Trump Is Gone. Will Irony Go With Him?
America rode ironic detachment to the brink. Now, it must regain its good faith.
Just as Donald Trump won’t leave us quietly, nor will the sense of irony his presence amplified in American life. Among the many cultural reckonings we must make in the wake of an election where Trump still received over 70 million votes, there are few more pressing than the sense of detachment that helped him take his place at the helm of the American political psyche for four long years. Ironic detachment is at the heart of the Trump story. It’s central to how he was, and continues to be, able to present himself as a viable leadership choice for millions of Americans. But it’s also central to the American story for the last 30 years. As America moves on from Trump, is it time for irony to die?
From the moment he descended a golden escalator in 2015 to kick off his candidacy to his campaign’s final press conference behind a landscaping company in Philadelphia, Trump’s presidency hinged on a denial of reality. Or better yet, it substituted one reality with a new, Trump-friendly, Trump-managed one. As Jeremy Gordon wrote in the New York Times in May 2016, months before Trump was elected president, the success of the alternate reality that Trump created was based on a formula perfected elsewhere in pop culture — in TV and…
