The Trumpian era is kitsch. Kitsch is the fake affirmation that everything is going well and everyone knows everything is going well. Milan Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit”. The F-18s flying over the Ryder Cup. The border force adverts which look like trailers for Call of Duty. The constant reminder from Donald Trump that America is the “hottest” country in the world.
Consider Trump hosting what he calls the “Rose Garden Club” with his buddies on the now paved-over lawn outside the Oval Office. The garish ballroom he is building on the East Wing. Or a Trump adviser broadcasting his proposal to his girlfriend from the White House grounds. The cabinet’s saccharine professions of loyalty approach an affected fealty that can only be described as kitsch.
You can’t help but think that Trump’s personal lawyer, the former beauty pageant contestant Lindsey Halligan, becoming the attorney prosecuting the former FBI director James Comey is what Hermann Broch meant when he said kitsch is the confusion of ethics and aesthetics.
Nothing is allowed to infringe on the idea that everyone loves Trump. When the president walked over from the White House to a restaurant recently and his fellow diners started calling him a fascist, kitsch did not allow them to be irritated patrons or concerned citizens. They had to become Antifa plants – fakes, in a word.
There’s a funny feeling in Washington, like a reality is being denied. Perhaps it’s the fact that you can’t get on the subway without seeing an M4 carbine assault rifle in the hands of a soldier. Or maybe it’s that Trump told his justice department to start enforcing the death penalty in the city.
The old establishment is watching on bemused from drawing rooms across the city. These can be sombre and anxious places. One socialite told me that the liberal elite has been “talking in the abstract about politics for years and now politics has become real, and they don’t know what to do”. Politics is no longer something that Washington DC types hypothesise about while the impact of their decisions bears down on those in the Mid West. Another remarked that liberals were impotent, standing by as they “watched Paris burn”.
Whither the Democrat champions? Step forward Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, his Senate equivalent. Charisma eludes these two old hands. Jeffries speaks with the allure of ChatGPT-3. “He’s always a step behind and a dime short,” one acerbic Washington insider told me. Those who know him say he’s much more exciting in person than the deadpan bollard he impersonates in public. Schumer first entered Congress in 1981 and in the decades since has mastered the art of writing angry letters.
They plan to refuse to pass Trump’s budget, leading to a shutdown of the federal government. Without money, the state will grind to a halt. Government employees will go unpaid. The bins in the Capitol will fester, unless Trump’s troops step in to empty them. Democrats had a chance to shut down the government back in March, but Schumer thought doing so would only help Elon Musk’s firing spree. History tells you that the party responsible for the shutdown usually gets blamed for it. That is Trump’s hope. The Democrats’ gamble is that the president has become so maniacal that any chance to stop his onward march is a lever worth pulling.
Congressional Democrats need some friction to get voters to start listening to them. The party looks listless at the moment. The liberal oracle Ezra Klein has said he longs for Barack Obama to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Obama is a cool man who can communicate well. But he is also a figure from another time. Democrats can’t long for the past when the present keeps monstering them unawares.
Those looking for strong opposition to Trump should go beyond Washington. There’s Gavin Newsom, the Californian governor and the Democrats’ most Trumpian figure. He has Trump’s ego, brashness and artificially elevated hair.
This November, Democrat Abigail Spanberger could take the governor’s mansion in Virginia. Spanberger is being talked up as someone with the gumption to fight the administration. “She could be a big foil for Trump,” one veteran of Virginian politics told me. Also keep your eye on left populists Graham Platner, who is standing for the Senate in Maine, and Abdul el-Sayed, a doctor and self-proclaimed “podcast bro” who is standing in Michigan.
Washington wisdom has New York’s Zohran Mamdani down as anathema to voters in the swing states. Let us accept the premise that the Democrats top priority must be winning back the House next year. The question then becomes how they do so. In gerrymandered America, the consensus in DC is to play it safe, hedge, resist the fight and rediscover the “middle ground”. Hence the aversion to Mamdani. The problem is that Trump has shown the middle ground has shifted.
At the time of writing, Jeffries has still refused to endorse Mamdani for New York mayor. His mistake is thinking we still live in an age where an endorsement is more important than the type of politics – exuberant, combative and principled – that Mamdani represents. Democrats in Washington could learn something from their colleagues around the country. If they don’t, then Trumpian kitsch may become more permanent than we ever thought possible.
[Further reading: The fantasy of Trump’s “eternal peace”]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate