The Bailout Theory of Trump's "Slush Fund"
What happens if we view Trump's proposed $1.8 billion dollar "Anti-Weaponization Fund" as a bailout for the larger right wing media ecosystem?
Turn on the news or a podcast and you’ll likely hear about The Latest Unbelievable Shit Trump Is Doing: this time, a proposed $1.8 billion dollar “slush fund” (sorry, “Anti-Weaponization Fund”) supposedly meant to purchase increased loyalty from figures like the Jan 6 rioters. The proposed fund has yet to be approved or put into practice (like many Trump ideas), but as usual, the response on behalf of mainstream, institutional and legacy media institutions has been panic over What This Means For Democracy. The very idea that the President would reward the Jan 6 rioters sends a signal to the country and the world that the rule of law has changed (as if it hasn’t already?).
But notice something. The discussion over the proposed fund operates almost entirely in the imaginary. By imaginary here I don’t mean “made up,” but rather the Lacanian imaginary, the layer of experience and reality in which one’s Ego is formed and reformed out of an identification with an image of an Other, either against or within it. In the classic formation of the mirror stage, Lacan described the Imaginary through the analogy of the event of the child looking into the mirror, and being able to see for the first time an image of, first, the Self, that it confuses for all of reality (narcissism), and then later, someone else walking behind them, an Other, perhaps the Mother (who in classic patriarchal fashion is distinguished from the male child, the standard for these thought experiments, and thus the first awareness of something like sexual difference).
Ditching this complicated framework we can describe the Jan 6 Slush Fund Imaginary the following way: when good liberals hear “Jan 6 Rioters” they are flooded with overwhelming negative feelings of Badness, Sin, Ressentiment—these are the ur-figures of our fascist turn that make up the footsoldiers of the force driving American democracy into the ditch, and these negative feelings are what recursively constitute their understanding of themselves as Not That. Add to that image another appearance, the “$1.8 Billion Dollar Compensation Fund,” and you start to slip into the symbolic with even worse feelings, feelings about justice denied, about abstractions like “the moral arc of the universe,” and the lack of punishment said Liberals so desire for the rioters’ transgression against, well, not even America but the liberals, the Egos that are in need of constant re-formation in a rapidly transforming world in crisis.
I hope by this you see I’m not here arguing the Jan 6 rioters did nothing wrong; rather that their power exists in the imaginary, as a recurring wound that Trump and the right knows burrows deep into the collective left/liberal unconscious. One way to read this proposed slush-fund is as a shot across the bow against the enemies of the broader right wing project, the latest insurgency in their assault against society as such, effective in large part because liberals are taking the bait. It doesn’t even matter if it happens, the damage is already done. But soon after the panic started to set in (and even some members of the GOP expressed discomfort with the idea), something else happened. Collective figures on the right, ranging from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, a far-right militia and chud social group, announced they would be applying to the fund.
This got me thinking. What do we make of the fact that key figures in the broader right wing universe see this fund not strictly as recompense to a bunch of aggrieved boat dealership guys but rather as an injection of money into the economy, their economy, up for grabs? I think this poses a challenge to those of us in opposition to this project. Do we view this proposed “slush fund” as evidence of our ongoing transition into a corrupt authoritarian system (which, yes, it is)? Or might it be useful to view it as a proposed bailout for the broader conservative media ecosystem after its failure to become hegemonic in the second Trump administration and the general decomposure of the MAGA wave of the GOP’s political constituency that coalesced during the mid-2010s?
In order to make this argument, I have to travel back in time a little bit. It is well known that the collective US right carries around a fungible conceptual apparatus that has over time variously been called things like “The Liberal Media,” “Mainstream Media,” or of course, Trump’s characterization of “Fake News” that has now become a concept so unmoored from its original articulation that it comes to represent everything but the thing it purports to be in guarding against, which doesn’t actually exist (or does it? tune in at 11!). Add to this the extremely rare instances of the DOJ going after figures like Michael Flynn or Steve Bannon and you have a new hydra in the right wing imaginary. Their panic over “The Liberal Media” and now the “Biden DOJ” is an idea that has a long history (tons of great media studies work has been done on this), and it is well known that the discursive power of an imagined grand conspiracy to brainwash Real Americans helped pave the way for new media institutions such as talk radio and cable news in the 1980s/90s, alongside the ongoing deregulation of media industries (among others).
As many of these media and political historians suggest, it would be a mistake to view “The Liberal Media” bugbear as an index of any actually existing, coherent institution. Not even because we are living through an era of profound media change (more on that in a minute), but because the thing it signifies—”The Liberal Media”—is not a thing but a feeling. Not MSNBC or The New York Times, or Black actors in Star Wars. All those things are caught in its signifying chain, but none of them actually build up to create the concept itself, which lacks a referent. It’s a deeply anti-foundationalist concept—signification is a system of differences, after all—and one that marks a feeling of being lesser, rejection, or ressentiment (I’m also starting to come around to the idea that ressentiment names perhaps the dominant affect on the contemporary right today, but more on that some other time). That’s why it’s been so effective moving across generations and media apparatuses over the past half-century, able to be mobilized with new signifiers for each new situation the party finds itself in.
There has been much ink spilled over the way the right’s obsession with media and influence became a tail wagging the dog over the last few decades, not only structuring what kind of media they produce but also leading to the mistaken belief they would receive legitimacy once they gained political power. That legitimacy doesn’t naturally come with political power and that the right is deeply unpopular is not an interesting idea. That this is all happening as traditional media continues to dissolve into an emerging digital media apparatus is somewhat interesting, but I still think there’s more going on here that actually is interesting: this is yet another example of the right’s ongoing crisis of reproduction, one that marks a larger and more general crisis of reproduction running through every institution of our late capitalist American society.
On the political right, this crisis has most consciously manifested as an awareness of changing demographics, either through racialized panics undergirding the expansion of civil rights to Black Americans or through immigration crackdowns performed by a growing, militarized deportation apparatus that is now interwoven into multiple levels of our civil society. But underneath even these panics is their knowledge—knowledge, not anxiety—that the whole thing relies on a shrinking base of old retired people and a cultural/ideological system that has lost mainstream legitimacy. On this, the right is laser-focused: the ongoing and recently-intensified manipulation of voting laws should be seen as an attempt to escape this crisis of reproduction by altering the rules of our already dysfunctional electoral system to ensure they keep power despite their aging base and increasing unpopularity. But the crisis of reproduction faced by the right isn’t just one that names their voters. It names their money and institutions, as well. And unlike the electoral college’s manipulable levers that control access to political sovereignty, the accumulation of capital is a process produced through a much more complex and globally-enmeshed totality they cannot control in the same way as the Electoral College.
This is the situation into which what I’m calling the latest bailout is being suggested. But why media? The last bailouts had much clearer stakes that were impressed upon Americans of all political tendencies—the global economy was going to end, supply chains had stopped. Who gives a shit about The Daily Wire’s failed Game of Thrones knockoff? It seems likely this proposed “slush fund” is indeed just the latest idea floating around the margins of the right wing universe, which has been functioning through a last-person-who-talks-to-Trump system for a while now. But while the right may ultimately be the (well, a) political apparatus that represents the interests of capital financial, fossil and otherwise, it nevertheless relies largely on media to gain its legitimacy, since it doesn’t actually have a wide enough appeal to organically grow its base that seems to deform and reform every time they take power and harm the lives of the voters they added to the coalition to gain power in the first place. This media ecosystem doesn’t just include Fox News hosts or streamers. It’s an entire cultural ecosystem, with characters, traditions, styles, institutions, regions, generations, industries, and what have you, all defined in opposition to a Liberal Other, juiced by a core of ressentiment. This ecosystem is the layer that stands in between the actual exercise of power and the construction of its legitimacy; this is all stuff Stuart Hall wrote about Thatcher’s England decades ago.
So what about 2026 America? Our economy is pumping with crypto shit, Trump is doing trades like an unemployed Reddit daytrader looking to turn his stimulus check into something real. Well, we know a core constituency of the right are propertied Americans of retirement age, who came to political consciousness during the era of deregulation that led to talk radio and cable news. Many of these voters still largely interface with the world through the practices they established in these earlier decades, now uploaded to smaller screens and new media platforms in the smartphone era. Add to that cohort the people stretched across thousands of miles, disconnected from urban areas except through the only talk radio channel in their area, or now some of the top-rated podcasts in the country, and decontextualized images of cities on fire and blue-haired lunatics ranting and raving about things that Regular Americans don’t give a shit about. Evangelical churches picked up some of that institutional reproductive slack over the past few decades, but they have an upper limit of genre that doesn’t allow them to cover the spread, especially after Trump 2016 added to the right’s base what is now the know-nothing MAHA podcast constituency, who dislike Christianity just as much as The Libs.
But it is that former constituency, the one that grew and accumulated with the first wave of the right’s post-70s accumulation—TV’s primary demographic—have been aging out of power for a while now, and the numbers show it. The latter have replaced the boob tube with the smartphone mirror in the hand and the accompanying media economy that has arisen in its wake, as markets decompose and reform across time (and the ending of There Will Be Blood suggests even another crisis awaiting that key constituency on the right). And it just can’t be emphasized enough through all this that we’re “late” now: it’s late, we have a lot of history, not just History but the history of this thing we’re in, now, that keeps going, freed from a telos aimed towards anything but More and Not Them. It’s been a half century since the neoliberal turn restructured markets in the core and set out the now-crumbling architecture for the world we currently inhabit. And sure, read any media industries work from the past 40 years and you’ll know we’ve been in waves of mergers for decades. But those earlier mergers produced effects that transform the possibility for the ongoing mergers in the present, which, again, it’s late: fewer and fewer companies to merge, decades of actual money moving across different financial instruments, growing, disappearing, and the like. Historical analogy or “How is this any different?” doesn’t work as a whataboutism with balance sheets that contain genealogical traces of completed unfoldings that have produced lasting effects across every level of our society.
The Televisual Crisis of the American Right
So what is happening at this particular moment is, I argue, different. You can even see evidence of it in right wing media’s formal appearances across time, technical apparatuses, and different waves of their political styles/formations. Trump, we know, is a product of television. His relationship with his movement--his control over it--operates through televisual logics: logics of postmodern play (he’s funny!), characterization (he’s a consistent character across multiple programs and networks), the list goes on (Lynne Joyrich was the first to give name to this phenomenon).
But I want to note a formal distinction at play here. Television in its traditional broadcast form is structured by a paradoxical mode of address that smushes together the cinematic and the “real” in ways that “work(ed)” on its viewers, who largely lived in a media economy with less players and screens than ours. Traditional broadcast television often uses direct address, which is forbidden in Hollywood cinema; think here of anchors staring at you, “welcome back,” stuff like that, that you didn’t traditionally see in mainstream narrative film until more recently. But when viewed from the comfort and intimacy of the home, this televisual address cuts through in emotionally satisfying ways. Raymond Williams and Lynn Spigel have described this process as “mobile privatization,” where the fantasy of the Out There comes to You In Here, a structure of mediation that has unfolded throughout modernity since the emergence of print media but radically intensified with the arrival of the radio and television into the domestic space of the individual home.
When viewed within the space of the home—a suburban enclave, a fenced-in compound safe from the Out There, a further pleasure emerges. What kinds of images are available to these viewers, barricaded from reality in the safety of their private little lebensraum? Many, it turns out. This new televisual image economy is glued together by the fact that television intimately engages its traditional viewer while simultaneously operating through less intimate aesthetics more typical of other media forms: cinema, radio, magazine advertisements, documentary film and newsreels, corporate meetings (turn on CNBC, right now), and the like. But the dominance of narrative, borrowed from cinema, is what glues this all together. When viewed from the home, traditional television offers its viewers a new visual economy that borrows from cinematic fantasy just as much as the more intimate conversational practices it innovates: television programs are filmed on sets designed by production crews, broadcast schedules often mixe narrative and nonfiction in the same program, Hollywood actors appear on TV series, and so on. All of this structures TV’s diegetic “otherness” as a place where reality can be formed/re-formed through an existing image economy drawn from an emerging multimedia system that smushes everything together into one single, comforting televisual Imaginary, structured by fantasy. Characters on Fox appear on different shows, linking them together into a shared Fox News CinematicTelevisual Universe. Gaffers and lighting crews work in Hollywood and on television throughout what used to be a kind of minor/major league system of labor flexibility. And for viewers: if you were a fan of the Trump TV show in the 00s, you can still follow it on social media and perform another kind of code switching on the new media apparatus.
But if you are a social media native, you’re not strictly limited to a few shows on a broadcast schedule. You’re scrolling, new, new, new, absorbing chaos, stumbling across exciting guest appearances-turned-main-characters by the day. The viewing situation has transformed, and the larger top-down, cinematic/televisual production processes that once dominated these industries and gave rise to FOX no longer operate through algorithmic social media the same way. I think the top layer of the GOP and the institutions of capital that support it don’t understand this, or if they do, they can only recreate the same ressentiment they once felt towards “The Liberal Media,” now aimed towards media audiences they can no longer control.
My reasons for believing this have to do with the recent moves like CBS’ Bari Weiss debacle--an attempt to inject right wing influence into traditional institutional network broadcasting--as well as the panic over online discourses that break from the party’s direct control, say, like Fox once had. Israel, AI, inflation and the economy, on and on; I don’t need to list these visible signs of new political sortings or fractures that are unfolding by the day (the Democrats have their own version of this too). But underneath this layer of figures like the Ellisons or the Murdochs are, well, what we might see as failed startups: Mr. Pillow, DeSantis’ based Whoops-There’s-A Sonnenrand staffing guild, wacko streamers. Hell, even look at Ben Shapiro’s declining influence in the wake of the right’s increasing turn against Israel! Epstein fits in here too of course. This layer of the media economy is built on, you guessed it, shit debt and quick liquidity that gets spent before it can form into anything as stable as an institution that the party can absorb into broader political purposes. Doesn’t this sound familiar? Like every other institution in our society, the right is passing hot potatoes and the players are increasingly reminiscent of the dipshit guys from the Miami stripclub in The Big Short, who cause Steve Carell’s “Mark Baum” to rush back to Wall Street and call the whole thing a bubble (so that it can be monetized. everybody forgets that part.).
To wind this down, I want to suggest that viewing this proposed slush fund primarily through the imperatives of The Law and Justice doesn’t allow us to see that what is happening here is, contra the popular slogan, Very Normal. It’s an inevitability in late cycles of capital accumulation. The right built a gigantic and highly profitable media apparatus that was relatively centralized through the 90s-00s as broadcast infrastructure was still functioning in a limited market. It has increasingly decentralized after 2008 as loose money and the new media technologies it funds grow, anarchically chasing profits wherever they can be found, starting from ground zero every couple of years.
Now, there is plenty of profit to be made. But unlike the boom phase of a rising market, financialized or not, we are not in a situation where existing wings of capital can hitch their wagon to a wider industrial revolution with seats on the boat for the taking. Outside of A.I., profits are found here and there, and increasingly on risky payoffs. This is not the efficient ideology machine of a cable television network that was able to be enmeshed with the institutional Republican Party of yore. Like the rest of our financialized economy, betting it all on AI, every success story brings with it countless failures carrying around bad debt and stalled profit. There’s nowhere left to grow to keep accumulating at the scale and rate they need to in order to be a successful capitalist enterprise. And that’s not just ideology--that’s how capitalism works.
In this light, I wonder what we could learn if we take the bailout idea and run with it. The proposed fund is “authoritarian” insofar as the beneficiaries are unsavory figures we associate with a political project with authoritarian aims. But we already did this! We did this in 2008/9, 2020/21! I think it was also pretty unsavory to give a bunch of money to the people who gambled on the housing market and destroyed the global economy because the only other option was apparently to let it collapse entirely. If we read the slush fund as a bailout rather than merely mob corruption signifying that Big Bad Thing that everyone has been waiting for since 2016, I think we would be able to actually see things—including if the bailout read is even correct—because such an approach attempts to see the real movement of things rather than making judgements, moral, aesthetic, or otherwise. Even if it doesn’t end up happening (although I’m increasingly skeptical of any “they won’t vote for that” retorts these days), I think its worth teasing out the logic of the bailout idea. It could help us answer things like:
Who exactly will be receiving this money?
Are the J6-ers just a discursive signal to ease the base?
Why are they bailing out old constituencies, when Silicon Valley seems increasingly comfortable integrating themselves into the political apparatus that the GOP is building?
Is “loyalty” even the right lens, or are we seeing evidence of a theory held by the right over who counts in the coalition?
I think these questions are far more important to grapple with than simply resorting to easy analogy (of authoritarian governments, of earlier fascisms) or moralistic legalism (which law is this breaking)? We should know by now that all of that didn’t do anything last time, either. The money printer is spitting to the beat of a ticking clock, powered by a battery nobody has changed since who knows when.