TRUMP ADVERTISING

“People who fetishize leadership sometimes find themselves longing for crisis. They yearn for emergency, dreaming of a doomsday to be narrowly averted. Last month, Donald Trump’s campaign released its first official TV advertisement. The ad features a procession of alarming images—the San Bernardino shooters, a crowd at passport control, the flag of Syria’s Al Nusra Front—designed to communicate the idea of a country under siege. But the ad does more than stoke fear; it also excites, because it suggests that we’ve arrived at a moment welcoming to the emergence of a strong and electrifying leader. (Trump, a voice-over explains, will ‘quickly cut the head off ISIS—and take their oil.’) By making America’s moment of crisis seem as big (or ‘huge’) as possible, Trump makes himself seem more consequential, too.”

Joshua Rothman, “Shut Up and Sit Down, Why the Leadership Industry Rules,” the New Yorker, February 29, 2016, page 64.