Trump and Autobiography

Corporate Culture, Political Rhetoric, and Interpretation

Nicholas K. Mohlmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000416909
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Literature

The 1970s and 1980s heralded the rise of neoliberalism in United States culture, fundamentally reshaping life and work in the United States. Corporate culture increasingly penetrated other aspects of American life through popular press CEO autobiographies and management books that encouraged individuals to understand their lives in corporate terms. Propelled into the public eye by the publication of 1989's The Art of the Deal, ostensibly a CEO autobiography, Donald Trump has made a career out of reversing the autobiographical impulse, presenting an image of his life that meets his narrative needs. While many scholars have sought a political precedent for Trump's rise to power, this book argues that Trump's aesthetics and life production uniquely primed him for populist political success through their reliance on the tropes of popular corporate culture. Trump and Autobiography contextualizes Trump's autobiographical works as an extension of the popular corporate culture of the 1980s in order to examine how Trump constructs an image of himself that is indebted to the forms, genres, and mechanisms of corporate speech and narrative. Ultimately, this book suggests that Trump's appeal and resilience rest in his ability to signify as though he is a corporation, revealing the degree to which corporate culture has reshaped American society's interpretive processes.

1 Scary Beauty

Towards a Trumpian Aesthetics

As both a candidate for and a holder of the office of president of the United States, Donald Trump generated controversy with what he said as well as how he said it. Some statements were viewed and condemned as offensive, such as his assertion that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…they’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists, and some, I assume are good people” or his infamous boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything” (“Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women”). Other statements were objected to based on their truthfulness, such as Trump’s repeated, but unproven, claims that there is substantial voter fraud in the United States.¹ Even when the content of Trump’s remarks have been less controversial, his habits of speech have led to speculation about his mental acuity and fitness for office, with some statements, like his discussion of his uncle’s work on nuclear technology, reaching a certain meme status for their supposed incoherency (Mikkelson). We might say that Trump’s speech has come under fire both for its consistency and for its inconsistency; the ways it consistently marginalizes, prevaricates, and confounds; and how it inconsistently represents reality and breaks with the norms of American political speech in content and form. While one can certainly make convincing arguments that Trump’s actions as the head of the executive branch are authoritarian, even destructive, Trump’s speech across a range of modalities demands careful attention for the ways he uses it to subvert and manipulate the political and cultural processes that make his executive actions possible.

Unlike other presidential candidates who ran on the strength of their business acumen, like Ross Perot, Trump’s success came in part because he has spent much of his life constructing himself as a public figure with certain significations. Through media appearances, book publications, and television programs, Trump produced an image of himself and a narrative of his life that emphasized his extreme wealth and cutthroat business savvy. This image and narrative served a commercial purpose initially, deepening and cementing the connotations associated with Trump’s name, a name that became a commodity, marking buildings and products with the Trump brand. In the twenty-first century, Trump leveraged the symbolic capital he had accumulated in the twentieth century by taking to Twitter to push conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s place of birth and to opine on a wide range of political issues (Krieg). In doing so, Trump added to his brand’s signification political and digital dimensions that positioned him to pursue higher office. Thus, when Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States, he was already familiar and legible to an American audience. A key difference that allowed Trump to disrupt the Republican primary and ultimately assume the office of president is that Trump refused to act “presidential,” a sort of contortion of one’s public production of one’s self to meet an assumed set of norms for a president or presidential candidate’s behavior and speech. A common explanation provided for a sizeable voting population embracing a presidential candidate who rejected presidential norms was that voters who backed Trump wanted a disruptive candidate, someone who went against the status quo. In what follows, I would like to suggest that part of Trump’s appeal is not simply a rejection of presidential norms that entails an embrace of anything that signifies as anti-presidential, but rather a recognition and acceptance of another set of norms already deeply familiar to nearly all Americans: the forms and mechanisms of commercial corporate speech and identity.

We can see the mechanisms of corporate speech in the struggles Trump’s businessperson-as-candidate predecessor Mitt Romney faced in 2012. When Mitt Romney was running for president of the United States, his record as a businessperson received significant attention, positive and negative. As CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity firm, Romney oversaw the acquisition and reorganization of many corporations. As a result, Romney took fire both from Republican primary opponents and from Democrats for decisions that resulted in large layoffs.² Romney’s image as a slick corporate raider led former presidential candidate Ralph Nader to argue that Romney was, “essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual” (Nader). Given the 2010 Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, a decision that found that corporations count as legal persons whose free speech the first amendment of the Constitution protects, it is not surprising that corporate personhood and the fuzzy line between biological and legal people was on Nader’s mind. The press would even skewer Romney for his insistence to an Iowan interlocutor that “corporations are people, my friend” (Oliphant).

Political opponents used this statement to indict Romney along the same lines as Nader, suggesting the claim tied Romney to an embrace of the logic of corporate personhood laid out in Citizens United (Dwyer). However, Romney’s response to the protestors is both more nuanced and more illustrative of Romney’s actual relationship as a CEO to his firm. Romney’s insistence that corporations are people is a response to a protestor calling out that corporations should pay higher taxes. After Romney makes his famous remark, the protestor yells, “No they’re not!” to which Romney replies, “Of course they are, everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.” The protestors then jeer as Romney asks, “Where do you think it goes?” to which the protestors yell something like, “In their pockets.” As the protestors attempt to shout over Romney, Romney triumphantly declares, “Pockets? Pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend” (Sargent). Romney’s responses, while disingenuous and incomplete, indicate how he conceives of the corporation as a fictional entity. In Romney’s thinking, there is a distinction between the fictional person, the corporation, and those who participate in its assemblage, the “human beings,” like the workers and CEO who act and speak for and through the corporation. In this instance, Romney manipulates the metonymic relationship between the fictional, non-corporeal corporation and certain components of its assemblage, here people, to separate out one aspect of the corporation and assign that aspect agency. While Romney’s embrace of the image and affectations of a CEO lays the ground for Nader’s hyperbolic statement that Romney, in essence, is a corporation, Romney generally performed the role of a CEO by negotiating the relationship between CEO and firm in normative ways.

It is surprising, then, that while Romney was accused of being a corporation, Donald Trump, a businessperson who proudly stated in his declaration of candidacy for the presidency, “I’m a private company,” has generally avoided the same accusation (“Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech”). As an icon of individualism, scholars have placed Trump in several political genealogies. For instance, Trump’s populism hearkens back to the demagoguery of Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana, or Sidney Johnston Catts, the conspiracy-mongering Prohibition Party governor of Florida.³ At the same time, Trump’s attempt to translate business acumen into political power places him among the ranks of Herbert Hoover, Ross Perot, and, of course, Romney. In addition, commentators have attributed Trump’s total takeover of the Republican Party to everything from the ubiquity of social media to the rise in white nationalist fervor to coastal elitism. There is truth in all of these things, to be sure. However, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his image over time, and the origins of that image are not fully political. Investigations into Trump’s political precedents are important for what they reveal about America culturally and socially. However, if we are to understand the roots of Trump’s appeal (positive and negative) to Americans I would argue that we need to examine the discourses, born out of the corporate culture of the 1980s, that allowed Trump to develop and construct himself as an image because it is these discourses that nourish and sustain Trump’s particular brand of populist nationalism.

While Romney spoke and acted like a CEO, Trump speaks and acts like a corporation. Like that of a corporation, his use of language is generic and gestural, less concerned with communication and the conveyance of particular information, and more focused on creating impressions, managing others’ orientations towards himself. Trump’s lack of coherence, his prevarication, his supposed narcissism, all emerge from Trump’s tendency to continually reconstruct himself in the present, revising and modifying views, histories, and interpretations to suit his present ends in much the same way that a corporation constructs itself in a continual present. The difference, of course, is that while the American public is accustomed to, even passively accepting of, this behavior from corporate entities, we initially find it jarring in what is ostensibly a biological human. At the same time, the infection of American culture with corporate culture and discourse means that corporate speech is legible to the vast majority of the American public. Romney’s metonymic distinction between himself and his firm alienated voters who read him as elite and out of touch. Trump’s collapse of the metonymic relationship between himself and his company, his insistence on speaking as though he were his company, however, renders him familiar, even comfortable. The difference is that the popular circulation of corporate culture has disciplined us to dismiss the inconsistency and mendaciousness of corporate discourse while reading into it our own desires.

Popular Corporate Culture and Corporate Aesthetics

The proliferation of US popular corporate culture in the 1980s occurred as part of the naturalization of neoliberalism in the United States. According to David Harvey, the corporate managerial class, financiers, and politicians began coordinated efforts to implement a shift to neoliberalism in US culture and politics in the early 1970s (Harvey 43). In this book, I am following Wendy Brown’s definition of neoliberalism as a kind of “rationality” that “disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere” (Brown 31). By disseminating neoliberal ideology throughout different levels of social and economic organization, pro-corporate forces generated a popular consensus that neoliberal market-based solutions were the most effective way to secure personal and national freedom (Harvey 42). This consensus ultimately led to pro-corporate forces “capturing” the Republican Party and successfully putting Ronald Reagan in the White House (Harvey 48). It is important to note that part of this process involved activating the latent political power of white evangelical Christians in the United States and forming an alliance between these voters and the Republicans (Harvey 49). As Harvey argues, however, the neoliberalization of the United States necessitated significant cultural shifts in order to support these political and economic changes (Harvey 42). What I am calling popular corporate culture, texts and discourses that speak to or about aspects of corporate life and circulate outside of the workplace, produces a hermeneutic that disciplines us to read and interpret corporate signification in sympathetic ways while promoting the integration of neoliberalism into our everyday lives. Here, we might think of texts like CEO autobiographies or popular management guides as well as corporate social media feeds and “business speak.” Erica Schoenberger argues that CEO autobiographies work to “legitimize” the executive managerial class, through their representations, a mechanism I would argue extends to all popular corporate culture, though with a variety of objectives (Schoenberger 295–296). The production of popular corporate culture supports neoliberal conceptions of the individual, the state, and the firm, disciplining us to read the authoritarian and unequal power distributions within corporations as normative and to understand the intrusion of corporate discourses into our so-called private lives as acceptable, even desirable. This process legitimizes the viability of businessperson presidential candidates who promise to remake the American government and American life in the image of the American corporation. As neoliberalism has come to dominate social, economic, and political life in the United States, popular corporate culture has replaced our cultural narratives and the images with which we identify and through which we understand the world with the images and narratives of the corporation.

While management literature has existed since the nineteenth century, an expansion of mass-market production and dissemination of popular management books and other forms of popular corporate culture into mainstream US culture coincided with efforts to remake the United States along neoliberal lines in the 1970s and 1980s (Furusten 3). As cultural objects promoting corporate life and ideology proliferated, they developed what I will call corporate aesthetics, images, uses of language, narratives, forms, genres, and figures used to discipline us into pro-corporate discourse and to allow us to signal belonging to the greater corporate culture of the United States. From power ties to tiger teams to notions of “leadership,” we have been socialized into the vocabularies and grammars of corporate life even if we do not or have not worked in a corporation per se. Recognizing corporate aesthetics as such is important because these aesthetics have filtered throughout US society and culture, offering systems of signification that may seem harmless or banal, but that facilitate neoliberalism’s collapses of the distinctions between individual and firm, life and labor, private and public. While scholars like Lance Cummings have examined the ways in which Trump draws on evangelical Christian discourse and New Age discourses on language’s power over the self to construct his Twitter persona, little attention has been paid to how the discourses of popular corporate culture inflect Trump’s signification (Cummings 52–70). The discourses that Cummings identifies, New Age self-help books and evangelical Christian discourses influenced by self-help ideologies, share with popular corporate culture methods of commodification and circulation, particularly in the ways that all of these productions participate in the mainstreaming of ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Scary Beauty: Towards a Trumpian Aesthetics
• 2 A Genius Purely by Instinct: Simulating Management in The Art of the Deal
• 3 A Chevrolet in Tokyo: Lee Iacocca, Japanese Management, and Donald Trump’s Surviving at the Top
• 4 The President Makes All the Difference: Genre, Image, and Becoming a Business Candidate
• 5 Coda: No More Bullshit: Trump Signs Off
• Index