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Advances in the History of Rhetoric

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Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect

Catherine Chaput

To cite this article: Catherine Chaput (2018) Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 21:2, 194-209, DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2018.1474051

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2018.1474051

Published online: 21 Jun 2018.

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Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect Catherine Chaput

University of Nevada, Reno

ABSTRACT This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract sur- plus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from con- sumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the back- ground as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.

Since the August 8, 2016, unveiling of his economic agenda, Donald Trump has excited crowds with his consistent pledge to reduce taxes, renegotiate trade agreements, deregulate industry, and increase infrastructural spending. He underscores these diverse policies with a simple nationalist philosophy: “Americanism, not globalism, will be our new credo” (“An America First Economic Plan” 20). Attempting to explain Trump’s popular image as an economically sophisticated political outsider, the media has painted an endlessly fractured picture of his appeal by characterizing each of these agenda items separately. Pursuing multiple simultaneous directions, commentators position deregulation within corporate interests, tax cuts within Reagan republicanism, stimulus as an easy collaboration with Democrats, and the border wall as nationalist jingoism, if not outright racism. Interpreting this list of economic pledges produces a dizzying volley between traditional Republican tax cuts and Democratic stimulus spending. A similarly inconclusive result emerges from coding the policies as a battle between neoliberal deregulation and increased military spending. Amid this confusion, Trump regularly repeats that his eco- nomic policies are all part of a project to resuscitate American exceptionalism— to make America great again—and his base agrees.

CONTACT Catherine Chaput [email protected] University of Nevada, Reno, Department of English—0098, Reno, NV 89557.

ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 2018, VOL. 21, NO. 2, 194–209 https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2018.1474051

© 2018 American Society for the History of Rhetoric

Seemingly ill-equipped to cover the economics of an enlivened Americanism, the media emphasizes policy details and truth claims that hold little importance for Trump and his supporters. In an interview with the editors of the Economist, for instance, Trump explained that his eco- nomic principles require “self-respect as a nation” (“Trumponomics”). The media did not follow up on this relationship between economics and national self-respect, but quickly noted that Trump did not invent “priming the pump,” as he claimed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt coined the phrase in a 1937 speech, and it has become a commonplace expression to describe Keynesian-style economic infusions. Yet, this strong stance against Trump’s self-declared “truthful hyperbole” fails to explain and does little to diminish the undeniable enthusiasm—among diverse voter demographics—for Trump’s economic vision (Art of the Deal 58). What remains so startling for those wedded to the idea of a unified reality with a singular truth is how Trump was elected president on a wave of economic populism, even though his economic policies only tenuously connect with that populous.1 His tax bill has been met with suspicion, his critique of NAFTA falls flat among rural voters who benefit from the privileged role it gives US agriculture, and the border wall, although popular, functions more like a statement of faith than a promise awaiting fulfillment; nevertheless, those who endorse Trump remain unwavering in their support. Dramatically exemplifying the lack of episte- mological coherency—what Slavoj Žižek (Ticklish) and Jodi Dean (Democracy) have long characterized as the decline of symbolic efficiency— Trump’s rise to the presidency requires a different analytical approach, one that focuses on the rhetorical ontologies of neoliberalism.

The rhetorical power of ontology has been studied through a range of theories that explore the animating forces influencing our dispositions apart from rational debate and clearly defined interests. According to various new materialist perspectives, individuals do not have self- contained, autonomous identities that motivate their political and eco- nomic decision making; rather, human beings, like other worldly matter, are enmeshed within a complex set of physiological and symbolic relations that inform action prior to conscious decision making. New materialism reimagines agentive power as dispersed among humans, objects, and environments (Rickert) and revises the rhetorical relationships among these entangled materialities (Davis; Stormer and McGreavy). From such a perspective, the economic policies that stump political pundits are not action items but agents that connect and energize the microenvironment occupied by Trump, his enterprises, and their consumers. This environ- ment takes shape through the vibrant participation of its elements and not because of self-declared economic affiliations.

Interested in this rhetorical ecology as well as its relationship to the larger neoliberal environment, I approach rhetorical ontologies through a Marxist

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critique of capitalism. Although not well trafficked as an avenue toward new materialism, Marxism provides an excellent platform for studying the pro- duction and circulation of affect (see, for instance, my “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism”). As a physiological energy, affect circulates throughout environments and through the objects within them. In the process of circulation, this affective energy leaves a residue that orients those things and environments toward particular action in the world. It produces a bodily thinking wherein truth is felt rather than logically deduced (Brennan; Massumi, Politics). By replacing value with affect, I reposition Marx’s labor theory from the theoretical plane of abstraction onto the ontological plane of imperceptible sensuous experience. An ever-present force in the production of society, the circulating pathways of affect evolve along with the dynamics of capitalism. These dynamics provide a diagram for how people enter into and reinforce the affective energies that spontaneously animate life according to highly incongruous patterns that are neither redu- cible to economic interests nor fully open to the possibilities afforded by our material world. In addition to including Marxism within the panoply of new materialist theories, this approach also extends the rhetorical study of eco- nomics beyond its traditional focus on style (McCloskey; Turpin; Longaker) and ideology (Aune; Cloud).

Weaving insights from new materialism into a Marxist analysis of capit- alism, this article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding both to extract surplus wealth and to appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument proceeds in three parts: first, it theorizes affect within the labor theory of value; second, it analyzes the Trump brand within that affective framework; third, it explores how the inclusion of affective value within the rhetorical toolbox of econom- ics shifts a number of our interpretative practices.

Affective Labor, Economic Value, and Neoliberal Branding

Although tracking economic value, as opposed to price, is often associated with a Marxist critique of capitalism, the language of economic value can be found in Scottish Enlightenment theorists like Adam Smith as well as classi- cal political economists such as David Ricardo. According to these thinkers, labor adds value to the product it manufactures, as do the tools that go into its production, and a commodity’s value results from the sum total of these contributing factors. Whereas Smith discussed value as a quality of commod- ity production that enabled its market exchange, Ricardo attempted to

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quantify value in order to determine price. Writing in the generation after Ricardo, Karl Marx joined these two approaches to value theory in his critique of capitalism. He concurred with the classical political economists that commodities have a qualitative value (use) and a quantitative value (exchange). Additionally, however, Marx proposed that commodities have a surplus value—more value is transferred into the product than is paid in wages—and he identified it as the source of capitalist profit.

According to Marx, the capitalist system exploits workers who, as creative beings, transfer their life energy into commodities, and are only partially remunerated for their labor. His theory of commodity fetish famously con- cludes that under capitalism workers become thing-like, whereas things become human-like. Human labor, a concrete “expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands,” produces commodities that have, in addition to their material qualities, a value derived from the collective human energies fun- neled into their production (Marx 163). Commodities, Marx said, are both concrete, sensuous things and “suprasensible or social” things (165). Commodity fetishism stems from the externalization of life value into things, making them replacements for our social desires. The traditional rhetorical solution to this dehumanizing phenomenon, like the talking cure that inspired it, tracks the worldviews that support the capitalist system and over- valorize its commodities to the point where such discourses break with reality. The utility of this strategy notwithstanding, Trumponomics, which seems to draw strength from criticism, offers a challenge for this approach. The alternative I propose focuses rhetorical attention on the energetic vitality at the core of the labor process: placing affect in the role of value, this ontological method redefines the supersensible as the material energies that animate bodies prior to consciously held beliefs.

Even though what I am calling affect has always been at the heart of capitalism and its social capacitation, its rhetorical significance has dramati- cally expanded in the neoliberal era. To reiterate, the key to capitalist profit occurs in the productive sphere where laborers transfer value into commod- ities vis-à-vis their working bodies without being adequately remunerated in wages. This surplus value enters commodities that are then sold in the marketplace. They are sold according to their cumulative value, which allows the surplus created in production to become actualized as profit. Marx specifies two ways to extract this surplus. The first is absolute surplus value, which results from requiring workers to labor in excess of the value paid to them in wages. While the labor pool and working day delimit this form of surplus value, relative surplus value circumvents those limits through technological innovations that enable greater productivity within the same working period (Marx 432). Given the capitalist imperative to increase profits, a significant stream of resources must be funneled into the develop- ment of productivity-enhancing technologies. In this way, the cycle of

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production constantly expands and intensifies capitalism, helping it to evolve from its inchoate formal stage into an advanced stage that covers every aspect of our lives. Ultimately, Marx imagined, capitalism would blend so seamlessly into our everyday activities that we would find ourselves unconsciously working on behalf of capitalism and its interests during all parts of our day.

This pervasive and clandestine production of surplus value defines con- temporary neoliberalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri characterize the present moment as a “social factory” that has erased the boundaries between workplace production and market consumption (196). In contemporary capitalism, dominated by information exchange, language production accounts for “one quarter of the national income,” as Deirdre McCloskey estimates; but, more insidiously, our daily lives and private communicative practices contribute to surplus value (187). Real-time, digital technologies have reinvented consumers as workers who add value and increase profit. For example, Joseph Turow studies how wearable technologies like Fitbit and Apple watches measure bodily data (heart rates, temperatures, steps) that enhance market research and direct consumer behavior. Less surreptitiously, social networking platforms—Twitter, Facebook, reality television, or face-to- face gatherings—mobilize consumer action. All such activities rely on con- sumer participation that transfers and enhances economic value through energetic engagement with a product.

If we conceive value as affective energy rather than as an abstraction, then its material forces emerge as capitalism’s enabling power. From this alter- native perspective, individuals transfer material vitality (through mental and physical exertion, as well as their accompanying affects) into the commod- ities they produce. Recipients of these things consume not only their use values, but also their affective values—energies taken in through our sensu- ous interactions. Increasingly, consumer activities also circulate affect back into a product, contributing to an energetic and economic surplus that can be mobilized. Throughout its circuitous routes, affect energizes individuals, things, and spaces, cuing responses to future stimuli. In other words, what Hardt and Negri cite as “affective labor” imbues matter with an internal rhetoricity (292). Inseparable from human interaction and its communicative practices, this affective labor creates a rhetorical disposition—what Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy call “rhetorical capacities” (7)—that moves matter “from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation” (Massumi, Politics 48). Capacitated through ubiquitous affec- tive networks, subjects within a particular terrain acquire a shared rhetorical environment, impervious to fact checking.

In the neoliberal political economy, an affective sense of belonging takes precedence over both use value and exchange value, initiating a shift from an advertising culture based on concrete facts to a branding culture based on communal sentiment. Naomi Klein argues, for instance, that under

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neoliberalism, Starbucks coffee need not be objectively better than its competi- tion to fetch a higher price; Starbucks can price coffee according to its affective value as one’s home away from home. Brands, she proclaims, replace products as companies reinvent themselves as “‘meaning brokers’ instead of product pro- ducers” (No Logo 21). Similarly, when a name like Trump circulates widely within the news and entertainment media, becomes identified with products as diverse as dress clothes, bottled water, and luxury homes, and interacts with individuals on a daily Twitter feed, it increases its affective value by embedding itself into daily social rhythms. In such a case, an item bearing this name can be exchanged at highly exaggerated economic prices.

Observing neoliberalism’s abandonment of products in favor of affect misses a key point, however—brokering meaning requires affectively charged consumers who take an active role in the production process. The quality of Starbucks coffee no longer matters, but the ability of coffee drinkers to become affectively charged from nestling into Starbuck’s leather armchairs does matter. That is to say, the product shifts from coffee to affect at the same time that the consumer shifts from a subject capable of factual discern- ment to a subject capable of discerning and circulating affect. Differently capacitated, these changed subjects facilitate and add to the circulation of commodity products valuated well beyond the labor that goes into their production. To return to the example of Donald Trump, he lends his name to a product, and so increases its price and profits. The enhanced affective energies circulating through the Trump brand legitimate the price increase, but that labor comes less from Donald Trump and more from his many followers. Of course, branding requires the labor of its celebrity—Trump must maintain a Twitter feed and make regular appearances on television, in popular magazines, and at live events to keep his brand alive. His labor, however, represents only a fraction of the affective energies of his followers, who exponentially add value to the product through their attention and enthusiasm. Affectively synchronized, these multiple and divergent agents inject economic value into the Trump brand entirely apart from the reality of its product claims. In addition to its nearly unlimited profit-making poten- tial, this affective circulation leaves bodies stirring with rhetorical potential.

To be clear, Trump’s brand signifies power, wealth, and savvy manage- ment because he has engaged individuals at an affective level. Trumponomics affectively triggers changes in the subjective experience of its audience through what Brian Massumi calls “ontopower,” or the preemptive power to interact with the raw materiality of living bodies to make new “capacities available for enaction” (Politics 64).2 From this radically materialist stand- point, the post-truth era does not signal ideological silos that need to be broken down with more dialogue, but differently calibrated bodies that need to be affectively re-capacitated. Drawing from Massumi’s political-economic theorization of affect, the next section rereads Trumponomics as the

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cultivation of an energetically empowered social network. Specifically, I explore the immediacy of affective labor—its unconscious, sensual re- scripting of bodily activities—as a process of micro-shocking that habituates bodies to absorb the full-fledged shock of neoliberal policy adoption. Such bodily capacitation targets the automatic, instinctual activities that Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, calls system-one thinking, supplementing the more time-consuming, arduous choice making he calls system-two thinking (20–23). Because neoliberal branding focuses on system-one thinking by reconstituting bodily disposition, it mitigates the rhetorical importance of truth, which often traps critics within an unproduc- tive true-false binary, and increases the importance of affectively charged materiality as an extension of what Maurice Charland identified as rhetorical constitution.

Affective Micro-Shocks and the Capacitation of Trump-Branded Materiality

Charland’s discourse-specific notion of rhetorical constitution is, no doubt, familiar to those who study the rhetoric of economics. Ian Hill, for instance, asserts that the rhetorical transformation of economic concepts, such as the shift from Thomas Malthus’ redundant population to Karl Marx’s surplus population and reserve army, increased the agentive power of this collectivity. As he sees it, Marx’s revisions to the economic lexicon characterize “the masses as brimming with extra productive energy needed to reverse the prospect of permanent mass poverty, and thereby they rhetorically reconsti- tuted the masses as revolutionary forces” (6). In this explanation, the working class and its political powers advance hand-in-glove with their rhetorical description. Explaining why the working class identifies with Donald Trump, the so-called blue-collar billionaire, requires more than discursive constitution, however. Trump discusses the working class not as agentive subjects, but as suffering objects in need of his help, and yet he energizes record numbers of this group and others who share few, if any, economic interests. Such a situation compels us to expand the rhetorical constitution of economic actors to include the affective production of instinctual, bodily capacitation. Recall that Trump explicitly describes the founding principle of his economic agenda as the production of a winning national persona. As a living brand, Trump embodies this privileged economic identity, and his pledge to “Make America Great Again” extends its power to his audience vis- à-vis affective labor. Trump is the affective core of a brand energizing everything within its network.

Tellingly, the mammoth dictionary American Economic History includes neither The Trump Organization nor Trumponomics, but does have a Donald J. Trump entry. In two short paragraphs, Trump is described as a wealthy real estate developer who, during the 1980s, invested in an array of

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heavily leveraged deals, “suffered huge losses and faced bankruptcy because the collateral backing of his loans was too weak” (Olson and Mendoza 590). This version of Trump as a failed businessman is difficult to square with the version of Trump as an economic wizard able to recharge the purportedly stalled national economy. These starkly different representations stem from two distinct forms of worldly accounting that are not resolved by the test of reality versus ideology. The first grounds itself in the circulation of abstract economic value wherein facts and figures reign supreme; the second grounds itself in the circulation of affective materiality wherein feeling and intuition rule unequivocally. The final sentence of the dictionary entry hints at this latter neoliberal environment by adding that “Trump continues to be in the public spotlight through his appearance on NBC’s The Apprentice” (Olson and Mendoza 590). The reality TV medium—blurring fact and fiction, work and leisure, production and consumption—relaunched Trump’s economic fortunes by reconstituting Donald Trump from a businessman who sells high-end real estate into his own celebrity brand.

It is no coincidence that the neologism Trumponomics first appeared in a 2004 review of an episode of The Apprentice that addressed Trump’s privileged identity performance. Jay Whitehead, a business writer who covered the show, noted that in Donald Trump’s quasi-real TV board- room, “your ability to elevate yourself, strike at your opponents and maintain dignity is key to survival.” Placing the cultivation of this cut- throat ethos under the title “Trumponomics,” Whitehead pinpoints the economic precedence taken by the rhetorical production of subjectivity over the material production of commodities. The viewer does not pas- sively consume but adds to economic value by physically participating in the brand creation—as Laurie Oullette and James Hay illuminate in their discussion of reality TV. Successful neoliberal brands circulate affective value through constant interactions with manufactured experiences. Celebrities broadcast a particular lifestyle on reality TV, groom the right Snapshot image, and craft their ongoing thoughts into 140 char- acters or less to share on Twitter. Viewing a reality TV show draws viewers into the actual, often mundane, experiences of real participants; Snapshot shares a real-time image and thus a slice of life; and, tweeting, with its limited field, produces an intimacy through ostensibly sponta- neous exchanges that validate what each participant likes and retweets. All of these practices require bodily engagements, images, sounds, and tactile encounters with hardware. They send vibrations throughout our muscular, vascular, and neural frames, contributing to the ongoing pro- cess of capacitation.

Through these and other practices, Donald Trump extends himself. Michel Foucault characterizes such a neoliberal subject as “an entrepreneur of himself” (226); Tim O’Brien, interested in Trump’s unparalleled ability to

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license his name, describes him as a “human marque” (17). Slightly more precise, the marque language stresses Trump’s “attraction-effect.”3 Designed as spectacle, the Trump marque pulls others into its orbit and affectively reconstitutes deliberative, liberal subjects into neoliberal ones whose belong- ing together precedes ideological identification. Trump, who regularly pro- claims his instinctual savviness, beseeches others to act in similarly unthinking ways. Indeed, he flaunts the value of his on-the-spot, unilateral decision making: “My moves are totally uncalculated. I’ve got a brand, sometimes despite me. And it’s a hot brand” (O’Brien 5). His swift action brand—muddled by the evaluative scale of truth and falsity—functions as the beacon of his attraction. Like a “human gravitational field,” Trump’s affective labor pulls others toward its sensory frequencies (Massumi, Politics 17). He amasses power through an unscripted ability to compel a collective sense of belonging to a brand that succeeds without discussion and often despite failure. In such a milieu, the possible effects of a particular economic policy like reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent are as irrelevant as discussing whether Starbuck’s Pike Place coffee is worth its four-dollar price tag. The coffee’s value incorporates the different Starbuck’s customers and their affectability, just as the tax policy includes the Trump-branded tax- payers and their affectability. The incredible pull of Trump’s affective charge stems from a brand value that circulates widely through television, maga- zines, popular books, Twitter accounts, hotels, golf courses, and a host of everyday items. This vast vertical scale of commodities simultaneously bol- sters the brand’s economic value by its sheer ubiquity and energizes an affective capacitation that thrives along a non-ideological plane.

Like a blinking neon sign, Donald Trump’s rhetorical performance imper- ceptibly and physiologically primes participating bodies to think and act along certain pathways. The physical indicator of a tweet—its image, sound, or vibration—serves as a single fire in this salvo of micro-shocks. Audiences may know that a tweet lacks veracity and yet the sensation from their phone sends off a dose of dopamine, increases adrenaline, and fires multiple neurological synapses that associate these positive sensations with Trump. This biological, technological, and discursive complex creates an intensified experience that becomes the unquestionable reality of participants whose rational decision making cannot be separated from Trump’s swelling affective tide. As Twitter followers or as chanting crowd members at a Trump rally, individuals constitute themselves and their world vis-à-vis this collec- tive belonging. Through varied forms of call and response, they manufacture reality, and it becomes “the only reality [they] have and it’s [their] participa- tion that makes it real” (Massumi, Politics 45). As Massumi explains, affective labor works through micro-shocks that “come in droves, all in intervals smaller than the smallest perceivable” (Politics 61). The affective energies surging through environments, things, and people propel the process with

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imperceptible, staccato-like sensations that eventually endow subjects with similar rhetorical frequencies that can be used to broadcast a common set of messages. In mass and over time, these tiny biological attunements constitute the default positions and commonplaces of individuals. Subsumed within this brand belonging, Trumponomics becomes coherent, real, and indispensable for those whose own affective constitution resonates within its frequencies.

Moving through material environments, affect leaves an orienting residue that guides behavior toward predictable outcomes. Donald Trump’s self- described rhetorical style as an exaggerated form of truth aptly illustrates this process. In Art of the Deal, he proclaims:

The way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion. (Trump 58)

Trump Tower, for example, has a numbering scheme that inflates each floor by ten. Clearly, someone who purchased a condo on the fifteenth floor knows that the actual view is only five floors high; however, the viewing experience, primed through Trump’s hyperbolic promotion, feels different from the unprimed view because bodies respond unconsciously to subtle cues in their environment. Even the apparently trite adjective, great, might pull an audience indiscernibly closer to the speaker, increase heart rates, and activate adrenaline glands, all of which ready those bodies for something extraordin- ary. For a body so prepared, an ordinary five-floor vista appears to cover more distance and leaves a slightly more dramatic imprint on the viewer because, as Kahneman’s experimentation with priming attests, “You think with your body, not with your brain” (51). Massumi reaches the same conclusion when he asserts that affect signals “a kind of thought that is taking place in the body” (Politics 9). Importantly, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies theory converge on the belief that the experiences shaping our feeling bodies also shape our thinking minds.

The Trump brand has recorded a long list of successes using such priming. After promoting himself on The Apprentice as a great businessman, Trump’s Art of the Deal was reprinted and became a best-seller, suggesting that his TV performance primed the reading experience. After forcing himself onto the Forbes list of wealthiest individuals with a highly inflated personal worth, Trump’s estimated value skyrocketed into the billions, suggesting that the magazine primed his business deals. Through these and countless other schemes, Trump constituted himself as a brilliant deal-maker in order to establish the rhetorical milieu in advance of any particular negotiation. Tellingly, O’Brien cites a 2000 Gallop Poll that names Trump as the most

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famous businessperson in America. With few actual business successes under his belt, Trump was better known than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—the pioneers of personal computing. Rather than attribute this to his business prowess, O’Brien connects it to the fact that Trump is an “absolutely brilliant image maker” (215) who “believes in his own press and drinks his own Kool- Aid” (41). But this critique of Trump as the modern day P. T. Barnum fails to grasp the ontological power of forcefully conveyed falsehoods and staged performances, especially when others participate in their repetition. From the perspective of affect, Trump cannot help but believe his own image-making, as such rhetorical performativity places his own bios at the center of the larger social bios, both feeding into each other at the intersection of feeling bodies and thinking minds.

Trump branding circulates affective micro-shocks that align diverse indi- viduals with disparate interests along the same energetic frequency. Primed through their shared affective constitution, these individuals experience their environment through that imperceptible common alignment. In the context of a vast structural shock, people acquiesce to what would otherwise be an unacceptable solution; in the context of imperceptible micro-shocks, how- ever, people actively embrace such solutions. Their collective participation energizes what might be a sluggish everyday existence and creates “a sense of vitality or vivacity, a sense of being more alive” (Massumi, Politics 10). Those who inhabit the Trump brand enthusiastically promote its economic policies as a way to promote their own life value, making this form of shock stronger and more recalcitrant against fact-based criticism. Not surprisingly, multiple constituencies primed through the Trump brand collectively experience his economic agenda within a shared and life-validating social reality incongru- ous with the reality outside such branding.

Produced through and wedded to its collaboratively crafted reality, a branded public is neither driven by clear economic interests nor the ideolo- gical manipulation of those interests, as Gerald Epstein suggests, but pro- pelled by its own material connectivity. The circulation of affect forges what Massumi calls “a politics of belonging instead of a politics of identity” (Politics 18). Unlike identity, which is signaled by shared demographics, belonging emerges through a shared resonance. Among those deeply attached to the Trump brand during the 2016 election, for instance, were White men with a stable annual income of $50,000 or more (Klein, No Is Not Enough 87–88). Overwhelmingly skilled laborers, this demographic is unli- kely to benefit much from Trump’s economic plans. Yet, these White men inhabit a felt sense of lost privilege coupled with economic insecurity that reverberates on the same frequency as the lived experiences of Donald Trump. Biographers note that Trump views himself as a victim, an outsider, and an underdog who is not fully accepted by New York City’s most elite (Johnston 22–23; O’Brien 90–91). These different victim narratives align

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themselves through the tuning fork of affect and redouble the reality of their felt experiences.4 Because Trump’s economic plan emerges in the radical present of such shared affective moments and not in the slow processing of evidence-based argumentation, it matters little that Trump has filled his cabinet with billionaires whose policies will further disenfranchise this voting demographic. Those who feel their innate privilege slipping away are not signing onto particular policies, but to a form of belonging together that corroborates their collective victimhood.

Circulating affect through objects and experiences that prime subjects and rewrite their reality, the Trump brand is impervious to its product failures. In a world built from sensory encounters, products can fail without the brand suffering. Revelatory of this phenomenon are decades of Trump’s entrepre- neurial failures. His foray into professional football ended in an unsuccessful attempt to merge with the National Football League; Trump casinos have been in and out of bankruptcy since the early 1990s; and, most recently, his venture into for-profit education lasted only five years and resulted in a legal payout. In fact, Trump’s brand value—attuned to an underdog sentiment— may benefit from such failures inasmuch as its primary frequency entails the overcoming of obstacles. Stamped with this affective branding, the neoliberal economic policies peddled by the Trump administration are no more depen- dent on their individual and collective integrity than Trump Vodka depends on proper fermentation to produce its signature “success distilled.” Brand value stems from the affective life moving through a commodity and not from product quality.

Thus, even if Trump’s presidency never escapes from the fog of contro- versy, the Trump brand will increase its economic valuation simply through its increased media attention. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Klein does, that “every single minute he is president, his brand value and the value of his ongoing businesses is increasing” (No Is Not Enough 35). Based on her research, the value of brands “fluctuates wildly depending on the space they occupy in the culture,” and there is arguably no higher cultural pinnacle than the Oval Office (No Is Not Enough 38). Trump’s explanation of his economic valuation follows the situational ebb and flow that Klein describes. During testimony in a lawsuit he filed against journalist Timothy O’Brien, Trump stated that his net worth adjusts “with markets and with attitudes and with feelings” (Johnston 78). He specifies that

You have a September 11th, and you don’t feel so good about yourself and you don’t feel so good about the world and you don’t feel so good about New York City. Then you have a year later, and the city is as hot as a pistol. Even months after that it was a different feeling. So yeah, even my own feelings affect my value. (Johnston 78–79).

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Because Trump bases his net worth on minute-by-minute feelings about himself and the state of the world, David Cay Johnston dismisses his claims as having “no basis in reality” (79). It’s tempting to agree with Johnston, but his conclusion—one widely shared among Trump’s critics—may have it backward: accounting books are representations of reality, whereas Trump’s visceral sensibilities exist materially.

Trump’s bodily instincts constitute his reality and, to the extent that others participate in his performances, they come to occupy that same reality. The lawsuit that accused O’Brien of purposefully underestimating Donald Trump's wealth was dismissed in 2009, but that was nearly a decade ago. More recently, Melania Trump won a court case using her husband’s valua- tion process. She successfully sued and received a settlement from the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, arguing that its accusation that she once worked as an escort hurt her future earning potential as the soon-to-be-first lady (Klein, No Is Not Enough 36). Given that institutions as entrenched as our courts are adapting the neoliberal economy’s affective valuation system, our equally durable rhetorical structures should find room to bend as well. To this end, the conclusion suggests expanding our notion of the rhetoric of economics to include diverse materialist perspectives.

Toward a Rhetorical Theory and Criticism of Economic Ontologies

For those assessing Trump according to the hegemonic lens of rhetorical theory, he provides an impoverished case. His speech is ineloquent, lacks purpose, and when pressed, he responds with name-calling. Take, for instance, this reply to concerns about his false and contradictory statements: “I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m President and you’re not” (Scherer 39). On the one hand, such a statement reeks of childish debate. On the other hand, its reality has not been acknowledged fully enough. Trump is president because of something he does well and it is not tied to the validity of his statements, his negotiation skills, or his preparation for public service. On the contrary, Trump’s rhetorical appeal—whether selling political-economic policies or steaks—stems from his affective brand valuation. Explicitly indif- ferent to truth, Trump follows an instinctual form of communication that outpaces evidence-based models. In effort to keep pace with the commu- nicative modality that the Trump brand represents, this article has diverged from the well-trodden paths of such foundational critics as Deirdre McCloskey and James Aune. Designed to understand the rhetorical power of a speaker so linguistically ill-equipped, this departure seeks space for new explorations of economic rhetoric, particularly ones dedicated to the theory and criticism of ontological production. A world dramatically altered by neoliberalism requires different methods for the rhetorical study of economics.

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The rhetoric of economics emerged through and is often bound by the rhetoric of inquiry, a project that explores the suasive character of disciplinary knowledge. Although the rhetoric of inquiry dismantled staples of scholarly production, particularly the dichotomy between dis- ciplinary truth and rhetorical assertion, it also produced its own calcified practices. The rhetoric of economics, for instance, focuses almost exclu- sively on the effects of stylistic practices like foundational narratives, disciplinary traditions, and guiding metaphors. This rigidity runs con- trary to the rhetoric of inquiry’s original intentions, which were driven by “new rhetorics, conceived less as techniques than as intrinsic dimen- sions of doing and knowing” (Nelson and Megill 23). The current epistemic focus in the rhetoric of economics, one that stresses knowing, accounts for only half this new rhetorical dimensionality; the other half requires an ontological focus, such as one that views participation in affective circulation as foundational to economic doing. Taking a cue from our diverse and richly developed epistemological approaches, this ontological thread needs to be advanced—affect is only one such approach.

Through expanded materialist methodologies, we will understand better the implications for variations in the production and stylization of economic subjectivities, market environments, and the practices they both enable and constrain. Such theorization will likely intersect with some of the same theorists—Foucault and Heidegger, for instance— whose work prompted the rhetoric-of-inquiry project. In addition to theorizing the power–knowledge dyad, Foucault studied self-crafted relationships between subjectivity and knowledge, often referencing rhetoric and rhetorical strategies like ethos, kairos, and parrhesia. Not surprisingly, Kendall Phillips calls us to understand Foucault’s aesthetics of subjectivity as the extension of rhetorical invention. Just as we make knowledge vis-à-vis our linguistic practices, we make reality vis-à-vis our subjective production. Both, he says, fall “within the purview of rhetoric” (Phillips 341). Heidegger, among the premier theorists of being, has inspired some of the more original new materialist rethinking of rhetoric, including Thomas Rickert’s notion of ambient rhetoric and Diane Davis’s conceptualization of the pre-rhetorical. Others, like Jenny Rice, Nathan Stormer, and Bridie McGreavy, explore materialism through an evolving theory of rhetorical ecologies. These mutually entangled materialist rhetorics go a long way toward explaining why Trump’s undeveloped economic agenda is so appealing to so many. Including such theories within an expanded terrain for the rhetoric of economics will bolster not only the study of Trumponomics, but strengthen the rhetoric of economics project as well.

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Notes

1. Similarly, if Oprah Winfrey runs for president and wins, it will not be because of the groundswell of support she unleashed in her impassioned Golden Globes speech endorsing #MeToo and other women’s movements. Trump and Winfrey, although stylistically and ideologically so different, converge on the branding structure that undergirds both their economic success and their rhetorical appeal. In other words, this affective structure is not politically partisan.

2. Massumi discusses the politically preemptive role of ontopower at length in Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception and discusses the economically preemptive role of ontopower in The Power at the End of the Economy.

3. Trump serves an “attraction-effect” much like the one theorized in Ron Greene’s analysis of twentieth-century film. In the twenty-first century, this attraction-effect has shifted from mass media to social media, but its function remains the same: to bring people together so as to cultivate subjects primed for predictable responses to political economic stimuli. See his “Y Movies.”

4. See Christian Lundberg’s Lacan in Public and Laura Collins’ “The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject” for explorations of similar dynamics using a psychoanalytic approach to affect.

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