Read on Twitter
When I call things like this “cartoon politics,” some people interpret that as meaning that I think it’s not to be taken seriously, or that I think Trump and his supporters are dumb. I don’t. Media events and images that I see as engaging in cartoon politics are very serious,
and are, though posing as funny and outrageous, actually threatening democracy and the rule of law in the US and elsewhere. By this cartoon logic Trump essentially inhabits a universe of his own where the laws that apply to everyone else don’t apply to him
(he can shoot someone on 5th Ave, brag about grabbing women by the pussy with impunity). The media, politicians, citizens (all stakeholders of sorts) have let this happen, in part because it was funny, and in part because many stood to gain by it
(& the handwringing of those who didn’t was part of the joke – cartoon humor often is sadistic, and that's 'ok', because it is supposedly not real – except that, of course, it is). Social media have a big role here: they revolve around attention and crude entertainment (“lulz”),
and have allowed Trump to interact directly with other users, e.g. by inviting them to make memes of his tweets (“my button is bigger than yours”, “I’m a very stable genius”), and retweeting them.
This is not to say we can’t have jokes – everyone and everything, including politics, desperately needs jokes and play – but these “jokes” have ushered in a very real threat, and particularly very tangible white-supremacism and anti-democracy
that we’ve seen unleashed about as literal as it can get last Wednesday (and still it is also cartoonish, meme-able, “not who we are”). Now a 2nd impeachment is likely, the Twitter account is suspended, and Trump may have met a moment when laws could turn out to apply to him too.
Trump is both a symptom and a catalyst, someone who, like many others has discovered how to weaponize cartoon politics and social media to fire up strong emotions and mainstream a white-supremacist and anti-democratic agenda.
Media platforms like Twitter should have banned Trump’s peddling of white-supremacist rhetoric long before that, certainly since his leading the “birther movement” (which turned on pushing the false and racist claim that Obama wasn’t born in the US – which he of course is).
Twitter, and a few other media outlets have, for Trump been a constant podium from which to whip up his racist and seditious message. This was ill-masked most of the time, but it didn’t need to be very well-masked because the US has a centuries’-long tradition of this rhetoric,
enabled – there and globally – by a media landscape driven by hunger for spectacle, combined with a both-sides ethos that was deeply reluctant to understand his dog-whistles (“just jokes”, “banter”, “irony”) for what they are.
And of course driven by droves of people (not just avid Trump supporters) who vaguely agree with the dog-whistles and are happy not to think them through quite to the end of their racist implications (“Of course he can *ask* if Obama is born here?”).
Note on terminology: I use racist and white-supremacist when talking about Trump and his supporters, rather than fascist, even though many of his supporters in the Capitol are clearly neo-Nazis, because those terms show how long and clearly these are embedded in American history,
and how deeply rooted this coup is in US culture. White-supremacism is historically (and logically) anti-democratic. And all racist/nationalist movements from eugenicism to the Alt-Right have been deeply internationalist and transatlantic, and in communication with each other.
