Is Trump the new normal?

Social media have caused a sweeping information and communication revolution. Communication has changed irreversibly and so will politics. 

A few decades ago, politicians could be seen on TV screens once in a while. They wouldn’t necessarily make it to the evening news. The only way for a politician to make himself or herself heard would be to either have a press conference or sit down with a journalist. For politicians, TV performance was a side gig, not necessarily the most crucial one. 

Nowadays, however, we communicate all the time and continuously. We post pictures, publicly share our thoughts on pretty much everything and share videos of ourselves. So do politicians. As we are, politicians are addicted to communicating. Political actors now have the duty to continuously be under the spotlight. They are expected to express and show themselves. 

The politician of our era is effectively a performer, a showbiz star. In that sense, Donald Trump is no outlier who got elected through sheer hazard.  Donald Trump is a TV personality. As a TV personality myself, I can empathize with his behaviour. TV is about glamour and thrill. There is no room for the boring or usual on TV. People want to watch the unusual, the overdone, the grandiloquent. A TV personality craves the public’s attention. So do today’s politicians. 

In the communication era, governance has turned into a show business. Political figures are expected to engage in verbal and visual shows. This is what Donald Trump knows best, putting on a show. He knows he has to come up with shocking material everyday to keep the audience interested. 

This is what he learned from his career in TV. Trump seeks rating figures. Even his so-called “deal maker attitude” is a part of his TV persona.

Though it is unlikely that Trumpian politics will become the new normal, from now on, all politics across the world will inevitably have a Trumpian dimension.