Trump, Bowie and Fungible Reality

I said, during the 2024 presidential campaign, that the outcome would be determined by what type of invisible things a plurality of voters believed in: angels and demons, or climate change and disease. The former group won. A large part of Donald Trump’s appeal has to do with his rejection of observable, measurable reality. The reason he so often mentioned the water flow of showerheads in his speeches (something that might seem unbelievable to anyone who only reads about his speeches and never listens to him speak), is that it would be nice if there was no climate change and we didn’t need to do anything to mitigate its effects. His campaign against medical science is appealing because it would be nice if there were no diseases and we didn’t need to do anything to prevent them. His was (and is) ultimately a permissive appeal to those frustrated not just by the constraints of an ordered society but of reality itself.

The biggest thing I got out of the June issue of The Atlantic, which featured an interview with Trump, and at least two other articles about Trump, was that all three pieces made a variation on this point: Trump believes “…that normative reality does not exist…” as Jeffrey Goldberg wrote. Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer wrote, “Reality, to Trump, is fungible.”

Meanwhile David Frum did not make such a sweeping statement but instead demonstrated the principle in action: “…Trump inherited an economy that was growing strongly. Unemployment was low. Inflation had been restrained below 3 percent. If the new Trump administration had just left well enough alone, his second presidency could have coasted to economic success.” Trump, however, campaigned on the don’t-believe-your-lyin’-eyes premise that the Biden economy was in the toilet. He necessarily had to act as if that were the case, so he’s in the process of dismantling it—the economy—in ways that will have a profound and almost certainly destructive medium and long-term impact. It helps Trump and his legion of believers that the impact of policy changes is usually not fully felt immediately (climate change being the best example), but few who don’t have a partisan or personal reason for agreeing with whatever Trump says or does would agree that the panoply of Trump’s economic initiatives, ranging from tariffs, to mass deportation, to disinvestment in research and development and so much more will lower inflation, grow wealth, create jobs, reduce poverty or do much of anything else that is usually cited as signs of a good or bad economy (I’m putting aside what economists would say, but from what I’ve read, the economists are the most horrified of anyone).

OK, before I go on—this is a David Bowie blog. What does any of this have to do with David Bowie? Well, admittedly, I’m taking advantage of this being my blog, and I can write anything I want. This is not the most Bowie-centric of blog posts. That said, I have been observing for a while that Trump, like Bowie (and like professional wrestling) demands of his audience to submit to an immersive false reality. Despite knowing on some level that Trump is, for lack of a better term, full of shit, his compact with his supporters is premised on everyone going along with the idea that he’s not. This is similar to Bowie asking his fans to act as if he really was Ziggy Stardust, even after the concert.

Bowie never dropped this demand for immersive false reality as I was reminded yesterday when I included a quote from Bowie declaring before the launch of his 1978 Isolar II tour that, “this time it’s the real thing. Bowie Bowie.” This must have been a kind of inside joke. Bowie would say something like this upon any persona shift. In this particular case, the joke was particularly naked because, of course, “David Bowie” is fake. David Jones never legally changed his name. There never was a real Bowie. But like Trump, for Bowie, reality was fungible.

Bowie was aware of both Friedrich Nietzsche and George Orwell (another made-up name), whose concepts and sometimes words found their way into Bowie songs. Nietzsche wrote, “All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Bowie probably agreed with the first half of that idea, but Trump is all-in. Without knowing about Nietzsche’s formulation, I first encountered this way of thinking when a member of a board I was also on argued that the law is whatever those with the ability to interpret it say it is. In other words, the law does not exist on its own, which is to say that there is no law at all. This is clearly Trump’s view of the law. Or, as Andrew Jackson supposedly said, “[Chief Justice] Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

While some of Nietzsche’s ideas appear in Bowie’s lyrics (say, for instance, “The Supermen” [1970] or “Oh! You Pretty Things” [1971]), he didn’t directly address the point about power being the arbiter of reality. He borrowed more heavily and more directly from Orwell’s 1984, which was the partial inspiration for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. In his dystopian novel, Orwell provided a convenient companion to Nietzsche’s idea about power— “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

There is a sequence in 1984 in which Party operative and torturer O’Brien holds up four fingers and asks the protagonist, Winston, how many fingers he was holding up. He asks this after confronting Winston with the word of his own secret diary, that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” O’Brien asks, “And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?” Winston attempts to resist but gets tortured. And when he concedes, “Five! Five! Five!” O’Brien calls him out for lying. It is not enough that Winston says, “five.” He has to believe it. O’Brien explains, “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. It is not easy to become sane.” (Bowie would address the idea of being tortured into societal conformity in “Scream Like a Baby” [1980]).

Winston eventually accepts that two plus two equals five. We later find him tracing the equation in the dust, as if he loves his new relationship with reality. Indeed, the last words of the book are, “He loved Big Brother.”

But here’s the thing—for this whole sequence to work, even the brainwashed, broken Winston needs to know on some level that two plus two does not equal five. It wouldn’t be an exercise in domination and control if the Party simply changed the meaning of the word “five” to mean “four.” And it also wouldn’t work if Winston was simply made to believe something that is not true. It is easy to imagine believing a piece of plastic fruit is actually a piece of fruit. That’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening here is total psychic submission to an authority.

Together, the ideas that reality is fungible, that power determines how reality is perceived, and that the organizing principle of a totalitarian state is to demand of its people to accept its rulers’ arbitration of reality even over their own experience and observation serve as how-to guide for Trump, and portends much about what the world might look like once his work is done. It also explains why so much of what seems capricious or inexplicable is necessary for Trumpism. MAGA is incompatible with reason, except, paradoxically, that there’s a reason for that!

As for The Atlantic, well, Goldberg, who became part of the story with his inclusion on a chat between Trump officials on the lead-up to a military action, closed his essay by asserting that “the point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account.” This is easier said than done, especially when so many journalists avoid identifying what exactly the powerful should be held accountable for. Parker and Scherer closed their long piece with the observation that Trump “was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.” The Atlantic is better than most at describing the consequences of all this. Frum’s piece was very specifically focused on the likely outcome of Trump’s trade war—regardless of what Trump says, at some point the price of canned peas will go up more than it already has.

And as for Bowie, he played with reality and perception through his art. Art, typically, presents itself as an avatar of reality. This is not limited to Bowie’s art. If anything, his open embrace of artifice exposed the unacknowledged artifice of more conventional artists, especially rock stars. As I previously recounted, “Bowie explained to radio host Terry Gross on a 2002 episode of her American National Public Radio Show, Fresh Air, that he never bought into ‘that whole thing about the artistic integrity’ projected by singers wearing jeans and a tee-shirt on stage. To that, Gross asked, ‘see if I got this straight…wearing a T-shirt and jeans seemed phony to you, but wearing mascara and eye makeup seemed right?’ Bowie clarified, ‘I didn’t say that wearing – a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer than the other thing… They’re both – it’s all artifice.’”

On the one hand, Bowie’s embrace of fakery and demand that his audience does so along with him exposes the fakery of others. It’s all bullshit. On the other hand, in so doing, Bowie clears away the patina of false truths and attempts to capture more abstract dilemmas. Even to the extent he borrows from, say, Orwell, he is much less prescriptive than Orwell. Though Diamond Dogs might have gotten its start as an intended adaptation of 1984, it is not that. Bowie leaves much for us to do and contemplate.

Trump embraces artifice for the opposite reason. He is very much telling us what to think. If Bowie borrowed from Nietzsche and Orwell by way of warning, Trump seems to be using their writings as how-to guides. Trump and Bowie share certain means but very different ends.

David Bowie conveniently left this plane of existence days before Trump assumed the presidency the first time. While his songs addressed issues of philosophy and politics in a broad sense, he stayed out of partisan politics. That said, all of his “future songs” warned about something on the horizon. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch that the thing Bowie was worried about has arrived.
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There, this post turned out to contain more Bowie than I thought it would. The embedded video of Marc Lowe’s adaptation of “Scream Like A Baby” is included in part because it is on point and in part as a reminder that Marc will be my interview guest this upcoming Saturday, when a big part of our discussion will be about Bowie and dystopia. And that will also be on point.