What is the meaning of Trump's presidency and his impeachment?

The question of Trump is not whether he is guilty. Only those who want to judge people without thinking the meaning of situations can be satisfied with this. The question is the one Alain Badiou posed of France's Sarkozy: “De quoi Trump est-il le nom?” What is the meaning of Trump, what is really the name of? What is really at stake in the idea of such a man as president?

We reduce ideas to persons and ask if they are guilty. This is a form of asking if we should endorse or not a given product. But ideas are less the properties of persons than indexes of a situation. We should want to think the situation and its meaning for us, in light of our desires, needs, projects.

Americans think, let he who is without sin run for office and get our votes. We should secularize more our politics. Ad hominem thinking left us susceptible to a Trump, just as our ability to recognize that in the online world we may be being manipulated by poseurs, trolls, and fake information made us susceptible to what Trump was constantly declaring.

Early in Ronald Reagan's presidency, Adam and the Ants sang, "You may not like the things we say. What's the difference, anyway?"

Trump was constantly declaring: What I say, though I speak like everyone of what is and what is true, is indifferent to all such considerations. Just as what I do may or may not be just. I say, those who disagree with me or whom I oppose are liars. Actually, I am, as is obvious, a liar who says of what is not that it is, and of what is that it is not; who calls true what is false and false what is true. But you can see that. The truth of the matter, the meta-truth in everything I say is that my speech is performative. When I say this is that, what I mean, stupid, is that this is what I want you to think, as facilitating what I want people to do. This country now is governed in a way that detaches statements from reason and truth. The origin of truth lies in what the people that government represents, and I as representing the people, the mostly but not necessarily (just see what we can do on the streets or in the capitol) silent or passive majority, -- what I/we want. The purpose of politics is to get what the sovereign subject wants. Statements of fact and truth and lie are only tools in this. I can say and do what I want, because I am the boss.

That the president could say that daily for four years says far more about American society today than that man's psychology. If insanity is, legally, not knowing the difference between right and wrong, it might indeed be rooted in not knowing the difference between true and false, real and imaginary (fantasy), or being and appearance (which can be manipulated, as in advertising and propaganda). Trump's presidency was a repeated set of advertising spots declaring that in America today government and governance use language with no connection to reality or truth. That is beyond madness; it is the commodification of meaning and truth. Our capitalist democracy and liberty make that possible. Fifteen years before Trump was elected, our leaders announced a state of exception: Whenever the terrorist threat could be evoked, citizens of this country (and anyone who can be subject to its power, which is the whole world) have no effective civil liberties. They still exist on paper, but anytime the floating state of emergency can be declared applicable in the instance, they do not in fact. Trump takes this to a logical conclusion: the very use of language to declare what is and what is not, and to derive inferentially conclusions from givens (that is, reason), is denied. Government no longer claims to be just, only to be a toolkit for whoever rules to get what they want. Will determines thought, what the one with authority to do something wants to get determines what he or she says.

That is the meaning of Trump. Apart from that, he was a very right-of-center president, but not very different from many others. The Trump administration's public relations strategy is what was most distinguishable about it, and constitutes its most problematic aspect, its greatest affinity with fascisms and authoritarian governance, its greatest threat to the world's people in relation to the global governance of the planet by capitalist and government elites.

The real point in accusing, prosecuting, or convicting Trump is likely to be missed as it was with Nixon, driven from office not for running a war that was a massacre, but for acting unfairly with regard to anti-war politicians in the other party (the Watergate break-in and bugging) and dissident journalists associated with them (bugging whistleblower the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who revealed much of the story of our government's conduct of the war.)

In a way that goes even further than Ronald Reagan, Trump is an actor, a performer. The questions his presidency raises partly concern the questions raised by the actor qua performer. To act means both to do something with the purpose of getting some result (means-ends rationality), and to present oneself in a certain way (managed appearance). Politics as theater raises a number of interesting and vital questions. One is how politics can be made more democratic and less performative and demonstrative, less of a one-man demonstration, performing for the media, to rule by manipulating the public to get what those ruling want.

In this light, it is appropriate that one of the two (legislative and judicial) in principle deliberative arms of our government prosecutes a former head of its administrative branch. At stake here is partly the question of the relationship between them. That also means that what is partly stake here is the relationship between, in the first place, something like acting deliberately to get what one wants, and representing oneself and what one wants as part of the tactics of this, and, in the second place, something like rational thought. That is, between acting and thinking, will and reason. Is government the sovereign's pursuit of its desire and implementation/enforcement of its will, or must it be rooted in reasoning as the means of justice and of doing not just the desired but the right thing? Certainly, individual and corporate actors in capitalist society are mostly the first and deficiently or not necessarily the latter. The hope in this is only that pretenses to reason and justice persist because, although the appeals may be false, no one can long do without them. There is no governance by pure will or administration. Action must be rational to be just, and action needs to be just, and not just effective and efficient as self-interested. Like the corporate state, a military state as such embodies no internal procedures of reasoning. The boss, and whoever he or she represents, and presupposes as underlying what is done and said, commanded and implemented, be that the public or the business's customers, is always right. The citizen then is not one but only a subject who must obey. This is a contradiction not in Marx's sense but Hegel's. Hegel thought that contradictions do not stand, because thinking and willing, and thus the course of events, cannot function without appeal to reason. If the Congress or the courts confirm that some part of our system of government functions rationally, it will be similar to their affirming that the Constitution is still in force, and citizens have liberties and rights of participation. That would be a weak conclusion that only affirms that the rationally deliberating processes that government relies on and that democratic governments do openly and with the possibility of citizens participating, that this can be claimed or re-claimed as in force. This will make a statement but in itself will not change much.

Reducing and political contestation to moral judgment, and thus politics to law, is always a way of both seeking some judgment that will have political import because it states a truth to be newly recognized, and quarantining the effects of that truth. Placing them on the head of one guilty person, which is scapegoating even if that person is guilty and is responsible for much of what happened that is now being rejected (certainly, the Senate should convict Trump and prevent him from holding any future office, and should do so partly to send a message, which is partly about what this country stands for and what its elected representatives will or will not tolerate on our behalf), is the same ad hominem gesture that is performed more problematically when people accuse artworks, or scholars, as just happened with two historians of the Holocaust in Poland. There is a kind of thinking in asking who is guilty or whether they are. But there is a more important thinking that has a much larger scope that asks what is happening in the society and world at large and what this or that phenomenon really is about or means. That is the question of Trump.

In this light, it may be said also that it is unfortunate that most Americans understand the world through journalism and its facts more than philosophy and its reasoning.