<nettime> Judith Butler: Why Donald Trump will never admit defeat

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/donald-trump-election-defeat-covid-19-deaths


Why Donald Trump will never admit defeat
Judith Butler, The Guardian, Wed 20 Jan 2021


Whether it is deaths from Covid-19 or his own election defeat, admitting 
loss is something Trump finds impossible to do

It could be considered a small thing that Trump can neither meet with 
Biden nor acknowledge that he has lost the election to him. But what if 
the refusal to acknowledge loss is bound up with the path of destruction 
we call Trump’s exit route? Why is it so hard to lose? The question has 
at least two meanings in these times. So many of us are losing people to 
Covid-19, or fearing death for ourselves or others. All of us are living 
in relation to ambient illness and death, whether or not we have a name 
for that sense of the atmosphere. Death and illness are quite literally 
in the air. And yet, it is unclear how to name or fathom these losses, 
and the resistance of Trump to public mourning has drawn from, and 
intensified, a masculinist refusal to mourn that is bound up with 
nationalist pride and even white supremacy. The Trumpists tend not to 
grieve openly pandemic deaths. They have conventionally rejected the 
numbers as exaggerated (“fake news!”) or defied the threat of death with 
their gatherings and maskless marauding through the public spaces, most 
recently in their spectacle of thuggery in the US Capitol in animal 
costumes. Trump never acknowledged the losses the US has suffered, and 
had no inclination or capacity to offer condolences. When the losses 
were referenced, they were not so bad, the curve was flattening, the 
pandemic would be short, it was not his fault, it was China’s fault. 
What people need, he claimed, was to get back to work because they were 
“dying” at home, by which he meant only that they were driven crazy by 
domestic confinement.

If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is 
one

Trump’s inability to acknowledge his election loss is related to his 
inability to acknowledge and mourn public losses from the pandemic, but 
also his destructive itinerary. If he were to have openly acknowledged 
his electoral loss, then he would be someone who loses. He is just not 
the kind of guy who loses, and if he does, then someone took what was 
rightfully his. But there is a further twist. The white supremacists who 
stormed the Capitol are also convinced not only that the elections were 
stolen, but their country as well, that they are being “replaced” by 
black and brown communities, by Jews, and their racism fights against 
the idea that they are being asked to lose their idea of white 
entitlement and supremacy. To this end, they transport themselves back 
in time to become Confederate soldiers, they occupy fantasy figures on 
video games with superhuman powers, they dress as animals and bear guns 
openly, reliving the “wild west” and its genocide of indigenous peoples. 
They also understand themselves as “the people” and “the nation” which 
is why they are still in some shock as they are arrested for felonies. 
How could this be trespass or sedition or conspiracy if they were only 
reclaiming “their house”? How could this be a crime if the president 
asked them to undertake these acts? Those who sought to find, kill or 
kidnap elected officials had clearly violent plans, ones well-documented 
on their various internet sites and unheeded by complicitous police 
officials. And the attack on police and even the death by crushing of 
one of their own, Rosanne Boyland, went unheeded in the excitement of 
their lethal rampage.

And it may also be that Trump’s own final killing spree, taking the 
lives of 13 people since federal executions resumed in July 2020, is 
another example of the readiness to kill that marks these final days. 
Where there is a ready-made refusal to acknowledge the loss of lives, 
killing presumably becomes easier. These lives are not quite grasped as 
lives, and their loss does not really count as significant. In this way, 
Trump’s final days, including the Capitol assault, are a violent 
rejoinder to Black Lives Matter. Globally, millions took to the streets 
to oppose in outrage police taking of black lives with impunity, forming 
a movement that exposed historical and systemic racism, and opposed the 
ease with which police and prisons destroy black lives. That movement 
continues to pose a global threat to white supremacy, and the reaction 
has been violent and vile. The supremacists do not want to lose their 
supremacy, even though they have already lost it and continue to lose it 
as movements for racial justice continue to achieve their aims. Trump’s 
loss is as unthinkable as their own, and this is doubtless one of the 
ties that bind them to his delusive conviction of a stolen election.

The result is a form of destructive rage that does not even bother to 
offer a moral alibi

Before the assault on the Capitol, it was surely worrisome or even 
humorous that Trump manically sought to nullify his losses by any means 
possible. But this makes sense if we think about a general inability to 
acknowledge loss, an acknowledgment, Freud tells us, that is the work of 
mourning. To mourn, though, there has to be a way to mark that loss, a 
way to communicate and register it and, in this sense, it requires 
communication and at least the potential of public assent. The formula 
goes something like this: I cannot live in a world in which the object I 
value is lost, or I cannot be the person who has lost what I value. I 
will destroy the world that reflects back to me that I have lost, or I 
will leave that world through recourse to fantasy. This form of denial 
would rather destroy reality, to hallucinate a preferred reality, than 
register the verdict of loss that reality has to deliver. The result is 
a form of destructive rage that does not even bother to offer a moral 
alibi. The issue is made clear in the rash of death sentences, 
state-sanctioned murders, but also the waving away of the numbers of 
those who have died of Covid-19, especially those numbers that show us 
communities of color are most adversely affected, including the 
indigenous populations of this land who are hardest hit. It makes cruel 
sense that Trump would make a deal in his final days in office that 
destroys sacred sites in Arizona to boost the production of copper at 
the very time that the failure of public policy has surely increased the 
death toll for those communities.
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White supremacy has now resumed an open place in US politics, and 
Trumpism will outlast Trump, and continue to assume new forms. White 
supremacy is a political fantasy, but also a historical reality. It can 
be understood in part as a refusal to grieve the loss of white supremacy 
that the movement for black lives and the ideals of racial justice 
rightly demand. So it’s time for the racists to grieve that loss, but it 
is doubtful that they will. They know that what they imagine to be their 
natural right can be taken away, is being taken away, and the struggle 
they are waging is historical. They will live out their fantasy until 
historical reality checks them. Let us hope that the Biden rejoinder is 
not to intensify the police state for this purpose. That would be a 
cruel irony.



Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot professor in the department of 
comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the 
University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is The Force of 
Nonviolence (Verso)
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