Trump Time, Prophetic Time and the Time of the Lost Cause

Abstract

SH: During the COVID-19 lockdown, Emily; her husband, Richard Cone; and I have been streaming TV series and then discussing the episodes via FaceTime three times a week. We’ve watched a variety of historically situated and grimly evocative series, among them Babylon Berlin, Giri/Haji, Small Axe and The Wire. Possibly under their influence, our ongoing side conversations about Trump’s latest atrocity took a sharp turn in early October 2020, when Emily discovered Trump time. This turn, for me, opened up the possibility of our thinking more seriously about the by-now clichéd notion that Trump and his followers live in an alternate reality. It allowed for shifting the emphasis from alternate-as-in-false to reality-as-in-actual, that is, as an inhabited and sensible world. So I want to begin our conversation by asking Emily, What is Trump time?