It’s all just a show, and sometimes that makes it all the more real. Playwright and theater scholar Hank Willenbrink joins Matthew to look at the spectacle of Trump through the lens of performance studies.
From his childhood listening to Norman Vincent Peale, to his lifelong fascination with Broadway, to his TV celebrity, to the tableau vivants of evangelicals gathered round him to sanctify his holy mission, Trump hits his marks so well he doesn’t even need to remember his lines. Now he has a new role to play: the framed felon.
Show Notes
Performing for the Don: Theaters of Faith in the Trump Era
About Me – Hank Willenbrink
Bread and Puppet Theater — Glover, VT
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today I can add to that tagline how sometimes it's all just a show, but that makes it all the more real.
I'm Matthew Remsky, and this is a brief called The Theater of Trump with Hank Willenbrink.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
So, I recorded this discussion with playwright and drama professor Hank Willenbrink over a month ago, but it got bumped around in scheduling for a number of reasons.
But the themes we cover here are both evergreen and timely because they get right into the core dynamics of Trump's past and potential future presidency as an audience-captured media spectacle.
From his childhood listening to Norman Vincent Peale, to his lifelong fascination with Broadway, to his TV-centered celebrity, to the manufacturer of ritual tableaux with the evangelicals who gather around him to sanctify his holy mission, Trump hits the mark so well he doesn't even need to remember his lines.
Now, Willenbrink and I go long on our discussion of Trump's unwarranted but unmatched confidence as the cornerstone of his statesmanship.
And I think it's really useful because thinking about aesthetics and performance and stagecraft is both a welcome relief from wondering what the hell is wrong with him, and it gets us to think about his audience capture, about how long he spends in makeup every morning, probably as long as Judi Dench takes to become Queen Victoria.
And it also makes me think about what the opposing aesthetics could possibly be.
Like, what is the stagecraft of anti-capitalism?
And I swear, someday I'll find a reason to do an episode about the Bread and Puppet Theatre of Glover, Vermont.
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Since Hank and I recorded, however, our subject is now a felon, and so I needed to go back to our guest for a little update.
Because this trial represented a rare and extended look behind the Trump curtain.
Unlike the towers, or Mar-a-Lago, or the diocese of a hundred rallies, the courtroom was not a forgiving set for him.
He dozed off.
He reportedly farted a lot.
And when it came to potentially hitting his mark and giving his lines, he declined to take the stand.
And then, of course, he reportedly looks wan and dissociative as the verdicts are read.
34 guilties.
So, an utter failure from a performance point of view?
Or because it wasn't televised, did anyone see it?
Because no sooner is he out of the courtroom as he's back on TV, raising money.
So, I went back to Hank with the question update.
What's your hot take on whether Trump's performance record has been dinged by getting fired by 12 normie New Yorkers in a state court?
And he wrote back, Trump may be called to face consequences in the state of New York, but he continues to manipulate his own performances and those around him.
Shifting the legal verdict into the political realm by claiming November 5th is the real trial.
And while it seems that this verdict and the trial has shaken his Teflon Dawn persona, his ability to turn the trial into a political referendum has the opportunity to further disrupt democracy in the U.S.
Okay, so let's roll this discussion between a couple of theater nerds.
So today I'm joined by Hank Willenbrink, who is a playwright and professor of English and
theater at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which means that the first question I have
to ask is, is Michael Scott in your improv class, Hank?
Hi, Matthew.
No, although I was told just a couple days ago that my office was the staging area for Al Roker when he visited campus in 2007 as a part of the office convention.
I feel like I'm close to celebrity.
Well, thanks for joining us.
You're here because you sent me your excellent academic coverage of political theater in the age of Trump.
It's a book called Performing for the Dawn, Theaters of Faith in the Age of Trump.
It's out from Routledge.
And we'll be discussing that today because it's a really important subject for our beat as ardent students of charisma in the conspirituality space.
And the reason that we are students of charisma is that the arguments offered by the influencers
that we follow about vaccines, public health officials, the so-called pedophilia epidemic,
or some sort of desperate need for spiritual renewal, are often incoherent.
And that always leaves us with the question of why is this material so compelling?
And we can reach into the psychoanalytic literature to understand the attractions of irrationality
and contradiction, but we also know that there are other elements at play, especially in
this age of endless spectacles.
So I wanted to start by asking whether you think it's fair to say that this is where a discipline like performance studies can come in.
Absolutely.
Performance studies as a discipline, I would say a more nuanced understanding of performance, period.
You know, performance studies as a discipline takes a very expansive view of performance.
And one of the nice things about that flexibility is you can look at anything from Traditional scripted types of performance, theater, film, etc.
to the performance of everyday life, right?
The ways that we perform in our particular roles.
I'm a professor.
Do I have a blazer with elbow patches?
You bet I do.
Do I have a beard?
Of course I do.
Because part of that is how you kind of show professorialness.
And one of the things that I wanted to contribute to with this book is taking that idea of performance and asking people to look a little bit more closely at the performances around them.
And in particular, The religious performances in support of Donald Trump, which is the the area that I look at in this book.
So you bring up the idea of charisma, which I think is a great idea.
There is a lot of ways that we can think about charisma.
But when I from my disciplinary background, when I hear that word, I immediately think of kind of 1960s and 70s experiments in theater, people like Joe Chaykin who talk about cultivating presence.
The ways that actors are able to hold an audience's attention.
And we can think about the ways that charisma is at work in public officials, public figures, anyone from Katie Britt's performance of her particular type of charisma and the response to Biden's State of the Union to someone Like Amy Carlson and the kind of Mother God cult and the way that charisma functions as a way of control, but it's also something that becomes cultivated and a type of performance that people use where they take elements of their personality and kind of make them more expansive.
So I hope that one of the things that performance can contribute into the work that you all do and the wealth of subjects that you cover is to think about how are the ways that we perform ourselves and what are the ways in which we're manipulating who we are and the audiences around us.
I think that is a great way to start, but I also want to trouble the framework a little bit, and this might seem like a little bit of a deep cut, because in your book you quote another performance studies scholar, a guy named Christopher Grobe, who suggests that interpreting the chaos of Trump as performative
with all of the connotations that that carries of perhaps being insincere or ephemeral,
runs the risk of minimizing his material impacts, while also maybe preserving for the liberal or leftist
that beneath it all, that reality is still intact.
And this is a feeling that I get even when listening to how much the guys on a podcast like Chappo Trap House
make fun of Trump's Broadway affect.
They're saying pretty regularly that he's not ultimately a serious person.
So Grobe writes, quote, when people say that Trump surely must be
a performance artist, that this in fact is the only logical explanation.
What they're really saying is, I need this to be true.
So, I wanted to ask you, do you struggle with this?
Absolutely.
In looking at Trump, one of the things that I tried to do, and I talk about this in the book, is a good faith reading.
But what I tried to do is I tried to actually listen to these performances, whether they're films, a play, public performances, etc., and listen to what the people were saying.
And then not take that only at face value, but try to listen to some of the intentions behind that and take the perspective of a cultural critic with all of that seriousness that's in it.
Thinking of Trump as a performance artist, which Grob does, cuts kind of both ways.
On the one hand, I think it reveals something to us about the way that we think about performance, that we tend to think about it as something that is duplicitous, as you mentioned.
The kind of vibe of the word performative these days, partially because of terms like performative allyship, is that people are faking it.
Right.
Right.
But there's another element to performance that scholars like Judith Butler, etc.
talk about, which is performative performance and performative acts as being constructive of things.
And one of the things that I think Trump shows us is the ways that both of those things Cut both that term performance really is an ambivalent term, and it can be used in a lot of different ways.
And so absolutely, that's the struggle of it.
And that's why I try to position myself as a cultural critic, as a performance scholar, and really take a look at what he's doing as a type of performance and try to tease out all of the different strands strands from that.
So, to really boil that down, we have to see him as faking it, but also creating something in that process.
Absolutely.
Okay, turning to his stagecraft, Trump grows up listening to Pastor Norman Vincent Peale thundering on about the power of positive thinking at Marble Collegiate Church.
This is in the 1950s.
Then, he's constantly around Broadway, constantly going to shows.
He comes into his money in the 1980s and he says, I'm going to go into real estate and I'm going to put show business into real estate.
I'll have the best of all worlds.
Are these the sort of primal elements of his theater background, would you say?
Well, we know from Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman's book, that he thought about going to USC and studying film for a bit.
One of his early business ventures that wasn't in real estate was to produce a play.
Paris is out in 1970, I believe.
And he takes the kind of extraordinary step of putting his name, the producer's name, above the title and above the actors, which is in the playbill, which is Ballsy.
Well, it's true to form because it's it's it's Trump stakes.
It's Trump, you know, university.
It's that he pursues that all the way through.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is you know, he is he knows how to put himself at the center of attention.
He has an innate understanding of himself as a showman, as a showman, as a salesman.
And of course, that fits right into Peale.
I mean, the Peale elements of Trump are just fascinating.
And Peele's kind of, and I'm going to really boil this down now, that kind of fake it till you make it thing is something that we say all the time in theater.
And one of the things that Trump, as we know now from the state of New York's fraud investigation, right, we know that that's how he's always conducted his business.
And let me just add in like kind of one other little thing that I think is really interesting that we're watching, too, which is Trump's kind of like performance of himself as a defendant.
Yeah.
Right.
And that kind of showmanship, how he's literally giving a closing argument, how he's talking too loud to his lawyer.
We're kind of watching another iteration of these performances working themselves out in his own personal courtroom dramas.
I'm also realizing, and we're gonna get to this, that if there's a theatricality that is rooted in his sort of memory of Norman Vincent Peale and faking it till you make it, there's then a continuity between the theatrical obsessions of his youth and how that becomes spiritualized later in life.
In some sense, it was always a spiritual endeavor.
It was always a part of how his soul, as it were, was going to be made and projected into the world.
Yes, yes.
Okay, well, about the spotlight and finding the spotlight and making himself the center of attention and his experience with Broadway, we have to focus on this There's a famous moment in 2018 where Trump is with a bunch of world leaders on a tour of the new NATO headquarters and while the gaggle is forming up for the photo op, he shoves his way from the middle of the pack and basically pushes the Prime Minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, to the side to hit his mark
At the center of the frame.
And then there's this moment where Markovich is confusedly wondering what has happened, but Trump looks from side to side like he's conquered the stage, like he's in Zoolander or something like that.
And then he gives a tug on his suit jacket, like a two tugs, you know, tug, tug.
And viewers were mesmerized by this.
They talked about his childishness, about elbowing in at the lunch line like he was 10 years old.
But if you look at that clip, Like a stage director, he hits his mark in a group tableau, like 10 out of 10, no notes.
And so I think we have to admit that he's really good at playing Donald Trump.
Yes, he is the best Donald Trump of Donald Trumps.
And I really like that you put this as, if we think about it like a stage director, I think it also shows us that Donald Trump is really good at being directed and has been directed for a lot of his life.
That moment in particular, I think, also reveals to me how many of, I would call them kind of uniquely American character tropes he encompasses.
So there is the bully.
There's the kind of like America, the center of the world stage that's going on there.
Yeah, it's true.
the kind of American naive, the American idiot, right?
That's going on in that as well.
And they're all kind of like amalgamated into this one figure.
Yeah, it's true.
Of Donald Trump.
Yeah.
And part of me thinks, here is a person who is so steeped in media.
I mean, do you think the TV ever goes off in his house or ever went off?
No, but he's internalized all of these different character tropes and kind of seems to unconsciously unleash them in a lot of different ways.
And, you know, to go back to what you were saying earlier with the You know, the kind of like, how can we take this person seriously?
If you remember, like one of the kind of tropes of a lot of late night comics was to kind of pull up old tweets of, you know, him commenting on Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and that kind of thing.
And a lot of times these would be unearthed to show Again, the kind of frivolousness of this person.
But there's another end to that as well, which is like he's someone who's bathed in all of this, right?
He's someone who has really created himself out of these media tropes and now literally lives them, embodies them on the world stage.
When you talk about the TV never going off, I have this feeling of him moving from space to space in his life, as if each room was a different set.
Like, there's no sort of entering a room in which this is where I'm going to be private, or this is where I'm alone, or, I mean, of course he has alone time, but I feel like being inside him would be very much like Never feeling that you could be alone or hidden or not seen.
Like, in fact, if you were unseen, you might not exist.
One of the things that really resonates to me with that is thinking about when Mark Burnett's creating The Apprentice, and they want to create him as the image of this American tycoon, another cultural trope, right?
So they start going through Trump Tower to find places to shoot things like the boardroom, and it's so rough around the edges that what they end up having to do is build a set within the actual boardroom.
And so it almost feels, to go back to your point about going to these other rooms, that every room that he moves into is a set for another version of himself.
Yes, Donald Trump is the best at being Donald Trump, but he's also been many, many, many different Donald Trumps over his life, right?
And so Again, I think that this is one of the reasons why he is a particularly fascinating subject, and frankly, why we should read him more closely as a performer and not simply a celebrity or a politician, because we've had actor presidents before.
And it's trite to say that he's the first reality TV show president.
But when you hover over that idea for a second and you say, well, what he's doing is performing his own reality.
I think that can unlock a lot of the ways that our world has changed since he came into office and began to run for public office.
Well, speaking of his many personas, he has this whole history with the WWE playing off of supervillain Vince McMahon in the ring and in real life.
And you note in the book that wrestling fans consciously suspend their disbelief You know, they really want that kayfabe to be rock solid.
And I wanted to ask whether you think that this principle of sort of consciously suspended disbelief increases his political power.
That if followers double down on devotion, it's because they have to.
They know they must participate in his performance in order to make him real.
One of the questions that I really wanted to go after in this book was essentially, which came first, Trump or Trumpism?
And I think at the end of the book, I come up with the answer, yes.
Yeah, right.
He is able to put together a coalition, bring under his umbrella a lot of different disparate groups.
In the book, I talk about everything from QAnon to conservative Catholics to Intrigalists and Dominionists and New Apostolic Reformation, that kind of thing.
All of these groups are people that have been politically activated before, but it takes a figure as unique as Trump to be able to bring them all into the same room and working together.
And I think a big part of that is that like wrestling, his political supporters get to change and mold and push the Trumpist movement in their own particular ways.
I mean, we're watching this play out now with, or we watched it kind of play out a little bit with what happened in Alabama and the IVF.
You know, Questions about reproductive rights, he's really having to do a kind of political soft shoe that he wasn't before, partially because he took so much from the audience.
You know, if you remember, there was that reporting about the champ build the wall was something that kind of naturally occurred at one of his rallies.
And then he kind of took up because it was a great line for him.
And so that The symbiosis between the performer Trump and the audience, I think, is one of the rallies, or one of the reasons that people talk about the rallies being so darn fun.
It is participating in it.
And there is, I think, a wink, right?
An acknowledgment of the fact that This will, you know, trigger the libs or we're pushing the envelope.
And that kind of dark play that is incumbent in that in this and is involved in that, I think, is one of the reasons that it's so much fun, just like the dark play of something like wrestling.
I mean, people can really get hurt, right, in wrestling.
And when that happens, suddenly that disbelief goes away.
Right.
That disbelief kind of like there's an actual awareness there.
And then you can go back and have the next match.
But that symbiosis between Trump, his crowd, and the way that they work with each other and work off each other is something that's really, really unique.
Well, I think also this might bring out another advantage of the performance studies framework, which is that if we're looking at Trump and Trumpism as a synergy, we might avoid the pathologization of his leadership or going down the road of, well, this very, very ill individual has actually led many, many people astray when actually, in many ways, You said that he was directable.
He has been directed by his own audience.
Like, he has taken cues.
Yeah, and another reason that I wanted to kind of... Another thing that I wanted to write about in the book is the group of people who are around him who oftentimes act as his translators, who act as his directors.
I mentioned Mark Burnett and The Apprentice.
being one key figure, but you think about people like Paula White, obviously I'm going
to skew a little bit religious with this, Paula White, Jerry Falwell Jr., this kind
of thing, that kind of inner circle, the historian John Fee calls them court evangelicals, but
that inner circle direct and translates so much of what he's doing.
So there's so much of Trump that is, you know, Trump, but then there's so much that's explaining what Trump is doing, right?
Why is he calling neo-Nazis good people on both sides?
Whatever, right?
I mean, there's so much kind of people who are acting as these intermediaries.
Between Trump and other people.
And there is a lot of power.
There continues to be a lot of power in those roles.
You know, one last thing before we get on to his hook into evangelicalism is that when you mentioned he had the skills, he had the temperament, he had the stagecraft to bring people together, I flashed on the similarity between his movement and the kind of, you know, big network talent shows.
When you look at his opening acts at his rallies, right, A lot of people were amazed at the amount of support that he got from the religious community in 2016.
And this is one of those moments where I feel like we weren't paying attention.
You know, it's the Masha Gessen line, which is like, listen to what the autocrat tells you.
And, you know, in his rallies, he was having big evangelical preachers start things out.
I mean, the man had Paula White give his invocation, right?
Evangelicals, Christians will talk about them being more prayers at his inauguration than at any inauguration previous.
Right?
And these are markers for them about they speak to his sincerity, they speak to he's able to platform people and that kind of stuff.
So I'm not suggesting that, you know, opening for giving a prayer to Donald Trump rally is like America's next top pastor.
I might not be too far away from that either, because I think that these are very conscious, intentional allyships that he's making politically in order to advance his aims.
He's also testing people out.
Absolutely.
Who is going to hit?
Who's going to be famous?
Who's going to help me be famous?
Who's going to be my next vice president?
We're again, we're right now we are watching this play out in front of us, you know.
And I think, you know, the interesting thing with Trump is always that he's doing that.
But then, you know, RFK Jr.
just did it as well.
Who's going to be my vice president?
Will be the quarterback?
Will it be the you know, the tech billionaire?
Who's it going to be?
Who?
Right.
There is that element of game show or reality TV contest that's happening.
All right, so early on in the book, but this is kind of late in the Trump theater timeline, actually, you recall that laying on of hands ceremony in which evangelical influencers consecrated Trump's status as their anointed leader.
Now, I want to draw out an ambivalence in this because he is in the center of that tableau.
He's the focus.
He's found the spotlight.
He's being elevated.
He's probably thinking of that scene in Jesus Christ Superstar that he saw, you know, for the first time in 1978 where like, you know, Jesus is rising up in the middle of the throng.
But just as in a baptism, he's also receiving a necessary purification from their point of view.
So on one hand, they are worshiping him.
But on the other hand, they are transforming him from his debauched state.
So what are your thoughts on that?
So that photo is one of the things that really crystallized a lot of this for me.
And just to give a little bit of context, it's July 2017.
He's kind of in this, like, he's back in the U.S.
after a trip to Europe.
And then another trip to Europe.
This is when, it's in one of those trips, I forget if it's the first one or the second one, that he has the famous meeting with Putin one-on-one.
The news has literally the day before broken that Don Jr.
had the meeting with this Russian asset, the famous, if that's what it is, say it is, I'm
loving it or whatever moment.
And this is, this photo is in this very odd way, the White House's response to the beginnings
of what would become the Russia investigation.
And it's a very strange photo for Trump because first of all, we don't see his face, his back
is to us.
As you mentioned, it's a lot of people laying hands on him.
It's almost the exact opposite of the kind of famous photo of him holding the Bible during the summer of 2020.
Yes.
It's a photo that comes out.
It comes out through essentially evangelical Christian PR.
There's a professional photographer that's there.
We never see or I've never seen that photo.
It's an Instagram photo.
So it looks candid.
It has all that kind of like feel of authenticity.
And it is this really, really amazing moment, because on the one hand, you're right.
It looks like he's asking for aid, which is something we don't see him do often.
On the other hand, it is a consecration, a baptism.
On the other hand, I almost see it as like a marriage ceremony, because who comes to his aid after this?
It's this group of, again, core evangelicals, evangelical influencers.
That not unlike the Iran-Contra scandal, come out and start doing PR for Trump as a way to fend off this, the Russia investigation.
And I think the other element to that, to add into that ambivalence or to add into that moment, is that if you think about the Russia investigation, it was ultimately about, is Trump a legitimate ruler or not?
And the laying on of hands there says he is a legitimate ruler.
He's our legitimate ruler.
And I would just say the kind of layers of white Christian nationalism, et cetera, that's all baked into it.
That photo is a moment of legitimizing his government.
Through the hands of Christians in this country.
And so it's a really, really pivotal photo.
And really, you're correct.
After that, I would say his administration takes this really more explicit turn towards what we would now call Christian nationalism.
It seems like there wouldn't be any other group of people who could give that kind of ratification to somebody so uniquely absurd.
Like, how else could you find a group of people that would elevate you except through an act of faith, except if they felt that they were doing some kind of magical sacramental action?
that they had appeared and through the power of their own faith,
through the power of their own devotion, they could make something happen through that ritual
performance.
I don't know anybody else who could do that, actually.
There's one other person that comes to mind, I think not coincidentally,
it was a piece of the big fake news of 2016, which is the Pope.
If you remember the first big fake news moment was the Pope endorsing Trump, right?
Yes.
And so I think in a lot of ways, a figure like that could do the exact same, obviously, in very similar, you know, sacramental area, you know, a similar sacramental area, and as similarly a religious figure.
But that's the only other thing that kind of jumps to mind.
Francis is a globalist, you see, right?
He's overly woke.
He, you know, he's he he heads a global organization.
He meets with, you know, trans sex workers every Wednesday for lunch.
I mean, I think he and Trump could have had a friendly lunch together, but I don't think that would have played well for his base.
You're absolutely right, given where the discourse has gone, right?
We didn't even know about globalists and a global pedophile ring in July 2017, right?
It's only later on, right?
We didn't know.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
All the halcyon days of July 2017.
Well, this brings us to Paula White.
And we just I guess, you know, there's nothing to be done except to just listen to her for a moment.
The Lord says it is done.
For I hear victory, victory, victory, victory in the quarters of heaven.
For angels have even been dispatched from Africa right now.
Africa right now.
Africa right now.
From Africa right now.
They're coming here.
They're coming here in the name of Jesus from South America.
They're coming here.
They're coming here from Africa, from South America, angelic forces, angelic reinforcement,
angelic reinforcement, angelic reinforcement.
Vika hata anda ata, hora bata rata, ande eke eke manda rasata,
for I hear the sound of victory.
I hear the sound of victory.
Oh, Paula, she hears the sound of victory.
It's so, so fantastic.
It's moving.
It's rhythmic.
She really hits all of her bars there.
And it's also really, really complex.
Let's just sort of tee this up with the context.
This is as the votes are being counted, right?
Yes.
So this is when Election Day turned into Election Week.
I think it might be the day after.
You know, we started earlier on talking about, you know, the word performative and how that has these different valences to it.
And I was saying that one of the important things is about how it creates.
Another element of performance, or what I think it's important to study performance, is that it also offers us an opportunity to understand and encapsulate a particular worldview.
So this Paula White moment is a very particular worldview.
The call to angels is this kind of belief in dominionist ideas that there are literal demonic and angelic forces.
She's bringing them in from South, from Africa and South America because those are the quote unquote front lines of these sorts of battles.
One thing that unfortunately you don't hear in the clip, but if you watch the video, Is there's a man who's kind of what seems to be wandering around behind her carrying a what looks like a bed sheet.
Yeah.
What we find out is that that's actually a Jericho march where, you know, you walk around something seven times.
It's it's a performative act of evangelical protest.
It was done around abortion clinics and it was very notably done leading up to and before January 6th.
So here's this moment where Paula White is calling on literal angels to come and change or vote.
I'm not sure which one, but she's calling on these reinforcements and she's enacting this worldview where we'll find out has very dire consequences because it is a moment of spiritual warfare.
And so This is, again, one of those moments where watching that performance, I know the first time that I looked at it, I was like, what is going on here?
You know, I understand the speaking in tongues, but the angels, et cetera.
But once you begin to kind of break down and look at the performance in a little bit more of a nuanced and textured way and ask, OK, what's going on?
Who's this guy with the bedsheet, et cetera?
What becomes clear, unfortunately, is what's going to happen two months later.
Which will end with this insurrection, this riot, where all of these things become actualized in this different way.
You said that the angels were being summoned from the front lines, so they're not ethnically South American and African angels.
These would be angels of the, I don't know, the American pantheon that are returning from their own battles against Satanism?
Is that your understanding?
My understanding is not that the Angels have ethnicity, but that they are angelic forces who are sent to do missionary work, essentially.
So while maybe not having explicit ethnicity, I think that we can pretty much assume that they come out of an American cultural worldview.
They're being summoned back to home base because this is where the real work is going on.
And did you find out anything about whether the glossolalia was translatable or whether it mimicked anything that had come before?
Is that her unique brand?
My understanding is that it's a kind of one-to-one communication where people talk about it as a love language to God.
Yeah.
And that's my understanding.
Of it, although, because I've definitely heard people speaking in tongues that sound to me like bad Italian, you know, and but, you know, Paula White's isn't isn't as lyrical as that.
It's very it's very militant, to be honest.
And so I'm I guarantee you that there's a way that we could begin to read that speaking in tongues.
And then what's the context and what's what is this language being asked to do?
Yeah.
I think if you run that by a jazz musician or a scat singer or something like that, they would tell you that, well, actually those syllables are dictated by the bar structure that I already set up with the actual English language that I had begun with.
So, you know, she probably couldn't go into bad Italian after, you know, using the metronome that she was actually using.
Well, right.
And you remember, you know, Paula White had a show on BET, right?
Paula White comes out of the black church, you know, and so saying what she's doing is bars there is exactly right.
That's where she emerges out of now.
She's somebody else who's become a chameleon and done a million different things.
In fact, this kind of call to angels, I think, is relatively new to her.
Yeah.
And so she's somebody else who I contend is very much like Trump, kind of changing her performance based on the context to get what she can out of it.
Yeah, well, the perfect confessor for him, I guess.
Let's finish by reflecting on what I consider to be a sane practice of performance art as embodied by Marina Abramovich.
Along with Christopher Grob, you note that Abramovich is She's probably Trump's main competitor now in the global performance arts space, and sure enough, she has to get tagged as satanic.
But of course, her work for decades has always been about undermining the status quo or creating these spectacles of revealed cruelty.
And in a prior age, Abramovich's work might have woken up people to various realities of late capitalist life and its alienations and isolations.
Do you think that era is still with us, or is it over because performance is now just everywhere?
Can anybody do what she used to do?
My first answer is yes.
I think it depends on what it is.
I mean, one of the things that's really interesting, and you can think about someone like Milo Yiannopoulos is a great example of this, is the way in which the right has Come into, let's say, culturally left spaces and take in some of the ideas.
And so, you know, Yiannopoulos at some point does this weird performance thing called Daddy or something like this, where he's just kind of like naked in a bathtub in Soho.
And You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting about Abramovich's work is that as she's moved along, it's become way more spare.
You know, if you think about the kind of famous artist as present at Retrospective at MoMA, it's just an act of communion between an artist and an audience member.
But Trump's performance, on the other hand, is very much spectacular.
It's not about communion with anything else but himself.
And so, in a certain sense, I think about, what's the aim of the performance?
The right and Trump can colonize these different ideas, but ultimately, what's the purpose and what's the end for it?
Abramovich has a much different end than Trump does.
And I think that's really important to think about.
What is the end of this?
And it goes back to, and I'm so happy that you brought up this grobe essay, because he's actually writing, again, kind of in the halcyon days of early 2017.
He doesn't realize that Abramovich will be caught up in QAnon.
That happens later on.
That essay is really, really prescient.
And it speaks to, again, what I would probably call an anti-theatrical prejudice that a lot of us have, where we only see again, we kind of only see performance as something that's fake and not as something that has consequences.
And this is what I worry about right now in our election cycle, that we are seeing people who say, look, this is We've already lived through Trump once, what's going to be the hurt again?
Right?
It was all just performance the first time.
There's going to be nothing that's different this time around.
And I think we have to look really clearly, not only at the people who are around him helping direct him, but also what's the end that he wants to take us to?
And what's the end that he wants to take himself to?
Hank, thank you so much for your time.
It's been fantastic speaking with you.
Very, very appreciative of your book.
And I hope that, yeah, performance studies becomes a more broadly used framework.
I think it's going to help a lot of people as they try to parse this out over the next few years.
