Regardless, transparency quickly became the talking point that jelled around Trump Jr. Shortly after his appearance, Jay Sekulow also appeared on Hannity reiterating the early talking point of transparency. “[Donald Trump Jr.] put forward the entire chain of emails, he didn’t delete them as others have done in other campaigns,” Sekulow told a nodding Hannity. In response to his son’s appearance on Hannity, Trump again celebrated transparency. “He was open, transparent and innocent,” the president said about the interview. Soon after, Trump loyalist all praised the president’s son for his “transparency.” Katrina Pierson and Michael Cohen both indicated that “transparency” was the moral equivalent of honesty, proof of leadership from a man who is ostensibly neither a leader nor a politician. Anthony Scaramucci used the translucency image too, writing that he was “proud to call” Trump Jr. “a friend.” “The truth is crystal clear,” he wrote.
It’s not exactly clear what the truth is or whether or not Trump Jr. is in violation of a campaign finance law. NBC reports that some legal experts believe that he may “have violated a federal statute that says a political campaign cannot ‘knowingly solicit, accept, or receive’ any ‘contribution or donation’ from a foreign national.” But whether or not Trump Jr. was in violation of the is decidedly beyond the point for both the president and loyalists. Incompetence, or lack of knowledge about the laws governing campaigns and politicians, has long been a favored defense of the Trump White House (it was used by Republican senators to defend the president during the Comey hearings) and it’s not surprising to see it reiterated here with such vigor. But here, transparency combined with incompetence and nothingness is particularly convoluted, even for the Trump administration.
But Trump’s praise of his son, a “good American” whose patriotism, innocence and morality were demonstrated by a tweet, is telling. Trump cares little for action and more for image. His conflation of image with value is typical of the president’s language. Trump is fond of sorting people by their aesthetic value as well as their materiality. Those who are loyal are “good” people, people of value or “high quality” people who simply make mistakes. They exist in contrast to those who are not, they are simply losers, liars, “nuts” or “phony hypocrites.” Instead of acting with transparency, enemies are a mess of fluids, they leak and they bleed.
Trump and his supporters have always treated the liars and phony hypocrites—everyone from Hillary Clinton to James Comey to the media—as a hysterical mob, gathered together in the mythical witch hunts he’s fond of talking about. Certainly, this is no different, though the proportions might be a bit more epic than usual—Trump called the treatment of his son “the greatest witch-hunt in political history.”
But despite the endless news about Russia and Trump’s alleged frustration that he can’t shake the story from the headlines, he remains committed to his enduring belief that images can be made real; that he can batter enemies by reducing them to a pool of fluids and turn his son into “high-quality” crystal simply by saying so. If the goal here is simply the transformation of reality, then it has run its course straight to the unseeable. The best the Trump administration can offer up here is a series of invisibilities: transparency, nothingness, quality, and good men.
