Big White Elephant in the Situation Room: Reckoning with the Suggestive Power of Trumpism

• In Event: Crime, Law, Justice and the Trump Administration 2: American Autocracy in the Making?

Abstract

It is difficult to reckon with the complexity of social problems in recent years without bumping up against a big white elephant in the room— US President Donald J. Trump and what Trump’s mesmeric political campaign power suggests for struggles aimed at social justice. What follows is less a commentary on the troubling implications of Trump’s corrupt, racist, misogynist, militarist, heterosexist, authoritarian-populist, and huckster-capitalist initiatives than a series of short meditations on the suggestive power of Trumpism and what its paranoiac politics of fascination and fear, denial and resentment, deception and hate mean for struggles for justice in the third decade of the twenty-first century. The essay concludes with a modest sociological imagination of how Trumpism’s articulation of white supremacism, militarized masculinity, sociopathic capitalism, and authoritarian populist nationalism might be strategically resisted in anticipation of a more generous, equitable, joyful, and life-sustaining future— a future rooted in power-reflexive ecological attunement to each other and the planet we inhabit.

Author

• Stephen Pfohl, Boston College