Janking Off

Trumpism, a vicious, viral strand of politics ushered in to fight off any credible manifestation of the demos, represents the endgame of politics as branding and personal trademarking. It proposes a real estate model that replaces the White House with Trump Tower and copyrights a form of politics without policy that fully capitalizes on dysfunctional institutions of governance. The transfer of the Trump name from the tycoon’s business assets to the Republican brand, and from thence to the presidency itself, coincides with Trump’s elevation of name-calling and personal invective to the level of political techne. We might call this incessant jibing and calumniating janking off, with an emphasis on autoaffectionate self-servicing and the Twitter vomit of lamely derisive taunts. A New York Times article titled “The 239 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List” offers a compendium of Trump’s most regurgitated schoolyard taunts: really dumb, dummy, major loser, goofy, pathetic, failed, a disaster, lightweight, lying, crooked, a disgrace, a bimbo. These hardly rise to jank level—this would require the unit of a phrase or syntactic composition, but taken together as an assemblage or as a single, streaming, jankish meme, they iterate janking off.

To jank, Trump-style, is not a performance art of dissing or offending where ingenious phraseographies are contoured (as can be found in “the dozens” or rapping and slamming). Here, there’s nothing to celebrate when the unconscious suddenly speaks, when impolitic remarks are let fly, or when faux pas leach into official channels of reported speech. Trumpist janking is irredeemable: It teeters on or falls right into hate speech, trolling, and verbal battery. It exults in forms of baiting reliant on ad hominem attacks on a person’s heritage, physical rating, character, and body parts. It is naming as traumatic wounding, replete with racist sobriquets (“Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren, “rapists” for Mexicans, “terrorists” for Muslims) and acts of violating mockery (the grotesque pantomime of a New York Times reporter’s arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints). Trump janks excel in extreme sexism as some kind of extreme sport. The worst-of catalogue of sexist insults targets Hillary Clinton (“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?” “She was favored to win, and she got schlonged,” and the campaign slogan “Trump That Bitch”); Carly Fiorina (“Look at that face!”); and Megyn Kelly (she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her…wherever”).

The female body is repeatedly trashed and disfigured, attacked like a punching bag with targets on faces, orifices, reproductive organs, weight, and fluids. Insulting the mother turns out to be a big part of janking across cultures and languages, and one could say that in the case of Trumpian janks, there is the full force of abusive defilement directed at the maternal imago. All feminine assets are ranked on a scale of 10, including those of his latest supermodel wife, Melania, avowedly vulnerable to being discarded if she lost her breasts in an accident. Fetish objectification is necessary to a rating system that subjugates women and minorities as part of the great celebrity jank-off.

Body size, as well as parts, is an obsessive motif of Trump’s siege, with potency and impotence adding their phobic, phantasmatic charge to the politician’s eternal game of taking out your opponent. Marco Rubio, repeatedly taunted by Trump as “Little Marco,” had fought back with a reference to Trump’s small hands, recycling Spy magazine’s famous epithet for Trump coined in the mid-’80s: the “short-fingered vulgarian.” During the March 2016 GOP debate, Trump responded by defending the size of his hands and his penis: “Now look at those hands, are those small hands? If they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem, I guarantee you.” Here, the wank-off/jank-off not only comes close to satisfying the risibility factor of the jank, it underlines the importance of scaling to the art of belittlement and to tumescent states of the ego in situations of political contest and phallago-centric competition.

When it comes to the jank, there is a runaway aspect to bodily synecdoches even leading to a theory of politics. Trump’s denunciation of Washington’s stalemate political culture with the phrase “It is out of control. It is gridlock with their mouths” invents a strange figure of speech that, when one focuses on the mouth of the utterer, registers like a warning signal against mouthing off. Mouthing off, wandering off script to some indefensible position that must be defended for lack of any other possible strategy, is the essence of jank, and it becomes consonant with the new meaning of the verb “to Trump,” which signifies quite literally the vagaries of disestablished politicking, or going rogue.

Jacques Derrida begins Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2004) with a question that references Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb”: “What political narrative, in the same tradition, might today illustrate this fabulous morality? Does this morality teach us, as is often believed, that force ‘trumps’ law [que la force ‘prime’ le droit]?” (emphasis added)¹ The verb form of “prime”” in French contains the idea of blocking, but also of “adding to,” “topping,” with “prime” in its use as a substantive to mean “bonus.” Derrida’s “que la force ‘prime’ le droit” suggests that force has a lead, a surplus, or an advantage over the law. His phrase echoes one attributed to Otto von Bismarck in the context of a speech delivered to the French Delegate Assembly. It was taken to mean either that force breaks any laws that obstruct its course or that force is the author of its own rule of law. Both senses are in evidence in La Fontaine’s fable in which the Wolf defies the natural laws of reality and makes up his own laws each time the Lamb raises a reasonable, evidence-based objection: “With that, deep into the wood / The Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack. / So trial and judgment stood.”

“Trumping” (close to tromper, to betray or act mistakenly) describes the strategy of brazenly upping the ante of the counterattack when you are patently at fault. The justice it recognizes belongs to the kangaroo court, where damages are routinely awarded to plaintiffs who make baseless allegations of libel and injury. Trumpism in this sense means justice flouted and justice acting like a person who panders to the caprice of the infant sovereign in the ego. Thin-skinned reactions to criticism or public displays of animosity and grievance—summed up in janking—are championed and fully claimed as the tactics of a winner at all costs. Trumpism brings to the public stage a performative incivility—taken in its full measure as a political concept designating extreme impolitesse (improper or uncivilized behavior, uncivic-mindedness, bad manners) and, as Étienne Balibar reminds us, the violence inherent in civil society, including the “modalities of subjection and subjectification” in Georg Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and new forms of civility that respond “to contemporary extreme violence from inside extreme violence."²

Trumpism inflates the dollar value of its patent with the trappings of wealth, with garish fashion redolent of the 1980s era of greed: tall buildings, gold fixtures, private jets, trophy wives. This plutocratic display is pumped up further by a litany of jankish hyperboles: “very, very best,” “great,” “tremendous,” “huge.” While intended to provide ballast to the old doctrines of American exceptionalism, this bombast dissipates into vatic trumpetings. Trumpism—whose “ism” is keyed to populist autocracy—is identified with a rogue way of speaking that provides scaffolding for an absent political discourse. The proper name is tautologically performative, which is to say, Trumpism trumps public interest by facilitating the decampment of the citizen from the demos to media theaters of depoliticized life, to “hijanked” political space.

This piece was written in response to Janks Archive's installation The Eternal Insult (2012-ongoing)

1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
2. Etienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy Trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 23.