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Four Years, Two months Ago
April, 2020: Almost four years to the day that Hope Hicks, former Communications Director in the Trump White House arrived at Manhattan Criminal Court to testify in the “hush money trial,” Ms. Hicks returned to the White House after a hiatus to help redirect the Trump candidacy which was foundering.
The following is an essay I composed in April of 2020, about the same time during the runup to a Presidential Election.
We are entering the Hope Hicks Zeitgeist
It’s not about politics, it’s about timing the message and maintaining the business model. Let’s face it: all politicians have egos. What politicians rarely possess is a viable business model.
Enter Hope Hicks.
Democrats practice what-if aspirational driven policies like “Medicare for All.” The “rest of us” do not care “about that.” “We” need a model for “getting things done”: a business model.
Trump and a complicit party practice hype, image mongering and a bleary-eyes positivism bordering on self-delusion.
‘Trump qua message’ is effective because this latter paradigm is the side effect of post-capitalist liberalism. We have arrived at a societal version of self-delusion and solipsism. Trump just needs to “show up” and the rest is accepted. Stunning? Not really, if one pauses and…
