“Trumpian excess implicitly designates the spirit of nuance as its direct opponent”

Lhe triumph of Donald Trump calls for several rights of inventory, on our ways of conceiving politics and of creating or not society. As such, it also questions the processes by which actions and events “make sense” for us, on the scale of the human community. The primary source of this wavering carried by Trump is generalized excess. This cannot be reduced to a logic of excess and exaggeration, as Christian Salmon recalled in his opinion article entitled “Donald Trump or the jester theory” and published in the daily newspaper in line AOCNovember 5th).

It is more about a constant crossing of limits going beyond the systems of rules and norms which make collective existence intelligible and acceptable: contesting court decisions, threatening the press, degrading one's opponent without reason, etc.

Excess manifests an out of control power, which likes to despise the self-control so prized by the elites, establishing a space of power impossible to contain. It is the grotesque dimension of power, the driving force behind autocratic excesses, which ridicules institutions. This ethos of excess perfectly meets the logic of media algorithms, favoring exaggerations that “overflow” from the social flow, whether they are polemical, emotional or dramatic.

Efficacité transgressive

But the regime of Trumpian excess is not just a baleful oddity. It implicitly designates the spirit of nuance as its direct opponent, by ridiculing and abusing the rationality which is the basis of the democratic essence. The nuance is based on a rationality of discourse, which seeks to evaluate, weigh, take away, to support a position with arguments, to concede to the interlocutor or to the adversary, in an always provisional sharing of values. It allows distinctions and degrees to be established.

It would be very naive not to recognize that this rationality is widely abused in many democracies, including ours. But the constraints of the spirit of nuance still assume, to a certain extent, a role of safeguard and regulation. The triumph of Trumpian excess reveals the worrying fragility of the spirit of nuance, which complicates, taking into account constraints, and holds back.

Behind these excesses, in the form of slippages and improvisations, a rationality emerges, which is the omnipotence of the negative and the collapse of which it participates. It is this power of the negative, released in the leader's mode of being and action, which makes Trumpism attractive and fascinating to its voters. Work in semiotics has shown that the negative, in the variety of its forms, has a more intense force of affirmation than the positive, and that it tends to impose its effects and its law. Thus Donald Trump when he unreasonably denies the competence of his political opponent: « Elle [Kamala Harris] doesn't even understand what nuclear means. »

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