A majority of voting US citizens last November elected a familiar face as their 47th president, familiar because he had already made himself known as their 45th president. Of course, his initial election in 2016 came about at least in part because he was already a familiar face as a multi-faceted TV celebrity and real estate mogul.

The people Donald Trump appointed to his inner circle in 2017 were not, for the most part, familiar faces. The non-political person endowed with the most power to act and change the world was none other than the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nobody knew who he was, other than the president’s son-in-law. They did know something about Kushner’s wife and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, because The Donald had repeatedly made a point of appearing on television to express his incestuous desires concerning Ivanka.

As the 47th president, Trump has changed his political vision. Instead of confiding political power in a formerly invisible member of his own family, Trump has chosen a hyperreal hero and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to play the role of what can legitimately be described as the co-president of the US. He has granted Musk the authority to undo, override and basically exercise powers over the federal budget, a task the US Constitution clearly attributes exclusively to the legislative branch of government: Congress.

Many Trump voters regard the US Constitution as a missing chapter of the Christian Bible, mediated and transcribed by a group of prophets known as “The Founders.” Some prominent evangelical Christians have claimed that Trump may deserve the status of a latter-day Founder, who has been sent by God to put the nation back on the right track. We may wonder whether they are not troubled by the fact that the sacred text of 1787 failed to prescribe the creation of an immensely wealthy co-president with the power to short-circuit Congress in case of need? Apparently not. Trump has been called by God to fill the gaps left by the founders.

Trump’s second term has permitted the fusion into a single entity of the nation’s two most authentically hyperreal personalities, Donald and Elon, who functioned separately during Trump’s first sojourn at the White House. The two men share the unparalleled capacity to invent or attribute new meaning to elements of reality, while remaining unfazed if anyone dares to speak up to and point out they may be getting it wrong. Recently, Trump insisted that Spain was part of BRICS. No one in the room dared to clarify the facts, allowing him to close the conversation with, “You know what I’m saying.” Yes, Donald, what you’re saying is precisely what we call hyperreality.

One major controversy that has erupted as co-president Elon Musk takes over the business of Congress concerns the suppression of funding for USAID, an institution created by US President John F. Kennedy. The agency proved over time to be a powerful toy in the hands of the same people in the CIA who, in all probability (i.e. in reality), had a hand in organizing and executing JFK’s assassination. (The Warren Commission produced, on demand, its own notoriously ham-fisted version of hyperreality, which the corporate media still dares not question).

To justify the president and co-president’s collective funding decision, Musk offered a simple explanation: “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Radical-left Marxists:

Anyone who seeks to promote Washington’s devious soft-power system crafted to support right-wing regimes aligned with the US by offering humanitarian aid instead of simply threatening such nations with crippling sanctions or even “fire and fury.”

Contextual note

Just like Spain’s membership in BRICS, a curious interlocutor might want to challenge the CEO of Tesla by asking him to produce examples. No one has had the temerity to do us. But Musk’s meaning is clear. The idea that any agency funded by the government should be spending US taxpayer money on any form of assistance, especially out of humanitarian concern, even if it’s a subterfuge for exercising covert power and engaging in the kind of manipulation designed to promote US business interests, falls into the dreaded category of “socialist,” “communist” or “Marxist.”

Clearly these people are communists hired to promote the interests of US capitalism, because that’s what USAID was designed to do. And that’s how it’s performed since its creation. Whether that was Kennedy’s intention or not is a moot point. Those, like Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, understood how it was likely to be used.

But Musk didn’t stop there. Marxists may be enemies of capitalism, revolutionaries and even terrorists, but Musk equally claimed, according to Politico, that USAID was a “criminal organization,” while at the same time asserting that the agency is beyond repair due to pervasive corruption. It was a Marxist mafia. Trump added the one missing ingredient: USAID was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics.”

Critics of USAID (count me among them) could not feel sad or disappointed about its programmed demise, but not many of us thought of its management as Marxist mafiosi escaped from a lunatic asylum. We needed a good dose of hyperreality on steroids to begin processing that illuminating vision of the organization.

Historical note

It was back in 2016, during Trump’s first election campaign, that I began using French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality to account for a deformed state of the perception and representation of reality that becomes evident in the public discourse shared by a modern society, especially in the developed economies. There’s a modern post-World War II tradition in France that seeks to look behind and beyond the façade and veneer of today’s media-enhanced civilization to reveal its workings.

The concept of hyperreality is often paired with Guy Debord’s notion of the “société du spectacle” but the tradition can be traced back to Roland Barthes’s work, “Mythologies,” that examines and to some extent deconstructs the language and beliefs of contemporary bourgeois French society. But some may prefer to trace the tradition back to Flaubert’s posthumous work, “Dictionnaire des idées reçues.”

The closest thing in the US to any of these writers might be Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary.” We all know what became of Bierce. Or rather, we don’t know what became of him because, after leaving as a journalist to cover the Mexican revolution possibly embedded in the forces of Pancho Villa, the last sentence he wrote to a friend before mysteriously disappearing was: “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”

Other politically or socially minded humorists, from Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen and Lee Camp, have honed their wit while demythologizing US culture, but the concerted effort to build hyperreality by the majority of media has both provided the comics with grist for their mill while utterly dominating the culture itself.

The theology of hyperreal power has long been visible in a nation proclaimed by Eisenhower to be “under God,” as well as being repeatedly described more recently as “indispensable” because of its “exceptionalism.” Under US President George W. Bush, theology played a direct role in commanding his administration’s invasion of Iraq. “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty,” he announced, “have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them,” and others reported that in private conversations, he claimed to have been advised by God.

If God created and blessed the indispensable order under more traditional secular Democratic presidents, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Trump’s people claim a more direct connection with the deity than even Bush’s. Trump’s Senior Advisor, Paula White-Cain, has proclaimed, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God,” and that he “will overcome every strategy from hell.”

Televangelist Lance Wallnau believes “Donald Trump is the chaos candidate, but he’s God’s chaos candidate,” and that “God is using Trump to tear down principalities and powers.” The pastor didn’t specify the governments of Greenland and Panama as the “powers” in question, probably because chaos has a tendency to spread everywhere immediately and reach all targets — just like hyperreality itself. And clearly nothing can beat a faith-based chaos as the actual final book of the Christian Bible, the Apocalypse, makes clear.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.