The Greatest President, Ever!

-Slavoj Zizek @ The Independent

"I hate Donald Trump's policies but it's true – he could go down as one of history's greatest presidents"

- David Lynch

This month, Steve Bannon said his political ideal would be the unity of both right and left populism against the old political establishment. One should never forget that our true enemy is the global capitalist establishment and not the new populist right

A couple of decades ago, a charming publicity spot for a beer was shown on British TV. Its first part staged the well-known fairytale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story wasn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her – and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly in his hand.

For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence; for the man, it is to reduce the woman to what Freud called a partial object, the true cause of his desire.

So we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer - what we can never obtain is the “natural” couple of the beautiful woman and man. Why not? Because the fantasmatic (imagined but impossible) support of this “ideal couple” would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer.

This same tasteless fantasy offers a model for Donald Trump’s politics. After the Singapore meeting with Kim Jong-un, where Trump declared his intention to invite Kim to the White House, I am haunted by a dream – not the noble Martin Luther King one but a much more weird one (which will be much more easy to realise than Luther’s dream).

Trump already revealed his love for military parades and proposed to organise one in Washington, but normal Americans seem not to like the idea – so what if his new friend Kim gives him a helping hand? What if he returns the invitation and prepares a spectacle for Trump at the big stadium in Pyongyang, with hundreds of thousands of well-trained North Koreans waving colourful flags to form gigantic moving images of Kim and Trump smiling?

Is this not the shared fantasy that underlies the Trump-Kim link, the frog-like Trump embracing the can-of-beer-like Kim?

Another case in the same series: in a CNN interview this month, Steve Bannon declared his political ideal to be the unity of both right and left populism against the old political establishment. He praised the coalition of the right-wing Northern League and the left-wing populist Five Star movement which now rules Italy as the model for the world to follow, and as the proof that the politics is moving beyond left and right – again, the fantasy is that of a frog-like alt-right embracing the Sanders movement and turning it into a bottle of beer.

The stake of this (politically and aesthetically) disgusting idea is, of course, to obfuscate the basic social antagonism, which is why it is condemned to fail – although it could cause a lot of misfortunes before its final failure.

While any pact between Sanders and Bannon is excluded for obvious reasons, a key element of the left’s strategy should be to ruthlessly exploit division in the enemy camp and fight for Bannon followers. To cut a long story short, there is no victory of the left without the broad alliance of all anti-establishment forces.

One should never forget that our true enemy is the global capitalist establishment and not the new populist right which is merely a reaction to its impasses. If we forget this, then the left will simply disappear from the map, as is already happening with the moderate, social democratic left in much of Europe (Germany and France as two of the most obvious examples.) Slawomir Sierakowski put it best: “As left-wing parties have collapsed, the sole option remaining for voters is conservatism or right-wing populism.”

This is the reason why, to the consternation of many of my friends (who, of course, are now no longer my friends), I claimed after the US 2016 presidential elections that Trump’s victory was better than Clinton’s for the future of progressive forces. Trump is a dangerous scum, of course, but his election may open possibilities and move the liberal left pole to a new more radical position.

I was surprised to learn that David Lynch adopted the same position in an interview this week. Lynch (who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary!) said that Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.”

While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. “Our so-called leaders can’t take the country forward, can’t get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”

Will the left gather the strength to use this opening, or will it continue to defend the status quo? The left’s answer to Trump’s fantasy of a frog embracing a bottle of beer should be to discard the frog and provide good beer for everyone.