Donald Trump And The Logical Endpoint Of Celebrity Worship

Put That Elf Back On The Shelf

I miss when celebrities seemed inaccessible and impossible to know.

Coming into fashion in 18th-century France, the modern definition of celebrity, in perhaps its most basic and depressing reading, describes someone who achieves fame and is subsequently separated from their authentic self while being made into a public commodity. A celebrity belongs to everyone, especially those who want to buy what the celebrity is selling, be it a book, movie, song, or vision; this often comes at the cost of the celebrity’s pre-fame identity. Sometimes it leads to death.

That’s from today’s Leah Letter (which one cultural commentator has called “the best bit of opt-in dyspepsia available these days”), which is largely about our mad desire to shove politics down Lady Gaga’s throat and then pat her belly, but also reminds about Donald Trump (not that I ever forgot, for ignorance is a dangerous drug). Specifically, it reminds me that, not for the first time and certainly not the last, we have a truly bizarre kind of celebrity in the White House. While of course every president is a celebrity, I mean something more specific. I mean we have whatever the opposite of a clippers-in-hand 2007 Britney Spears looks like.

It looks like a man with hair for a hat. It looks like a man tweeting from a gaudy gilded room, early in the morning and late at night, before and after a seemingly not-quite-long-enough-to-tackle-all-the-issues-he-could-have day attending meetings with government officials and takings calls with heads of state. Let that sink in for a minute: the man is NIGHT TWEETING. Whatever happened to “Who has time for that nonsense?” Whatever happened to “Not tonight, Michelle, I have so many briefing books to get through.” Whatever happened to “I’m literally the President of the United States of America I have WAY WAY WAY more important things to do than to fire off petulant tweets.” No one is there to peel that guy away from his very personal vendetta against the New York Times. Even Rupert Murdoch has Jerry Hall.

I miss the days when celebrities were not Just Like Us. Because you know what? They are not. At all. I mean sure they’re people, yes, but celebrities are doubly cursèd humans and we should feel sorry for them, not wish to know the horror show that constitutes their interior lives. The two greatest evils on earth are, in this order: fame and wealth. Celebrities have a double pox upon their beautifully symmetrical and microdermabrased visages, and it corrupts them deeply. They are in every way different from us, and they know it, and they abuse it. It’s not their fault; it’s only human. You and I would do the very same if we were pumped up full of Instagram followers and cash.

The late aughts brought us many things including a bald Britney Spears, but they also ushered in the age of handheld social media, which immediately thrust the celebrities into our palms, where we could pet them and starve them of our love like so many Tamagotchis. They live their lives entirely for us, doing romance walks with each other and wearing bikinis on vacation for our cameras. We have stolen them from themselves, they belong to us now, and you know what, they love it because we make them richer!

But I for one have seen too much. I have seen every marriage which was never quite real in the first place dissolve into distant memory. I have reveled in spotting his DNA and her DNA in so many celebrity babies like I was some sort of sick eugenicist championing the cause of a very tragic race of humans. I have seen way too many vag shots of celebrities getting out of limousines with Paris Hilton while not wearing any underwear. I have followed Ms. Tina’s Instagram, and, well, you’ll see. I have seen so many who-lebrities celebrating X-million followers proclaiming to “love” each and every one of them, with a thank-you caption like a Sally Field acceptance speech. I am horrified by the level of access I have to these people because it shows me that they are just people under a microscope and they are just as afraid of dying (aka wrinkles) as I am. Except they are really screwed up in the head, and it’s not their fault, it’s mine. What did I expect?

The Britney Spears head-shaving incident occurred on Februrary 16, 2007 (or maybe the 15th, I dunno, I’m not gonna split midnight hairs). So where does that leave us now? After a particularly intense decade of celebrity worship, we have reached its logical endpoint; we have crossed the uncanny valley into celebrity revulsion. And who do we meet there at its nadir but a square-handed, pouty-faced Donald Trump, pivoting his entire upper body from the hips to look the crowd over, as though he’s got a rod in his back, bouncing everything that’s ever said about him back to us because he’s rubber and we’re glue. “What can I say,” he says, “I’m here because of you!” And in a sense he’s right.

I want to go back to a time where the president was too busy taking care of my country to tweet. I want to go back to a time when bosses were enigmatic and hard to profile and get access to. I realize that perpetuating a kind of secrecy creates its own kind of celebrity (thank you “Young Pope”). I’m not advocating for more secrecy, just a sort of being-above, to get downright Heideggerian about it. And I’m not saying politicians shouldn’t tweet at all, either. I just want to go back to a time where social media was a frivolity and not a necessity—marginalia rather than source. I don’t think any of this stuff was built with bad intentions, but I do think we humans, as we do with most things, have really let it get out of control.