The Unbearable Lightness of Being Donald Trump
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
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Are we sure Donald Trump really exists?
I mean, I know he exists as a corpulent land mass, aspirating Big Macs while hate-watching cable news. There was once a baby that was given the name Donald Jay Trump, and he grew into a man large enough to test the strength of a chair. As a body attached to the identity Donald Trump, he exists, and formidably so. To look at him is to marvel that he has not yet dropped dead of a heart attack while climbing the stairs to Marine One. Likewise it is to marvel, if not marvelous, that he was President at all. It happened, repeatedly, and in front of the televised proxies of our eyes. He lumbered up those stairs into that helicopter as the whole-ass President of the United States of the actual, gosh darn America.
But if you inquired as to the health of the body called Donald Trump, you’ll get an answer that has nothing to do with reality. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Dr. Harold Bornstein, a gastroenterologist from Lenox Hospital in New York, wrote1 in 2015. Trump self-reports his weight at 215, which, at 6’3”, would make him roughly the same dimensions as Baltimore Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson, pictured below.
I have seen few athletes like Gunnar Henderson. He runs not just as fast as he can but as if he’s thrilled to see if he can go even faster. He is so present in his own body that he nearly glows. His substance coheres with his appearance. You can tell Gunnar Henderson is real by the way he stretches a single into a double, but to look at Donald Trump is to be forced to believe not the substance of him, of which there is at once both too much and nothing, nor the appearance, but the artifice.
Is Donald Trump all curtain, no wizard? In 2020, Frank Spring smartly observed that his re-election campaign was “a ghastly Potemkin village erected to keep Trump happy.” Now his kin have taken over the Republican National Committee and dismantled voter outreach offices in favor of more bunting, more pomp, given the circumstance. Has anyone followed up to see if they’re filling orders for his golden Trump basketball shoes? Did they even bother to print words in the Trump bible? If Republican members of congress succeed in renaming Dulles the “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” will the airplanes disappear?
The surest way to know something doesn’t exist is for Donald Trump to say it does. Trump, who protested the removal of Confederate monuments that misrepresented our history, has a plaque at his Northern Virginia Trump National Golf Club commemorating a Civil War battle that never happened. When told that historians disputed the entirety of his claim, Trump responded, “How would they know? Were they there?” It is with some surprise, then, that I accept the reality that the golf course exists at all and is, in fact, located in Northern Virginia.
Truth Social, Donald Trump’s anti-social media platform that recently went public, exists only as the misrepresentation of a publicly traded social media company. It brings in only about $3 million a year, less than the average McDonald’s franchise makes annually, against $58 million in costs. As Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway agreed on a recent episode of their podcast The Pivot, this is not a real business.
And yet. Trump was forced to put up a nine-figure bond after he lost a civil fraud trial that dismantled his artifices, but no bank would lend him the money. It’s probably really hard to get a bank loan after you lose a trial where you’ve been shown to have repeatedly lied to banks about loans. So, in swoops a Republican billionaire who is the largest institutional investor in a magic carpet called a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
A SPAC is a bank account that does an IPO in order to acquire a company that, after merging with the SPAC, becomes a publicly traded company without the bother of the due diligence and transparent process of an IPO. People call SPACs “blank check companies,” and all of a sudden, Donald Trump was a real billionaire, at least on paper, and he could pay his bond.
Either you believe that Donald Trump was just bailed out in front of everyone, or you can believe that the smart money thinks that Trump Media (ticker symbol: DJT) which owns Truth Social is a valid company worth as much as Alaska Airlines. Except neither the substance or the appearance matter when it comes to Donald Trump.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looked at Trump Media’s 8-K, in which the company said it wouldn’t be using “active user accounts including monthly and daily active users” as key operating metrics, and what’s more it would not promise ever to release those numbers. In other words, their official, legally binding promise to prospective investors is that they should never count on Trump Media to be a real company. Concluded Marshall, “This company has no value.”
Actually, it does, except not to anyone but Donald Trump. DJT is now a meme stock that doesn’t even offer bibles as dividends. But it does provide a legal artifice for Trump to go into deal mode as he pays his various legal teams. Want a good trade deal from a second Trump presidency? All you gotta do is buy shares in Trump’s Potyemkin media company. Want to make sure we’ll stop sending weapons to Ukraine? I’m sure someone at the bank can exchange those rubles for shares in DJT.
Of course Trump’s phony-baloney social media company has become a meme stock. Donald Trump is a meme candidate, becoming sentient only after corrupting the substance and denying the appearance of things. Donald Trump is just the artifice.
Milan Kundera never resolves the essential question posed by The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Do we choose the burdens of love and attachment and accept being weighted down or do we float above it all, untethered to notions of meaning in life? This is the titular unbearable lightness of being, when we are living for ephemeral beauty.
Or in Trump’s case, living a life in which the ephemeral is a never-ending string of golden facades, propped up on the riverbank as we drift by, admiring his accomplishments. Donald Trump is vulnerable only as flesh bound by juries and judges. As a figment he creates, he achieves his highest form: utter balderdash.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
Further Reading
As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There
The Trump Diet
Keep Hope Alive
America's Last Bellwether
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He later claimed that Trump dictated the letter: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/02/607638733/doctor-trump-dictated-letter-attesting-to-his-extraordinary-health
Banger.