Body horror in the body politic

Donald Trump's haunting obsession with disfigurement in the democracy.

Donald Trump’s mockery of a New York Times reporter’s disability in 2016. (CNN)

The blood-and-soil nationalist movement in the United States is led by a real estate developer who’s oddly less interested in the soil.

Obsessions with gore, disfigurement and death run through Trump’s rallies, public appearances and record of governance. While national conservatism marches against impurities in America’s body politic, Donald Trump lingers over mutilations of the body natural. Policy is bonded with blood in Trump’s gothic campfire stories about liberalism’s republic of suffering.

On a Halloween day rally this week in Albuquerque, Trump, complaining about arrestees getting out on bond, dwelt on a local criminal case in which the defendant “was charged with decapitating a man, mutilating his body and kicking his head around like a soccer ball in a public park.” Trump characteristically lied about the man’s immigration status, but the Las Cruces Bulletin, in a fact check, said Trump mostly got the gory details correct. On the trail, Trump relentlessly invokes the fictional Hannibal Lector when claiming other countries are emptying insane asylums and unleashing serial killer cannibals on the U.S. “Remember the last scene?” Trump reminded an audience about “Silence of the Lambs.” “‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by.” Innocent Americans are the meal.

Like B-movie schlockmeister, Trump shows it so you feel it:

[In 2018,] the Trump White House launched a six-figure advertising campaign to combat the opioid epidemic that was notable for its gruesome imagery, including a woman intentionally crashing her car and a man shattering his spine beneath a jacked-up vehicle during desperate efforts to acquire prescription drugs. …

“We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies,” Trump told White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has spearheaded the administration’s efforts to curtail opioid abuse. “Do it like they did with cigarettes. They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.”

Trump had no interest in another proposal, to create a website where Americans could share personal stories about the opioid crisis. Instead, Trump told Conway, he wanted to develop “the most horrifying ads you’ve ever seen.”

Against hydrogen cars, Trump went full “Final Destination” at a recent rally:

If something goes wrong and Marjorie Taylor Greene with that beautiful blond hair is driving down the highway in a hydrogen car and the problem with the hydrogen car, if something goes wrong, it’s like the atom bomb went off. You’re not recognizable. But they say, ‘We think we have it under control.’ That’s not good enough. They’ll say, ‘We thought it was Marjorie Taylor Greene riding down the middle of the turnpike but she’s no longer recognizable. We found some of her.’

The narrative pacing, the dramatic tension, the dialogue, all the way down to the innocent and doomed blonde, is a classic slasher-movie touch. Trump relishes cinematic detail about bodily desecration:

But when it goes bad, it's over, you're not recognizable. They call the wife. ‘Please come and inspect to see whether or not this is your husband. He's lying against a tree and the tree has a lot of red on it.’

Trump’s soft spot for snuff stories made me remember the bullshit folk tale Trump first told years ago about U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing executing Muslim fighters in the Philippines. When it’s about enemies, the moral of the story shifts from the horrors of victimhood to the righteous power of the torturer:

He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’

This fantasy became real when Trump announced the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a U.S. raid in 2019:

He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.  The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house and are uninjured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him. They were led to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast.

Mutilated by the blast. When Barack Obama announced that U.S. Navy SEALS had successfully assassinated al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, the sole piece narrative detail from one of the most literary men to ever occupy the Oval Office was that “after a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Spoken like a true lawyer, even though the Global War On Terror under Obama was more Sparta than Athens. A Senate investigation revealed that the world’s leading democracy had been pumping hummus up its tortured detainees’ butts. Not exactly East Room material.

Until Trump: Long fond of capital punishment, he exulted in the darkness of the executioner’s powers. Trump claimed to reporters that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog … He died a coward — crying, whimpering, screaming, and bringing three kids with him to die a certain death. And he knew the tunnel had no end.”

The fear of no way out, the victim fleeing upstairs instead of out the front door: Trump’s invocations of claustrophobia don’t extend to women losing control of their wombs or to transgender people who feel trapped inside false identities. These sorts of bodies are sites for satanic ritual. Trump recently charged that Democrats “will have a federal law for abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month and even execute the baby after birth.” Gender-affirming care evokes similar scaremongering: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?” Trump said at a Wisconsin rally, practically holding a flashlight under his chin. He’s promised to “revoke every Biden policy promoting the disfigurement of our youth.”

This disgust at mutilation, or even deviation from traditional standards of beauty, applies brutally to women’s appearances, of course. (I learned this early about Trump, when I reported for the Los Angeles Times in 2016 that the notoriously vain Trump had tried to fire women at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course who weren’t pretty enough.) For a brief period this cycle, the noxious troll Laura Loomer became a hanger-on of the Trump campaign to the bewilderment of top aides, who finally persuaded the boss to kick her out. “What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance,” Tim Alberta reported in The Atlantic this weekend. “Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations.”

Trump’s similar discomfort with disabilities led to one of his first genuinely damaging campaign controversies, when he physically mocked the arm movements of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. In July, Trump’s nephew Fred, whose son has a developmental disability wrote for Time magazine that Trump had said of disabled people like Fred’s son, “Those people… The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

Trump’s obsessions with bodily purity exceed even his drive for military nationalism, as Jeffrey Goldberg reported for The Atlantic in 2020:

Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. …

Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

Nobody wants to see that, and yet Trump describes it all the time. “I’m not good for medical. In other words, if you cut your finger and there’s blood pouring out, I’m gone,” Trump told shock jock Howard Stern in 2008, relating a story about how he once recoiled at seeing an 80-year-old man fall and crack his head at Mar-a-Lago:

“I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him… he’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible. You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red. And you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away. ‘Oh my God! This is terrible! This is disgusting!’ and you know, they’re turning away. Nobody wants to help the guy. His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.” …

“I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say he’s OK,” said Trump, adding of the blood, “It’s just not my thing.”

What’s the purpose of gore in the hands of a demagogue who can’t stand blood? Masters of schlock need to make thrills where they can. Facing an exhausted public in the 1970s, horror directors abandoned Hitchcockian subtlety, skipped viewers’ frontal cortices and went straight for the vagus nerve with ever more realistic, tasteless and sadistic depictions of severed limbs. Next generation horror innovated thrilling ways to destroy physical bodies as an adrenaline delivery device, the film scholar Phillip Brophy noted in 1983:

The contemporary Horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one's own body, of how one controls and relates to it. In 1976, an Italian movie Deep Red made an impact not by portraying graphic violence - a trademark of Herschel Gordon Lewis in the '60s with films like Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red and She Devils on Wheels - but by conveying to the viewer a graphic sense of physicality, accentuating the very presence of the body on the screen, e.g. scenes where a person gets rammed into a marble slab, mouth wide open in a scream, crushing the teeth on impact. Deep Red is cinematic scraping of chalk on a blackboard. Suspense is set up by knowing that the next scene of violence is going to be uncomfortably physical, due to the graphic feel effected by a very exact and acute cinematic construction of sound, image, framing and editing.

This was the essay where Brophy coined the term “body horror” to reflect the innovation of films like “Alien” and “The Thing” reducing us humans to mere meat. “Both films deal with the notion of an alien purely as a biological life force, whose blind motivation for survival is its only existence. Not just a parasite but a total consumer of any life form, a biological black-hole,” Brophy wrote. “To it, the human body is merely protein — no more.”

Separating persons from their personhood is common in Trump’s stuff about hated migrants “poisoning the blood of our nation”: “They're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals" and “in some cases they’re not people, in my opinion.” This is demoting people to protein, and it’s one of the central features of fascist rhetoric. If the possession of human rights has any legal relationship whatsoever to possessing American citizenship, it’s no surprise Trump’s coterie dwells on turbocharging denaturalizations. Americans are supposed to get plot armor.

The ratings reality here is that Trump the lifelong entertainer can only reach his creative peak as Trump the executioner. There’s a ceiling on how much attention you get playing the heel on TV and in the newspapers. Placing ads in 1989 urging the execution of the very real (and very innocent) Central Park Five — "they should be forced to suffer, and when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes” — represented a shift in Trump’s gold-plated commercial phoniness toward something more vulgar and thrilling to the mob. The archconservative Edmund Burke famously reflected on the fragility of drama with the public when competing against the viciously genuine article:

Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.

And yet. Our great humanists have always fought to push past governance by blood — be it Jim Crow, colonialism, the discrimination of migrants — for modern democracies based on reason, universal law and mutual recognition. One of the only fixed truths about human bodies, in all their wondrous variety, is that they eventually fail. The Declaration of Independence didn’t state that people were created equal in natural body but in natural right, with the purpose of popular government to secure those natural rights of life, liberty, and happiness — whatever the hell that means.

Trump’s foe Kamala Harris has been campaigning on those more abstract themes of freedom and acceptance: Democracy means the right to be more than a meat sack. But tellingly, Harris’ own most memorable moment of her debate with Trump was also a body horror, about a woman suffering a miscarriage “bleeding out in a car in the parking lot” outside the emergency room because anti-abortion laws prevented her from getting life-saving care. The integrity of one’s own body, the horrors of rape and incest, are central to Harris’ defense of abortion rights, like when "a survivor of a crime, a violation of their body, does not have a right to make a decision about what happens to their body next." Death by forced birth would be the nightmare if it weren’t already the reality.

Horror films usually end when you beat the monster. Though there are often sequels. There are too many fans.