President Trump…its gonna happen

A recent meme has arisen having ineffectual fun with the resemblance of Trump to Biff Tannen the bully from the 80’s hit movie, Back to the Future. Its more than the uncanny physical resemblance, in the second movie of the series Biff is depicted as a Trump like success who has built a dystopian empire around a building that looks amazingly like Trump Towers..

So in keeping with the predictive bad-forune of the Sci-fi genre (with a nod to JG Ballard’s prediction of the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency a decade before he event) its probably time for us to pre-mediate the likelihood of a Trump presidency.

In a continuation of the inversion of all the normal rules that his candidacy represents, the more absurd a Trump presidency appears, the more likely it is to happen. He conforms precisely to Quentin Crisp’s definition of charisma as having -the ability to influence without logic- Like England’s own miniature version (Boris Johnson) he deploys an invincible and shameless confidence to great effect placing him not only beyond any pretence of deliberative liberal discourse but also beyond parody and satire;… perhaps even direct action and protest plays into his hands. To call him a symptom is to frivolous Trump is more like a morbid convulsion..

According to Andre Breton’s credo “beauty will be convulsive or not at all” but imagine a truly visionary convulsion so violent as to repudiate the concept of beauty entirely, substituting all the paraphernalia of aesthetics and connoisseurship… with an object so inexplicable that it appears (F. Jameson) as a shudder emanating from an incomprehensible future. In art this would make it an avant-garde masterpiece …Unfortunately in this case, the artifact in question is the Donald…