It's Still Trump and How We Should Look at Him

(a development from the quip “How Should We Look at Trump”)

Remember how we discussed abstracting Trump from the person and focusing on the attributes around him? That article was for the "apolitical"—the expert who can keep a cool mind when it comes to Trump. But now, the question to ask is: how should we—the ones whose passions influence judgment, whose political knowledge comes filtered through the news, already tinged with ideology—look at Trump?

The "left" sees Trump as a rapist, a liar, and—recently—a dictator. Whether these claims are true or false, the "right" denies them outright, dismissing the scandals as "leftie bias" or government conspiracies. But what about the truth? Is he the criminal or the savior? The rapist or the holy man of the U.S.? The dictator or the liberator of those "shackled by the woke mob"?

Ah! If you think this is a question worth answering, then you've already fallen into the trap. This question of Trump’s nature or character—whether the scandals are valid or not—is the very ideological trap we've all fallen into. It’s not a genuine inquiry meant to give us a new perspective; it’s a rhetorical question, one we already know the answer to before even asking. The mere act of pondering it shows we've been captured by an ideology.

Have you ever tried confronting someone with the opposite ideology? A liberal debating an authoritarian, a progressive clashing with a conservative, or a Marxist squaring off against a capitalist? What usually happens? One side gains the upper hand and “wins” the argument, but no minds are changed. No matter how “open-minded” someone claims to be, few people truly step back and reconsider the opposing side’s points, no matter how factual or logical they may be.

Zizek gives a more detailed example of this in The Sublime Object of Ideology: imagine a real antisemite, an OG Nazi. Even if this Nazi meets a Jewish neighbor who is an absolute gem of a human being, the Nazi won’t reconsider his beliefs. Instead, he’ll twist that neighbor’s virtues into sins: “My Jewish neighbor,” the antisemite might think, “is only good to me because he wants to deceive me so he can push his evil Jewish agenda.” The antisemite takes the facts—the reality of his neighbor’s goodness—and weaves them into a narrative that reinforces his ideology. He transforms what is real into his reality.

Isn’t this exactly what the "left" and "right" do with Trump? The left twists Trump’s populist appeal—his affinity for the American working class—into cynicism: “He’s just exploiting them.” Meanwhile, the right takes formal charges against him and turns them into "leftist conspiracies." This is why facts alone can’t convince anyone. It’s not that people ignore the facts; they absorb them into their ideology, reshaping contradictions into evidence.

This explains why the normal “cure” for ideological bias—staying as objective and factual as possible—doesn’t work. The facts themselves aren’t necessarily cherry-picked or false; it’s how we interpret them. And by definition, there’s no such thing as an "objective" interpretation.

So, does this mean we should abstract ourselves from the person, the facts, and the events, as we suggested in the previous piece, "How Should We Look at Trump"?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. The situation is more nuanced than that.

Zizek’s answer, which I fully agree with, is to delve even deeper into subjectivity—not to leave it behind in pursuit of abstraction, but to confront it head-on. He calls this “confronting the Real of our desire.” In other words, instead of fixating on politics as events, data, or scandals, we should examine the psychology of politics—the genesis of our own ideologies. To truly understand the Trump phenomenon, we need to do what Husserl suggested in his First Philosophy lectures: embrace our subjectivity. Only then, can we go through the process of abstraction described in "How Should We look at Trump", since we now know what to identify and remove as part of our ideology during the process.

For Trump, we, the common people, should look at Trump and his character not to look at him, but through him at ourselves.