this sovereign power “back to you, the American People” is at once the effect and the delegated cause of the activities inherent in this transferential process. By way of the recursive process animating this alternative investiture, the presidential “we” appropriating the power to give back to the American people already will have been appropriated by the American people's sovereign power to actuate this transaction.

What is more significant to this transaction, when Trump shifts the referent of “you, the American People,” from “everyone” to “the forgotten men and women . . . who came by the tens of millions” to join the Make America Great Again movement, it becomes apparent that the American people to whom “we” transfers the sovereign power vested in the Office of the President are not identical with all Americans. This slippage reveals that Trump intends the members of the Make America Great Again movement as at once his primary addressees, the ultimate source of sovereign power, and the co-enactors of this unauthorized investiture ceremony that would make them “rulers of this nation again.”

Now it is customary for newly elected presidents to formally recognize “We the People” as the final authorizing conduit of their sovereign power to govern. At presidential inauguration ceremonies, the phrase “We the People” has traditionally performed the strictly rhetorical function of endowing newly elected presidents with the people's imprimatur for the policies and agendas they laid out during their campaigns. When, at a key moment in his 2013 inaugural address, Barack Obama (2013) said, “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity,” he spoke as if the American people had already authorized the Climate Action Plan that he would not announce until June 25, 2013. The people Trump institutes through this supernumerary ceremony differ from “We the People” Obama represents, in that Trump's “forgotten” Americans exist within United States constitutional democracy as a constituent power that exceeds any legitimate power to rule and transcends the grasp of already constituted law.

The January 20, 2017, inauguration ceremony was supposed to establish an irreversible distinction between Trump the leader of a movement and President Trump by hailing the latter figure as representative leader of all the people of the United States. However, his inaugural address makes it clear that President Trump remained primarily invested in the symbols and regalia of the Make America Great Again movement on whose extra-constitutional authority he has usurped the office of president. Trump indicated the magnitude of the political transformation he intended this rogue investiture ceremony to realize, when, consequent to his act of giving power back to “you, the American People,” he turned the members of the Make American Great Again movement into the quite literal referent for and first-person collective agency retroactively empowered to enunciate the otherwise strictly rhetorical phrase “We the People.”

The mystery in this supernumerary investiture ceremony pertains to the source of the sovereign power to rule that Trump gave back to the people. This alternative investiture ceremony effectively displaced the central ritual involving the symbolic function of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next with this unauthorized transfer. This extralegal investiture ceremony would not be completed until an event took place months later in Charlottesville, Virginia, that required the American people to whom he transferred this power on January 20 take part in a separate inauguration that would retroactively invest Trump with their power to rule the nation.

Nothing about this transfer of power should be considered peaceful. Trump was not handing on power the Obama administration had peacefully passed along to the Trump administration. The American people to whom Trump has given back power were inalterably opposed to Obama's policies. Since they never recognized President Obama as the legally elected bearer of their collective agency, they could not have regarded the sovereign power Trump handed back to them as having emanated from President Obama's administration. The American people who made a virtual appearance in this investiture ceremony instead granted Trump the extralegal sovereign power to perform this hostile takeover of the 2017 inauguration ceremony.

In performing this supplemental ceremony that restored his movement to the status of the nation's rulers, Trump had, for the time it took to perform it, impersonated the presidential “we” and assumed the Office of the President as the embodiment of the movement's sovereign will. Although the scenario Trump added to the official inauguration ceremony may have appeared merely symbolic at the time, the historically material effects of this unauthorized hand over became evident after his 2020 electoral defeat when President Trump adamantly refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power to his successor in the office. It would take the intervening four years to realize, in retrospect, that Trump's superfluous ritual had also changed the 2017 presidential inauguration ceremony into the setting for the installment of a deferred-action coup d’état, a de facto usurpation of power by the head of an insurrectionary movement that would invade the Capitol building rather than hand it back to the political establishment in Washington, DC.

The 2017 inauguration ceremony did accomplish the self-executing task of “merely transferring power from one administration to another” that legally recognized Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. However, this outlaw investiture ceremony vested in President Trump the unofficial authority to rule the nation as the expressive voice of his white nationalist movement's will: “What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

The American people through whose will Trump acquired the power to govern the nation differed from Obama's “We, the people” in that they wanted no part of the political order governed by the Washington, DC, establishment. This insurrectionary movement claimed the “revolutionary” power to dismantle the free press, colonize public lands, undermine voters’ rights legislation, and wreak havoc on other venerated institutions of American liberal democracy (Todd and Zito 2018). Scholars in constitutional law have described previous examples of the American people's revolutionary assertion of the right to rule as enactments of constituent power. According to these scholars, the American Revolution changed the meaning and practice of popular sovereignty in the West, “transforming the people from a source of power defensively appealed to in constitutional crises . . . to an agent capable of ongoing, collective self-government and, when necessary, radical constitutional reform” (J. Frank 2010: 10). Linking it to the right to revolution, the founders who drew up the US Constitution presupposed the constituent power of “We the People” as the sovereign agency that was responsible for its authorship (Partlett 2017). As constitution-making, the American people's constituent power could not be subject to the rules and laws in “the existing constitution and implies in practice its legal abrogation” (957).

Over the nation's two-hundred-fifty-year history, remarkably diverse movements on the right and the left have claimed the sovereign authority of “We the People” to validate their revolutionary demands. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama spoke with the constituent power of his grassroots movement when he repudiated President George W. Bush's curtailment of Americans’ constitutional rights. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movements emerged during the Obama-Biden administration. As did the Tea Party movement.¹³ In his 2016 campaign Donald Trump galvanized the constituent power of the Make America Great Again movement when he promised to repeal and replace the “unconstitutional rule” of Obamacare.

Its core members consider Make America Great Again an insurrectionary movement (Mogelson 2021). And Trump's declaration—“That all changes—starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment”—instantiated a classic example of what the political theorist Jason Frank calls a “constituent moment.” At such moments, Frank explains, the people are enacted as an extralegal constituent power higher than the constituted order but not formally mandated from within that order. Frank (2010: 8) defines a constituent moment as what takes place when an impostor or usurper or other unauthorized agent “seizes the mantle of authorization” and claims to speak in the name of the people to open up new places (in this case, the investiture ceremony Trump added to his 2017 inauguration) for the accomplishment of “the people's aspirations.” It is through the achievement of such a “felicitous infelicity,” Frank explains, that the American people's sovereign power effectively demonstrates its capacity to alter the conditions and contexts through which the people's voice gets heard and recognized as politically efficacious (8). Trump's investiture ceremony imbued a “very special meaning” in the Inauguration when it positioned the recipient (“you, the American People”) of this transfer of power as what authorized Donald Trump's taking up the Office of the President. On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was formally inaugurated as president, but he accepted sovereign power as the head of an insurrectionary populist movement.

Rather than accomplishing the felicitous transformation of Donald J. Trump into the Second Body inhering in the office of the US president, this extralegal investiture ceremony precipitated an ongoing investiture crisis. The crisis effected the disjuncture of the president of all the American people, who was expected to conform his policies and actions to the rules and laws embedded in the institutions of American liberal democracy, from Donald J. Trump, the de facto usurper-agent of a populist movement whose members demanded that he overturn American liberal democracy's hegemonic rule. During his four years in office, President Trump occupied the rift in between them so as to turn the personae of president and usurper into each other's foil. When doing official state business, Trump formally acceded to the rules and norms of existing institutions of government; in speaking as and for the Make America Great Again movement's sovereign power, he exceeded and transgressed extant rules and laws.

Trump did not govern as a president whose actions and policies were authorized by the guardians of the sacred epistemes of US liberal democracy. Trump based the authority of the policies, actions, and decisions he made as president on the sovereign power from the future anterior of the Make America Great Again movement. As it turns out, Trump's Inauguration Day assertion that “January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again” was not merely an instance of Trump the campaigner playing to his movement's grandiose fantasy. With this declaration as authorization, Trump announced his post-inauguration plan to repurpose the sites on which he staged his campaign rallies as assemblages of We the People's power. In so doing Trump designated the members of his movement as at once his Real addressees and as the “We the People” source of the sovereign power enunciating itself though his presidential speech acts.¹⁴

When he was inaugurated president, Obama disbanded the grassroots movement animating his presidential campaign and invested himself wholly in the Office of the President. Unlike Obama, Trump's repurposing of the sites at which he formerly held campaign rallies into “We the People” constituent assemblies elevated popular sovereignty's authorizing entity, the People, into larger-than-life visibility. The constituent assemblies into which Trump rallies mutated supplied the condition of self-presencing for the American people whose constituent power Trump claimed to embody and express (J. Frank 2021). Trump's radical claim is that he better represents the will of these Real American than do partisan members of the US Congress and Senate or the justices of the Supreme Court. At each of the assembly-rallies Trump held during his four years in office, his supporters vociferously acclaimed President Trump's power to nullify, suspend, ignore, and on occasion change the rules of the liberal democratic order.

President Trump rarely appealed to liberal watchwords when he wanted to defend, justify, or even represent his executive decisions. Whenever members of the House or Senate impugned his policies, Trump traveled to one or another of these assemblies where the Real American People claimed a power higher than the constituted authorities to exercise the constituent power to preemptively endow their leader with a “legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking had the effect of rule-making” (O'Neill 2020). These “We the People” assemblies did not grant him immunity within the law. The provenance of the assembly's constituent power exceeded the authority of constituted law and preemptively exempted him from punishment for his rule-breaking. Trump reveled in the power his constituency granted him to transgress with impunity the laws, rules, and norms of American liberal democracy. This preemptive impunity made Trump seem unanswerable to the discipline of his party, the impeachment powers of the House and Senate, the punishment of the courts, or the impugning of the liberal media. It sabotaged as well attempts by journalists and pundits to use fact-checking to disqualify his public pronouncements.

The fact that they based the grant of preemptive impunity on their extra-constitutional sovereign power did not impede the members of these “We the People” assemblies from efforts to gain political control of legislatures in states across the country. They also used social media to organize street protests, to circulate threats to “primary” elected Republican officials in Washington, DC, and to perpetrate related forms of symbolic and actual aggression on anyone who failed to recognize the higher authority of their constituent power. In retrospect it is difficult not to see that these populist assemblies were training grounds for the protesters who gathered outside the state capitols in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and other “battleground states,” chanting “Stop the Steal!” and issuing demands that their state governors, judges, and members of the House of Representatives and US Senate take action to reverse the punitive results of the 2020 election (Gabriel and Saul 2021).

President Trump carried out the transfer of power back to “you, the American People” in an actually existing historic action on February 18, 2017, when he traveled from Washington, DC, to hold the first of these “We the People” assemblies in Melbourne, Florida. Midway through the Florida meeting an anonymous member of the assembly acknowledged the people's part in receiving this transfer of power when he stepped up to the podium and said, “Mr. President, thank you sir. We the people, our movement is the reason why our President of the United States is standing here in front of us today” (Trump 2017f). At this assembly and the close to two hundred rally-assemblies that followed, Trump purported to enact the sovereign power of the people on whose authority and as whose voice he governed.

Because Trump had not yet faced any major challenge in Washington, DC, he wanted the Florida assembly's acclaim rather than its preemptive authority. Trump could do without a rally-assembly's surplus constituent power as long as Attorney General Jeff Sessions (and later William Barr), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy agreed to interpret existing rules, norms, and constitutional statutes from a point of view that did not pose a threat to Trump's aberrant governmentality. The first constituent assembly Trump convoked to acquire preemptive impunity took place in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 22, 2017, ten days after the presidential statements he issued about events that took place in Charlottesville generated a controversy that led the entire Washington, DC, political establishment to distance themselves.

Charlottesville-Phoenix: The Unauthorized Authority of White Supremacism

Donald Trump may be the first president who aroused in a significant bloc of the American electorate the collective desire to unseat him even before he took up the office of president(Remnick 2016; McManus 2018). Victorious in the Electoral College, Trump received three million fewer votes in the 2016 election than Hillary Clinton. From the moment the election results became official, pundits and political opponents deliberated over the most effective stratagems for his removal (Fallows 2016; Winecoff 2016; Toobin 2018; Levits 2021).

The danger Trump's election posed for American liberal democracy required that his term in office be accompanied by the open-ended threat of impeachment that functioned as a liberal democratic surplus to compensate for the perceived democratic deficit that resulted from Trump's election. By promising to mend the constitutional statutes and governmental rules that Trump took delight in violating, the specter of Trump's impeachment exerted a paradoxically reparative influence that made additional punitive measures seem unnecessary. The ongoingness of the threat of impeachment attested to the fear that Trump's presidency exceeded the jurisdiction of American liberal democracy—as did the constituent power of the populist movement that facilitated this excess. Ironically, the unceasing threat of impeachment solidified Trump's condition of preemptive impunity by proleptically rectifying whatever damage he might do to American liberal democracy.

During the first two hundred days of Trump's tenure as president, political commentators joined talk show hosts and late-night comics in casting as clownishly incompetent the failure of Trump and his appointees to understand the established rules and carry out the duties traditionally associated with their offices as the premise for an ongoing situation comedy.¹⁵ Individually and collectively these commentators needed to believe that the election installed a bright line segregating the serious responsibilities of the governing president from Trump the campaigner's reckless political tactics. This belief rendered them unwilling to countenance the notion, save through the psychic defense of satire, that Trump embodied the intentionality of an alternative America that he could “make great again” only by transgressing the norms, breaking the rules, and dismantling the institutions of American liberal democracy. Inasmuch as these comedians appealed to the rules and norms he transgressed, the political satires directed at Trump and members of his administration exerted a quasi-emendatory influence on the institutions he damaged (Hennefield 2017; McClennan 2017; Levitz 2021). However, after these comedians and pundits witnessed the events unfold on August 11–12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, their satiric accommodations of Trump's presidency devolved into an encompassing situation tragedy that threatened the entire socio-symbolic order with “utter, abject unraveling” (Berlant 2011: 6).¹⁶

The Unite the Right protest bore a family resemblance to a Trump rally but without the leader's presence. Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler organized the demonstration to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville's historic courthouse district, and the demonstrators drew on the emblems and costumes of white supremacism to buttress their protestations. At this mass protest, neo-Nazis chanting “Blood and soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” combined forces with white nationalists and polo-shirted members of the Ku Klux Klan waving Confederate flags while shouting “White lives matter.” Weapon-carrying members of paramilitary white nationalist movements provided both groups armed protection. Counter-protesting organizations included the National Council of Churches, Democratic Socialists of America, Revolutionary Communist Party, Redneck Revolt, the Industrial Workers of the World, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Anti-Racist Action. Some counter-protesters came armed. On August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., a self-identified white supremacist, rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring thirty-five other people (Wamsley 2017).

What went on in in Charlottesville made starkly evident the crisis in the nation's self-representation as an exemplary liberal democracy that Trump's white supremacist people's movement prompted. After such events, US presidents are typically expected to speak with the moral authority of the nation's conscience and offer a coherent representation of the ethical values uniting all Americans. However, the statement Donald Trump issued at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on August 12, 2017, was glaringly lacking in the needed provision of moral clarity. Trump's press statement began with a forthright condemnation that seemed clearly directed at the participants in the Unite the Right protest: “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Rather than concluding this condemnatory sentence after “violence,” however, Trump (2017d) added the phrase “on many sides.” This rider did not restrict the intended recipients of this censure to the Ku Klux Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and sundry additional cohorts of white supremacists participating in the Unite the Right protest but distributed Trump's denunciation to as yet unidentified counter-protesting persons and groups.

Apparently in response to the demand for moral clarity, Trump published a second statement on August 13, which he addressed to “anyone who acted criminally in this weekend's racist violence you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered. . . . Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans” (Trump 2017d). The next day Trump once again said he found fault “on many sides.” In a news conference at Trump Tower on August 15, President Trump insisted that there were “many fine people . . . on both sides” (Sitrin 2017).

The anarchic frontier violence that took place across the Charlottesville historic district had shadowed the nation from its settler-colonist inception into the present. Moreover, the “egregiously” racist events that took place Charlottesville were not substantively different from the white supremacist demonstrations that sprang up during Barack Obama's presidency and that pundits hurled into the nation's forgettable past. But Donald Trump did not consign Charlottesville to that past. Indeed, during his campaign for the presidency, Trump enjoined the forgotten white Americans in his movement to reenact in the present the lurid, racist scenarios from the nation's settler colonist past (Mitropoulos 2016; Pease 2020).

Marked by multiple, heterogeneous, often violent political antagonisms, Charlottesville made the contemporary political order appear to be a restoration of settler warfare. Which is to say that the events taking place in Charlottesville displayed political actors and activities who represented the limit to the applicability of American liberal democracy's basic norms of plurality, inclusivity, and tolerance. Arbiters of American liberal democracy customarily have applied the disqualifying descriptor “extremist” to these organizations. The hate-filled violence and bigotry these “extremist” gangs promoted had to be ousted from the precincts of legitimate political rivalries to safeguard the liberal norms of inclusivity and tolerance that were believed to be protective of the human rights of all members of a liberal democracy.

However, since a substantial segment of the protesters who took part in the demonstration were also members of the Make America Great Again movement, President Trump could not broadcast a blanket condemnation of the Unite the Right demonstration without numbering some “very fine people” in his core political constituency among the condemned. Moreover, President Trump could not banish these extremist groups from his movement without conforming to the liberal democratic norms that members of his movement were united in opposing. Organizers of Trump rallies and constituent assemblies did not routinely exclude members of these extremist groups. Indeed, every Trump rally, every Make America Great Again assembly, and every America First demonstration possessed the potential to become a version of the Charlottesville event. How could President Trump impose strict speech and behavior regulations on a white supremacist protest without jeopardizing the political viability of his movement? Trump's response to this question was at once unprecedented and certain to instigate moral panic.

Trump's critics represented the individuals and groups assembled in Charlottesville, with the notable exception of the counter-protesters, as “extremist” political actors unworthy of legitimate political standing within American liberal democracy. Trump strenuously condemned what he described as criminal acts of racist violence perpetrated by “criminals and thugs” but did not apply the exclusionary rule to white supremacist organizations. Tellingly, Trump replaced the qualifier “extremist” with “egregious” to distinguish members of these organizations who resorted to physical violence from those who did not. This distinction enabled Trump to recognize the political legitimacy of all the actors and activities at the Unite the Right demonstration. None of his condemnatory statements explicitly excluded members of the KKK or neo-Nazis or white nationalist militias from membership in the Make America Great Again movement, nor did he denounce them as “domestic terrorists.”

Rather than describing Charlottesville as having been overtaken by discredited political organizations, he represented the scene as structured in a primary antagonism setting those protesting the removal of the statue in an adversarial relationship with counter-protesters alongside sporadic, individualized agonisms of varying degrees of violence. Most importantly, Trump's indiscriminate assignment of the culpatory trait “egregious display of hatred and bigotry” to Antifa and Rednecks against Fascism as well as to neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan suggested that the injurious animosities that Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis directed against Black, Jewish, and other minoritized populations were morally equivalent to the campaign of brute force that Rednecks against Fascism members of Antifa mounted to protect these groups.

Trump's condemnation of the egregious display of white supremacist and white nationalist violence in the KKK and paramilitary organizations tacitly endorsed nonegregious, unmarked whiteness as the operative ideology and prevailing norm of US politics. He could condemn particular instantiations of white supremacist violence because whiteness did not need to assume this restricted expression to sustain its status as the normative condition of the American political system. What apologists of American liberal democracy cannot acknowledge and must foreclose from recognition is that white supremacism functions as the unmarked normative presupposition regulating liberal democratic productions of inclusivity and diversity (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1995; Rodr'guez 2020; Louie and Viladrich 2021; Issar 2021; Wiegman 1999). After Trump recognized ordinary, nonviolent white supremacy as a legitimate political stance embraced by some “very fine people . . . on both sides” of this political antagonism, white supremacism underwent a radical shift in its positionality from that of a particular ideology to the structuring matrix for the entire field of political contestation.

The pronouncements about the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in the three statements about Charlottesville that President Trump put out between August 12 and August 15 undermined the moral consensus that had united political factions on the right and left for more than eighty years (D. Clark 2017). Trump's failure to recognize any justiciable difference between neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen disgorging hate speech and those who opposed them provoked outrage across the political spectrum. The indignation was not restricted to news reporters, pundits, and political opponents. Republican colleagues whom Trump had come to trust were uncharacteristically forthright in their criticism. “We must be clear,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan cautioned. “White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.” To which nostrum Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added, “There are no good neo-Nazis” (Gambino 2017). In a widely circulated tweet, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president, offered a useful disambiguation of Trump's offensive phrase “many sides”: “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes” (Balz 2017). Nancy Pelosi and other leaders in the Democratic Party alluded to the remarks of Trump's Republican colleagues when they contemplated bringing impeachment procedures against him (L. Clark 2017; Siegel 2017).

Charlottesville opened a paradoxical space within the US political order wherein advocates of liberal democracy were required to mirror the exclusionary practices of their authoritarian and illiberal Other to sustain America's integrity as a pluralistic democratic order. The political establishment's exclusionary and intolerant response to the Unite the Right protest at Charlottesville revealed what might be described as American liberal democracy's illiberal underside. After Trump's press conference on Charlottesville, apologists for American liberal democracy could only maintain the norms and principles of liberal democracy by forswearing the Unite the Right protesters. However, their procedure of condemnation perforce violated liberal norms of tolerance and inclusivity. Upon entering this paradoxical space, Trump transgressed this procedure. His transgression assumed the form of rendering the principles of inclusivity and tolerance applicable to persons and groups that proponents of liberal democracy had declared “extremist,” hence illegitimate, political actors and organizations. Rather than shoring up the foundational liberal democratic norms of diversity and plurality, however, Trump's deployment of these acts of inclusion worked to undermine American liberal democracy from within. Throughout his tenure in office, President Trump governed the US political order by occupying this site of inherent transgression as the vantage from which he aspired to disconnect American democracy from quintessentially liberal principles and norms. More significantly, he represented the constituent power of the Make America Great Again movement as the authorizing power for this aspiration.

Because Trump's diktats on Charlottesville contradicted the consensus reached by representatives across the political spectrum, the guardians of liberal democracy were eager to construe what they found inappropriate in Trump's response to Charlottesville as the pretext for bringing Trump and his insurrectionary movement before the disciplinary authority of the liberal democratic consensus. Trump's adviser and speech writer, Stephen Bannon, who had a hand in crafting the president's August 12 press statement, said Trump's August 15 press conference was the “defining moment” in his presidency because he had taken sides with “his people” against the “braying mob of reporters” and the entire “liberal establishment they represented” (Swan 2017).

As we have seen, prior to Charlottesville the Make America Great Again movement's extra-constitutional authorizing power endowed President Trump's transgressive behavior with preemptive impunity. Trump's responses to the Charlottesville protest rally made publicly evident the self-division that had remained dormant since the Inauguration. During his initial seven months in office, Trump was able to obscure his primary commitment to an illiberal, white supremacist, populist movement by following the procedural rules of liberal democracy: he submitted policies to the House and Senate for approval, negotiated with senators and members of the House to secure passage of key pieces of legislation, appealed Supreme Court rulings on executive decisions. However, the statements Trump felt compelled to make about Charlottesville exposed the disparity between the president and the head of a white nationalist movement. At this moment of danger both Trump and the American people to whom he had handed the power to rule of the country were exposed to the punitive powers of liberal democracy. Charlottesville had rendered Trump's contradictory identifications spectacularly evident, and his political opponents were now eager to use constitutionally authorized powers to initiate impeachment hearings to remove President Trump from office and to disassemble the Make America Great Again movement.

Trump knew that his statements about Charlottesville would remain subject to nearly unanimous denunciation as long as liberal norms offered the sole criteria for their adjudication. Rather than continuing to subject his statements to liberal democracy's impeachment powers, Trump decided to call on the higher authority of the Real Americans in his movement. So, he arranged a rally/constituent assembly meeting for August 22, 2017, in the Phoenix, Arizona, Convention Center. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and paramilitary organizations might have seemed out of place in Charlottesville, Virginia, but Phoenix is in Maricopa County, Arizona, the location of the notorious tent-city jail that its designer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, described as a “concentration camp” for undocumented immigrants. Sheriff Joe's detention center had received accolades from the full gamut of ultra-right paramilitary and white supremacist groups, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan (Finnegan 2009; Oppenheim 2017). Despite the fact that Arpaio's illegal detention of persons suspected of being undocumented immigrants resulted in his July 2017 conviction for criminal contempt, Trump never missed an opportunity to extol Sheriff Joe's extralegal rounding up and incarceration of undocumented immigrants as exemplary stratagems for defending US borders.

The Washington, DC, political establishment and the mainstream media had already concluded that Trump's Charlottesville pronouncements rendered him signally unqualified to hold the office of president. However, when he traveled to the people's assembly in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump made clear his intention to recognize the higher authority of the Real American people to decide on the ethical and political status of his statements about Charlottesville. Earlier I mentioned that the investiture ceremony Trump added to his inauguration could not achieve completion until the American people to whom he gave back the power to rule retroactively used that power to make Trump the embodiment of their will. The alternative inauguration ceremony that took place at Phoenix on August 22 effectively “resolved” Trump's investiture crisis by enabling him to demonstrate quite publicly his primary investment in accomplishing the will of the people to whom he had transferred sovereign power on January 20. Upon taking part in this ceremony, the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center thereby revealed themselves as the mysterious source of the power he gave back to this constituency on Inauguration Day.

At his January 20 inauguration, Trump had conjured the Real American people in their absence. The American people who traveled to Phoenix on August 22 became reflexively aware of themselves as the people whose enactments could decide the future of Trump's presidency—and the Make America Great Again movement. At Phoenix, Trump was retroactively empowered to deliver his pronouncements about Charlottesville by the people to whom he had given back this power at his official inaugural ceremony and from whom he now needed authorization to continue to exercise the American people's power to rule the nation.

The event that this assemblage co-enacted with Trump at Phoenix on August 22 thereby actualized Trump's inauguration as the Make America Great Again Movement's usurper-president. This inauguration ceremony was divided into three scenarios. The initial scenario began when the Phoenix assemblage mutated into a continuation of the Charlottesville Unite the Right demonstration, but with the protest headed by President Trump himself this time and directed against the liberal elite media's condemnation of President Trump's statements about Charlottesville. Trump fomented this transfiguration when he repeated the Charlottesville statements that he had originally enunciated as president but delivered in Phoenix as the voice of this We the People assembly's outrage at the mainstream media's response.

Members of the news media who flocked to the Convention Center brought cameras to record what they expected would be Trump's self-incriminating affirmation of his earlier statements within a setting that would expose his supporters in Phoenix as morally discreditable members of the extreme Right. The press wanted to turn the event into an instructive exposé of the extremist and illiberal behaviors that must be excluded from American liberal democracy to remedy the defects Trump added to it.

Trump did not behave as expected. He neither apologized for the equivocations in his earlier pronouncements nor clarified what he meant to say nor offered a revision of his three earlier official statements. In place of these expected scenarios, Trump opened his remarks about Charlottesville with a belligerent encore of his August 12 response to the Unite the Right protest. In place of speaking as the president, however, he spoke as the collective voice of the Phoenix assembly: “And tonight, this entire arena stands united in forceful condemnation of the thugs who perpetrate hatred and violence.”

The mainstream media had rebuked Trump for the moral equivalence he adduced between racists and antiracists. When Trump assumed the assembled people's voice of moral indignation, he did so to draw a political equivalence between the liberal media's unanimously intolerant response to his statements about Charlottesville and the “hatred and violence” they condemned. He then identified the reporters from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post covering the event as the proximate referents for the “thugs who perpetrate hatred and violence.”

Trump did not propound this equivalence as a form of self-defense. He denigrated the perspective from which the mainstream press was prepared to cover the Phoenix meeting as itself indistinguishable from the bigotry exhibited on “many sides” at Charlottesville. To let the “dishonest media” feel the specular effects of the assembly's outrage at the perspective the press had imposed, Trump enjoined his addressees to cast their antagonistic gaze at the reporters’ cameras. As they returned the press's gaze, the people dispossessed the press of the power to represent the event from the press's point of view: “But the very dishonest media, those people right up there with all the cameras (BOOING). . . . So the—and I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories . . . I'm telling you folks, look, look, I know these people probably better than anybody” (Trump 2017c). As Trump shouted into this throng he became bodily interfused with their reciprocating vociferations and spoke as the force of their coalesced voices (Freud 1928). Throughout their interlocutory transactions with Trump, the participants in this event collectively acted out the nullification of the liberal principles informing the press perspective and took delight in the strike-down they cocreated with Trump. They questioned the liberal media's ability to represent, interpret, or explain the movement's values; they did not recognize the media as credible arbiters of Trump's political, cultural, or moral authority; and they regarded as hypocritical the liberal media's claims of neutrality and objective reporting. With each shout of disapproval, this assembly authorized what Trump said through their deauthorization of the press's impugning and the political establishment's calls for impeachment. They joined Trump in taking obscene transgressive enjoyment, what Jacques Lacan calls “jouissance,” in the press corps's growing vexation at this coup de force exempting him from punitive measures (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008; Jutel 2017).

After orchestrating this antagonistic response to the liberal media's perspective, Trump proceeded to the portion of the inauguration ceremony in which he asked the Phoenix constituent assembly to decide on the aptness of his Charlottesville pronouncements. This second scenario in the people's inauguration ceremony began with a speech-event that made legible the self-doubling that Trump's investiture crisis precipitated. Rather than repeating the morally offensive statements as the US president who said them, however, Trump, as if standing beside that person (in what I am tempted to describe as an out-of-Second-Body experience), delivered verbatim recitations of the contested passages from all three of the president's declarations about Charlottesville as if these speech acts were originally uttered by someone other than himself: “So here is my first statement when I heard about Charlottesville. So here's what I said, really fast, here's what I said on Saturday: ‘We're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia’—this is me speaking. ‘We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.’ That's me speaking on Saturday” (Trump 2017c). Trump's virtuoso double-voiced performance effected an asymmetrical presentation of the two personae he felt compelled to take up when he first heard about Charlottesville: The persona who said, “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” is the figure who was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, and who was summoned on August 12 by the moral responsibility and solemn obligations attendant to the Office of the President to condemn the violently hateful activities unfolding in Charlottesville. However, the persons who said, “That's me speaking on Saturday. Right after the event,” is the usurper-president (the president that is not one) who cannot identify with the official statements of the president without the loss of identification with the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center. The latter figure cannot successfully usurp the Office of the President until the segment of American people before whom Trump is now reciting these official presidential announcements in the Phoenix Convention Center spontaneously acclaim his power to divest these utterances of their connection to the obligations and responsibilities inherent in the Office of the President and retroactively infuse these utterances with the people's sovereign acclamatory power.

The indexical phrases “So here is my first statement” and “So here's what I said, really fast, here's what I said on Saturday” interject a disparity between the presidential “We” that enunciated the sentences “We're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia” and “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” and the person who is citing these phrases in the here and now. When he appends the deictic tags “this is me speaking” and “that's me speaking” to the preceding sentences, Trump divests the “I” addressing the Phoenix assemblage viva voce from the presidential “me” that “I” was obliged to impersonate when “I” delivered “this” pro forma presidential statement of concern (“We're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia”) and “that” pro forma presidential condemnation (“We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence”). The “I” that emerges fully divested of officious presidential obligations is wholly invested in the people who are acclaiming these words as felicitous expressions of their will. This newly emanated “I” who gives expression to the sovereign enunciative instantiation of the people's power is the usurper-president whom the people's acclamatory sovereign voice now inaugurates.

Throughout this opening scene Trump divided the audience of this virtuoso performance into primary interlocutor-addressees and secondary witness-addressees. The primary addressees were comprised of the Phoenix interlocutors whom Trump recognized as the extra-constitutional sovereign voice endowed with the people's constituent power to decide on two questions: (1) whether his official condemnations of the Charlottesville bigotry conformed to the proprieties vested in the Office of the President; and (2) whether the liberal mainstream media and the political establishment should have been satisfied with these official condemnations. The primary addressee-interlocutors would also include the participants in the Unite the Right protest at Charlottesville, who were the initial targets of his pro forma presidential condemnations as well as all the members of the Make America Great Again movement whose voices Trump and the members of the Phoenix assembly conjointly channel. The secondary witness-addressees include the press recording this spectacle and the sundry local, national, and international audiences taking in, with varying degrees of apprehension, Trump's usage of liberal formalities as vehicles for substantively illiberal and white supremacist populist disruptions.

In the third scene of this contraband inauguration ceremony, Trump disclosed that the official statements he made as president could not acquire the status of felicitous or legitimate speech acts as he initially said them because they were accompanied by an ongoing and simultaneous impeachment from members of the press and the political establishment who found them infelicitous responses to what took place in Charlottesville: “So I'm condemning [sic] the strongest, possible terms, ‘egregious display,’ ‘hatred, bigotry and violence.’ OK, I think I can't do much better, right? OK. But they didn't want to put this on. They had it on initially, but then one day he talked (ph)—he didn't say it fast enough. He didn't do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist. It took a day (BOOING)” (Trump 2017c). Now it should be noted that the speaker enunciating the utterance “So I'm condemning the strongest, possible terms, ‘egregious display,’ ‘hatred, bigotry and violence’ ” is different from either the figure of the president or the substance of what “that's me speaking on Saturday” previously said about Charlottesville when impersonating the office of president. The figure who repeats these lines viva voce before the segment of the American people whose retroactive sovereign will he purports to incarnate is Donald Trump the usurper-president. He required the people's retroactive approbation because every one of the speech acts Trump uttered as “this is me speaking” while impersonating the president underwent ongoing and simultaneous impeachment (“he didn't say it fast enough. He didn't do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist. It took a day”) as he uttered them and necessitated the anterior supplement of the American people's constituent power to retroactively appropriate these utterances as expressions of their will and thereby grant him preemptive impunity for enunciating them.

Notice, however, that the phrases “egregious display” and “hatred, bigotry and violence,” which Trump initially pronounced as president, have now become newly potentiated. Since the press who formerly criticized the efficacy of these phrases are also present in the Convention Center, these phrases become freshly activated as sovereign speech acts uttered by the “I” who has appropriated the president's phrases here and now to denounce the press's ongoing injurious “bigotry.” However, the “I” who now utters these phrases to express the will of a people united in unambiguous condemnation of the press's “egregious display [of] hatred, bigotry and violence” is no longer impersonating the president. This I, who is invested in speaking and being spoken by the people's outraged indignation at the liberal elite, is the enunciative agency of their newly inaugurated usurper-president.

At his January 20, 2017, inauguration, Trump hailed the people in his movement as a nation-making force that exceeded the authority of the constituted order. However, insofar as the people to whom he gave back this power assumed a merely virtual presence, this power stayed latent in the Washington, DC, alternative investiture ceremony. The people who assembled in Phoenix on August 22 actuated this power by effecting two indissolubly related outcomes. The Phoenix people “resolved” Trump's investiture crisis; they did so by inaugurating Trump as a leader vested in primarily serving as the expressive agency of their nation-making power. The supererogatory inauguration ceremony Trump cocreated with the Phoenix assembly thereby imparted to him the Make America Great Again movement's sovereign power to usurp the presidency and occupy that office as their vox populi. Upon being bodily taken up by the people's acclamatory voice, Trump, who previously had uttered the statements about Charlottesville in his office as the US president, now spoke them as the incarnation of the voice of the Make America Great Again movement. Trump therewith and thereafter dedicated the power and authority of that office to the work of enacting the sovereign will of the Make America Great Again people.

The inauguration ceremony the Make American Great Again movement enacted at Phoenix achieved the interrelated objectives of potentiating the sovereign power Trump had given back to the Real American people at his inauguration ceremony, authorizing Trump's Charlottesville statements as the expression of the Forgotten American People's will, decoupling the movement from the jurisdiction of American liberal democracy, and inaugurating Trump as usurper-president of the Make America Great Again movement. They demonstrated the efficacy of this power by rejecting the judgment of the press, overruling the House's charges of impeachment, and deauthorizing the Senate's power to remove him from office. The People's preemptive powers, which accompanied the president like a djinni throughout the remaining three years, three months, and fifteen days of his tenure as president, found its extralegal constituent powers confronted with a potentially lethal threat on November 5, 2020, when President Trump sounded the alarm that at polling stations throughout the United States large-scale and centrally organized electoral fraud had happened, was happening, and that, without an intervention, Joseph R. Biden. Jr. would illegally be declared president-elect of the United States. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us” (Trump 2020).

Time in the Après-Coup

Numerous commentators have cogently analyzed the historical, political, and psychosocial significance of the January 6 insurrection and the part Trump's Save America rally at the Ellipse played in inciting it. However, in keeping with the restricted focus of the trajectory of these remarks I want, by way of conclusion, to explain briefly the part Birtherism played in Trump's effort to persuade Vice President Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College votes that made official Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election as the forty-sixth president of the United States.

When Trump asserted, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he put into place the preconditions for the production of what Brian Massumi (2015a) calls an “affective fact.” For Trump's supporters, the threatened reality of the state of affairs referenced in the alarum “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us” felt so superlatively real that it translated into a certainty about the election even in the absence of actual grounding for it in observable facts. The threat conveyed in the warning “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us” overlays its own conditional determination on the objective situation through the mechanism of alarm that makes the threatening and the objective coexist. If the threat does not materialize, it still always would have if it could have. This would have been voter fraud if it could have been. Rather than referential truth value, Trump's alert possessed performative threat value (Massumi 2015a). The measure of its factuality pertained to the immediacy of response to the threat it triggered. More than any correspondence with the semantic content of observable facts, it was the performed commensurability of the alert to the action it triggered—the inception of a series of actions that culminated in the January 6 insurrection—that qualified the alarum's accuracy.¹⁷

Following their reception of this alarmingly affecting factual matter, the Birthers in Trump's movement revised their understanding of Trump's decertification of the citizenship rights of the first African American president to entail the disenfranchisement of every African American voter. In response they extended Birtherism's provenance to encompass all African Americans, who, by virtue of their African heritage, lacked the identity credentials required to make them legitimate voters in an American election. Viewed from a Birther's perspective, the votes of African American and “always already” illegal immigrants could not be counted as equal to those of Trump's electorate without “diluting” or “polluting” the ballots of white voters. It is because he received an even greater number of votes than he had in 2016 that Trump says he won the 2020 election by a landslide (Chalfant and Samuels 2020).

Trump based this claim on Birtherism's aspiration to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans on the basis of race and heritage. For the Americans who remade themselves in the image of Trump's settler-nationalist alternative to liberal democracy, only Make America Great Again votes count. In Trump's America to be white is to perform Americanness. As Cheryl Harris (1993) has explained, whiteness alone endows an individual with the dispossessive power of birthright citizenship to exclude or render natural the condition of forced noncitizenship. Black people and migrants cannot belong to the America over whom the Real American People have the birthright to sole ownership; it follows that they cannot vote in the country to which they do not belong. Trumpists who went to polling stations to decertify legally cast Black votes on November 8, 2020, were exercising the power of whiteness to Make America Great Again. By this logic, the disenfranchisement of Black voters is a nation-making event.

However, Trump's contestation of election results was not based simply on Birtherism's aspirational ideals. It was built on the infrastructure of an entrenched culture of minority rule buttressed by an insurrectionary populist movement whose members considered the 2020 election results a theft of their country. Trump based his claim that the election was stolen on the fact that Republican state legislatures in the swing states he won in 2016 had purged voter rolls, passed “use it or lose it” right to vote laws, authorized retroactive signature checks, reduced or eliminated ballot boxes and drive-in registration sites, and enacted other voter suppression legislation that supposedly should have made it impossible for him to lose the 2020 election (Serwer 2020).

Trump supporters who participated in the communication of Trump's affective facts trafficked in lurid spectacles of trucks dumping votes numbering in the millions cast by dead (in the civil and literal sense) Black people and other aliens. This illegal vote-counting invariably took place under the shield of darkness and occurred only within the rat-infested, unsupervised polling stations in cities with sizable African American populations—specifically Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia—within the battleground states that Trump lost. To right this wrong, Trump's legal team asked various courts to invalidate millions of Black and undocumented immigrant votes and extend his term in office. When the courts did not arrive at that verdict, Trump enjoined the paramilitary wing of his movement to act upon the event prefigured in the alternative investiture ceremony he had added to his official inauguration.

On January 20, 2017, Trump the Usurper, whose 2016 election resulted from a nonviolent insurrectionary movement, stated that he was “transferring [sovereign] power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the American People” (Trump 2017a; Deans 2018). In a December 2, 2020, YouTube video President Trump initiated a much more grandiose version of the Unite the Right demonstration that had taken place at Charlottesville by urging members of the Make America Great Again movement from across the United States to gather in full movement regalia in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2022, the day the joint session of Congress was to officially certify Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the forty-sixth president. On January 6, the “American People” to whom he had transferred this power on January 20, 2017, traveled to Washington, DC, as an insurrectionary movement that would use whatever force necessary to preempt the president-elect from taking back this power (O'Toole 2020).

• • • •

“Stop the coup!” might have been—and in some quarters was—taken as a realistic call to action during the early morning hours of November 9, 2016. Now, however, in the wake of Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party, revivification of settler-colonist agents and events, sabotaging of the US administrative state apparatus, hollowing out of key institutions of the liberal international order, shattering bedrock principles of the US political system (equality under the law; impartial and Independent courts and tribunals; separation of church and state; the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property; checks on the power of each branch of government), insurrectionary pillaging of the Capitol, what remains of the Trump event feels somehow more real than the reality of Biden's presidency (Pease 2021). Without a planetary reckoning with the settler-imperial specters of American liberal democracy, time in the après-coup will belong to its revenants.

Notes

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