The following paper seeks to understand Donald Trump as a "dialectical image" for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. Trump's management style, as described in his Art of the Deal, combines a fetishizing of entrepreneurial risk as a "lifestyle" with the insistence that it is not the entrepreneur but his targets who are ultimately exposed to risk. This suggests that we might understand the elevation of "deal-making" to a lifestyle as a characteristic of modernity that, with neoliberalism, is increasingly coming to the fore. Such a critique of modernity, I further argue, is anticipated by Fichte's Closed Commercial State with its intriguing dialectic of risk. I conclude by arguing that Trump's politics marks the rise of a new, specifically American style of Fascism-one that demands identification not with the state as supra-individual collective, but with an impersonal system governing over individual lives and rendering them precarious.
Keywords Donald Trump · US politics · Johann Gottlieb Fichte · Neoliberalism · Fascism · Economic nationalismIt's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.-Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.