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Trump: transacting trickster

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DOI

Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self-contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trump's open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competition's effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so-called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftAnthropology Today
Vol/bind33
Nummer3
Sider (fra-til)5-8
Antal sider4
ISSN0268-540X
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2017

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