Bear with me. I promise that this will go somewhere.
Trumpery: a word from Middle English that denotes trickery or deception. This has its origin in the French word “trompe” which would now mean “cheat” and is used in the phrase “trompe l'oeil”, a style of painting which looks as real as a photograph, but isn’t – or sometimes something that at first looks like one thing but is in fact another. This stems from 700 years before Photoshop and AI simulations, whereas to know reality now means staying away from screens and developing our direct forms of awareness.
Trumpery also came to mean showy but worthless finery and, via the Collins English Dictionary, “foolish talk or actions” and “a useless article”. But it also has a secondary meaning, possibly related to the origins of trumpet and trombone, meaning an echoing tube, which also connects to the French use to denote an elephant’s trunk and that animal’s trumpeting call.
I wouldn’t want to insult that highly intelligent mammal with this comparison, but it does remind me of the expression “sound and fury”, borrowed by William Faulkner for his novel title because the opening character, Benjy, is an idiot who can only “moan” and “bellow”. It refers back to a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth where, when everything in his life is falling apart, he describes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
So, welcome to today’s world in which global politics is Trumpery, a tale told by an idiot in a media climate filled with fakes, both actual fakes and realities written off as fake news, surrounded by images which are false and computer-generated such that we can’t even trust ourselves to know what is real. And with a world leader whose most predictable trait is to be driven by whims and impulses that make him unpredictable and who bellows and moans. If only we had known it was all in his name. He did exactly what it said on the tin.
But maybe there is something deeper for us to engage with in this time of transition or transformation – if you are willing to embrace the notion that this is exactly what we are going through. What if the remainder of what we consider to be “reality” is similarly unreliable, a narrative that we have been given, a set of perceptual frameworks that make sense on the surface and at first glance appear to be fit for purpose as descriptors of the world, but in fact are not, What if our conventional worldview is itself a “trompe l'oeil”?
This is not at all a new notion. It has been present for thousands of years in Eastern religions as the concept of “Maya” – the world of illusion. It has been the temporary reality in more recent times for everyone who experimented with magic mushrooms or LSD. So what if we need to embrace Trump as someone who has arrived at a time when the very thing we need to learn is that reality is fluid, materially unreliable, and not to be trusted? What if he is a teacher, or at least we treat him as one?
We are already in a high-level polycrisis. Some of the individual crises within that cluster look increasingly close to criticality. “Liberation Day” could well have lit the fuse under the global economy and who knows how long the fuse is? My mental image of MAGA is a picture of the breadlines after 1929, but the economy is only one of the potential problems and the collective mindset of Western humanity is not yet adapted in a way that responds to such volatile complexities.
So, perhaps we need to learn, and learn fast. Maybe we need to let go of what we have thought so far in order to move to ways of thinking that are beyond the ones that have got us into this mess. Maybe we need to ask how many of those past mindsets are rooted in illusions, and how much our systems embed the dance of Maya. Maybe we need to look for the blessings that are available when the Trumpery is revealed for what it is. After all, what is in the one is in the whole, so blame is a distraction. So is the anger which drives us in turn to sound and fury. Maybe there is a better use for our energy.
Most of our collective mindsets were given to us, by our parents, our cultures, our education systems, and given constant media reinforcement. But has it struck you, as it has me, how often people are lately using the word “unprecedented”? What beliefs are you willing to question and let go of, if that is what it takes to adapt to unprecedented conditions? How radical and how urgent would those questions become if you thought that your life depended on it?
Just asking.