There was something almost mystical about the past year of Donald Trump. He was everywhere and nowhere—a distant mirage appearing to be close up but recognized as a mirage until it suddenly solidified as we bumped into it. Those people who thought he was false and flickering now find him unbudgeably close, a road block in their path or a boulder to be climbed over. How can one man be such a shape shifter?
There was a time when homosexuality was called “the love that dare not speak its name.” Trump deals in hates that dare not speak their names—but he has found ways to give them sotto voce expression. T. S. Eliot popularized the notion of “an objective correlative”—what he described as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that becomes the “formula” that anchors what would otherwise just be fugitive emotions of fear, suspicion, and belief. Eliot was speaking in aesthetic terms, where the objective correlative was not meant to convey truths but to carry instantly felt emotions. This is a form of artistry that, translated into the realm of political speech, Trump has mastered. He partly disguises but enhances the force of a whole series of interlocking hates—black hate, Muslim hate, woman hate, and “Mexican” hate—by giving each an objective correlative.
1. Black Hate. Trump first stumbled on the power of his objective correlatives in 2011, when he said he had sent private investigators to Hawaii to expose Obama’s birth certificate fraud. These fictitious investigators of a fictitious crime are typical of the way Trump creates a concrete image to let people fill with whatever uneasinesses they feel about a person. He does not have to say outright that Obama should not be in the White House because he is black. The objective correlative is like a Rorschach ink blot. People will see different things in it.
Last September a PPP survey found that 66 percent of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim. The power of Trump’s focus on the birth certificate is that it seems to narrow the issue, but really it broadens it—you can think that Obama is not a Muslim but is also not a citizen, or that he is not a Muslim but also not a Christian, or that he is something unknown, which causes him to obscure his background—and makes him an “outsider.” Or you can, like Trump himself, simply say “I don’t know” what is behind the elusiveness of the birth certificate—creating a sense of mystery, with all these possibilities left in the air. The story about the missing birth certificate is not factual, but it is effective. It works. That is why it persists. Trump is the most successful birther of them all, and his whole campaign was founded on that first objective correlative.
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