Trump's Two Bodies

The Political Theology of Trumpism

In the criminal trial in Manhattan and the Supreme Court oral arguments, the two different sides of Donald Trump are fully on display. On the one hand, in Alvin Bragg’s criminal trial, we have Trump-in-himself: he’s a petty conman, a quasi-gangster, who lives in a world of pornstars and pay offs to tabloids. There he’s an old man who is falling asleep in court. And maybe not because he’s aging either: the Trump trial is actually kind of boring; it’s quotidian sleaze that can’t break through the news about Gaza and the student protests. People have criticized Bragg’s decision to prosecute Trump, but it occurred to me that maybe there’s a quiet brilliance in the move; it cuts Trump down to size and shows him to the world to be just what he is: a common, banal criminal. It even made me wonder at the wisdom of my insistence on Trump’s fascistic qualities. Doesn’t that just add to his myth? Perhaps he is just kind of a nothing.

On the other hand, before the Supreme Court, he have Trump-for-others, the way Trump would like to appear, and the way many of his supporters would like him to be: le Roi, the King, the state embodied, a figure above the law. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times about Trump’s lawyers’ theory of the presidency:

It is difficult to overstate the radical contempt for Republican government embodied in the former president’s notion that he can break the law without consequence or sanction on the grounds that he must have that right as chief executive. As Trump sees it, the president is sovereign, not the people. In his grotesque vision of executive power, the president is a king, unbound by law, chained only to the limits of his will.

Shockingly, it seems that certain members of the Supreme Court are willing to take this notion seriously.

How should we understand this apparent contradiction between Trump the meager man and Trump’s pretensions to being il Duce? I thought of Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 book The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. In that classic study, Kantorowicz describes how lawyers and political philosophers in the middle ages and early modern period developed a conception of the monarchy where the king was understood to have two bodies, his literal, corporeal one and another, incorporeal one, co-extensive the state, or, as Kantorowicz argues, the origin of the myth of the state itself. Here’s Kantorowicz quoting from the Tudor jurist Edmund Plowden:

For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.

Trump certainly has his share of “Defects and Imbecilities,” yet in office, his lawyers would like us to believe, he becomes this other, mystical being, an embodiment of the American volk’s own will. With the powers granted to him by this type of political theology, he is somehow identical with and above the Constitution. It’s worth considering the context of Plowden’s remarks. It was a case that argued King’s acts before or after his enthronement still participated in this mystical body: “They pointed out that, if lands which the King has purchased before he was King, namely ’in the capacity of his Body natural,’ later were given away by him, such gift, even when made during his nonage, had to be recognized as the King's act.” Now this is starting to sound a little familiar. By dint of holding that office, he had, as Trump likes to say, “total immunity.” Again, this is the legal philosophy for a monarchy, not a republic, which by definition recognizes nothing above the law and, like the Lord God in Heaven, is “not a respecter of persons.”

Trump is neither wholly Donald from Queens nor the God-Emperor. He is both. And perhaps the key to understanding him as a political phenomenon is see how in him the mere schmuck can become deified. His propagandists often say, “If they can do it to him, they can do it to you,” of his legal prosecutions. But the appeal goes the other way, too: “if it can happen to a putz like him—power, success,money—it can happen to a putz like you.” As William Hazlitt wrote in The Spirit of Monarchy:

The worthlessness of the object does not diminish but irritate the propensity to admire. It serves to pamper our imagination equally, and does not provoke our envy. All we want is to aggrandize our own vainglory at second hand; and the less of real superiority or excellence there is in the person we fix upon as our proxy in this dramatic exhibition, the more easily can we change places with him, and fancy ourselves as good as he. Nay, the descent favours the rise; and we heap our tribute of applause the higher, in proportion as it is a free gift. An idol is not the worse for being made of coarse materials; a king should be a common-place man.

Sooner or later, Trump the natural man will succumb to his infirmities or imbecilities; but we might wonder how Trump’s other, mystical body will haunt us in the years to come. As an idol it’s already worshipped by too many, will we now enshrine it in the law itself?