Donald J. Trump's Storytelling, May 12–June 7, 2020; or, Can His Saying Make Things So?

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay examines President Donald J. Trump’s storytelling over twenty-seven days in spring 2020 in order to explore the ways in which his performances threatened to destroy the genre of nonfiction political narrative in the United States. The analysis of these twenty-seven days is framed by a Preface, written from the perspective of January 2021 after the attack on the US Capitol by those who believed Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election—an attack indicating that Trump had almost succeeded in destroying the genre. By the spring of 2020, Trump had all but eroded that genre’s foundations in referentiality, and his Republican supporters in Congress, in right-wing media, and in the electorate had allowed him to operate on the principle that “my saying makes things so.” The events of the spring of 2020, however, especially those accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the greatest resistance to that principle, because the virus was an extratextual reality that was indifferent to Trump’s rhetoric. The essay is itself an unfolding narrative, as it traces Trump’s storytelling about the pandemic, voting by mail, Barack Obama, and, toward the end of the period, about George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed. This thick description of Trump’s performances does not end with a definitive judgment about the fate of the genre of nonfiction political narrative, but instead offers insights into the nature and relentlessness of Trump’s attack on that genre that in turn shed light on his Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election.