Part III - The Acting President

7 The Acting President

Trump is a hyper-narcissist performance artist charismatic rough beast. As for Bannon, he is Trump’s Barnum.

Richard Schechner¹

He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism.

Rick Perry²

YouGov, the online pollsters of public opinion, conducted a survey in the UK in 2012 to see What Voters Really Think of Parliament and Our Politicians. That was the survey’s subtitle. Its main title was Democracy on Trial.³ Judging from its reported findings, democracy was found guilty on all charges. The main indictment was against the trustworthiness of politicians. The report tells us that two-thirds of respondents believed that ‘however they start out, most MPs “end up becoming remote from the everyday lives and concerns of the people they represent”’.⁴ Shockingly, almost the same proportion agreed that ‘politicians tell lies all the time – you can’t believe a word they say’.⁵ The section containing those two findings opened with a gloss by YouGov journalist Peter Kellner, author of the report, where he opined: ‘If Parliament is the principal stage on which democracy is displayed, MPs are the principal actors.’⁶ He was making the point that politicians are judged by the appeal and persuasiveness of their rhetorical performance. This is made express in the title to a prize-winning article by scholar Alan Finlayson: ‘Proving, Pleasing and Persuading? Rhetoric in Contemporary British Politics’.⁷ Finlayson cites research conducted by the Fabian Society which found that if non-voters and swing voters could change one thing about British politics it would be ‘politicians themselves: who they are, the way that they talk and act’.⁸

If voters are as much persuaded by the charisma of a politician’s personal performance as by their policies, it should not surprise us that actors have sometimes successfully made the move from showbiz to the business of government. President Reagan and Governor Schwarzenegger are well-known examples. Sometimes the substance exceeds the show, as it does in the case of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who at the time of writing stands centre stage of global politics as the feted wartime president of Ukraine. With other performers, a spectacular show might make up for lesser substance. What John L. Styan observed in relation to theatrical acting is equally true of political performance: ‘[a] profound idea only partly communicated is as nothing against a shallow one wholly communicated: content, form and medium cannot be judged apart’.⁹ Early modern rhetorician Thomas Wilson made much the same point when he observed that ‘an eloquent man being smally learned’ can be much more persuasive than ‘a great learned clarke … wanting words to set forth his meaning’.¹⁰ Donald Trump has been a major beneficiary of voters’ susceptibility to persuasive political performance, and his performative prowess might be said to have overcome what Wilson calls small learning and Styan calls ideas of a shallow sort. His supporters will like the substance of what he says every bit as much as they like his style, but in relation to a strongly partisan section of the electorate the opinions of card-carrying supporters have little bearing on effective persuasion. In the 2016 presidential election campaign, neither Trump not Clinton had to do much, if anything, to persuade their dedicated followers. It is in relation to the minority of undecided voters – the floating or swing voters – that the persuasiveness of rhetorical performance comes most strongly into play.¹¹

What Donald Trump lacks in political education he has made up for through practical experience in the entertainment industry, and especially through his role as host of the popular programme The Apprentice. The format of that show – in which business hopefuls compete for the chance of employment in Trump’s business empire – is one that encourages conflict, egocentricity, autocracy, and snap judgments of a career-defining sort. It was ideal preparation for the president he became. If, as commentators have observed, US presidential rhetoric has evolved from addressing the US Congress to addressing the public directly,¹² then Trump’s televisual and Twitter presidency can be regarded as the culmination of the process – at once its zenith and its nadir.¹³ The argument that Trump brought the values and practices of popular entertainment to presidential politics is the governing theme of the 2020 BBC documentary The Trump Show.¹⁴ Originally a three-part series, a fourth part, ‘Downfall’, was added in 2021 to document the last days of Trump’s presidency culminating in the infamous incursion into the Capitol Building by a mob of his supporters on 6 January 2021. The title The Trump Show may be an allusion to the 1998 movie The Truman Show, in which Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) is a normal Joe who doesn’t realize that everything in his life has been staged to deliver a reality TV show in which he is the star. The argument of The Trump Show is that the reality TV star turned president, turned the presidency into a reality TV show. Even Trump’s critics acknowledge his knack for producing an entertaining performance. Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News during the Trump presidency, was especially struck by Trump’s remarkable stage-managed meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The Trump Show shows him smiling broadly at the sheer chutzpah of it all: ‘It was mind-blowing. I mean, it was showmanship of the highest order’ (ep. 1, 57’20). Tim Alberta, chief political correspondent for Politico Magazine, echoes the sentiment:

Donald Trump, who has an insatiable thirst for reality television style drama saw an opportunity to be the star of the biggest show in global politics.

(ep. 1, 57’40)

This is Donald Trump sending a message to the political establishment at home and internationally, that there’s a new sheriff in town and the presidency was going to be show business.

(ep. 1, 58’10)

Near the start of the ‘Downfall’ episode, British politician and Trump confidante Nigel Farage called Trump’s performance in the 2020 presidential campaign rallies ‘a level of political showmanship the world has never seen before, and I’m going to predict now will never see again’ (ep. 4, 1’37). Where Truman Burbank was the only person in his world not ‘in the know’, the documentary makes clear that Trump is well aware of the production values in the performance of his political brand. A suitable subtitle for the BBC documentary, and the title I have chosen for this chapter, would be ‘The Acting President’, for Trump is an actor through and through – even in the sense of being adept in the art of actio, which is the classical rhetorical term for the use of hand gestures. We will return to his hands later. What The Trump Show demonstrates, and what is in any case clear to a casual observer, is that Trump was somehow able to dominate the political scene through his natural mastery of performative techniques. Why devote a chapter to the performative rhetoric of this one former president? The simple and sobering answer is that he came to power in one of the world’s most free and open democracies and his show turned out (through unprecedented insurrection and impeachment) to be as shallow as it had been seductive. If ‘[e]lections are a mix of reality TV, drama, and soap opera’,¹⁵ the case of Trump the reality TV president supplies an exemplary instance of a performative demagogue and a warning for all time.

The ‘reality’ in ‘reality television’ seems an odd descriptor for a genre of entertainment which is highly hyperbolic, exaggerated, and frankly unrealistic. The truth, though, is that such shows can perform and become a sort of reality for participants and viewers alike. Their reality is the heightened reality of the theatrical stage. The celebrated actor Sir Ian McKellen once said something that is relevant in this regard and also highly pertinent to this book’s general concern with the fashioning of the world. He was speaking many years ago as a talk-show interviewee in the context of a discussion on the nature of realistic theatrical acting through the centuries since Shakespeare’s day. He made the point that the acting style of the Victorian actor Henry Irving in the play The Bells would seem melodramatic to us today but would have seemed perfectly realistic to the tastes of audiences at the time. Sir Ian’s pithy summary was this: ‘fashions of reality change’.¹⁶ The new reality of our time is the reality of the unreal – the reality of virtual reality and of the reality ‘show’. Trump, as showman, has an innate feel for what plays well in these times. He has a performer’s instinct for forming a public persona and a maker’s instinct for moulding and mobilizing the mass of voters. In the hands of such a player, realities can be refashioned. In The Trump Show, Jon Sopel, the North America editor for the BBC, issues a warning: ‘I think people underestimate him at their peril. He understands theatre. Understands entertainment. Understands politics as entertainment’ (ep. 1, 25’30).

To know for sure that Donald Trump conceived his presidency as a continuation of his reality television performance, we needn’t rely solely upon the testimony of his supporting cast. Near the beginning of the second episode of The Trump Show, the man himself gives the game away when an archive clip shows him at the start of the first cabinet meeting of 2018 saying: ‘Welcome back to the studio!’ (ep. 2, 2’5). Sara Brady writes in a personal communication with performance scholar Richard Schechner that Trump’s performance is ‘not acting/theatre and it’s not performance/art. It’s a category of reality TV, of “theatre of the real” … It’s not about authentic, or true, or false, or fake. Simply: it’s “good television”.’¹⁷

One of the talking heads on The Trump Show is Omarosa Manigault Newman. She was the director of African American outreach for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and joined his White House team as an assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison. She first met Trump when she appeared as a contestant on The Apprentice. Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist from the Washington Post, interviewed Newman in August 2015. His reflections on that interview are extremely informative:

The thing she said was, Jonathan, reality television has taken over America. Donald Trump is the reality television king. He is now bringing that to Presidential politics and you are making a mistake if you try to view him through a Presidential prism. You need to view him through this pop culture reality television prism. And I was having a hard time with that. Three years later I have no hard time at all. I completely see it. Everything I know about Donald Trump and learned about Donald Trump I learned from Omarosa.¹⁸

Ms Newman picks up her theme again on The Trump Show when, around halfway through the first episode, she says that people were selected for Trump’s White House team ‘based on their look. A lot of the briefing materials would have a photo clipped on it … it was almost like a casting call.’

A Skirmisher Enters the Fray

The award for most entertaining cameo played out in Trump’s inner circle goes to financier Anthony Scaramucci. He acted (in every sense of the word) as Trump’s White House director of communications for a period of just eleven days. A confident and brash New Yorker, he blazed into his post and then blazed out of it post-haste when Trump fired him for an indiscrete interview with a reporter for the New Yorker. That was the official reason. The Trump Show proposes that Scaramucci had to go because he stole Trump’s spotlight. It quotes an ABC News reporter who says that:

Scaramucci came in – bigger than President Trump in his own ways and received an even bigger spotlight than the boss himself and as all of us who cover this administration know that is the one way to get out of this White House.

(ep. 1, 43’10)

In Trump’s reality television White House, it was not so much that life imitated art, but that art and life were indistinguishable. Scaramucci epitomizes the phenomenon, for his very name evokes the stock character of the commedia dell’arte known as Scaramouche, a name that rock music fans will recognize from the lyrics of rock band Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Scaramouche derives from the Italian scaramuccia, meaning skirmish, and the English word skirmish is itself derived from scaramuccia via the French escarmouche. Scaramouche is an aggressive figure and a dramatically compelling one. He ‘can be clever or stupid – as the actor sees fit to portray him’.¹⁹ It’s almost as if the young Anthony studied the role and made it his mission to give it life. Before his interview on The Trump Show, Scaramucci said to his interviewer, ‘you don’t want a boring show … all that spin cycle bullshit that all these political clowns give you’ (ep. 1, 1’36). The irony is that Scaramucci in his commedia role is the purest, classic incarnation of a clown, right down to the fact that Tiberio Fiorilli (1608–1694), the actor who established the role of Scaramouche, abandoned the traditional commedia mask for the white facial cosmetics that we associate with the modern circus clown.²⁰ There have been many incarnations of Scaramouche down the years. One website devoted to commedia dell’arte even suggests that the character traits of Scaramouche were reborn in the brash Looney Tunes cartoon character Daffy Duck.²¹ I would add, not just his character but also his clothes – since Daffy’s colouring resembles Scaramouche’s all-black costume with white ruff. Scholars have argued that ‘the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment’.²² For the offence of encroaching on Trump’s comedic prerogative, Anthony Scaramucci simply had to go.

Off the Cuff or with a Script Up His Sleeve?

It is difficult to discern in Trump’s performance when and to what extent it is scripted and stage-managed and to what extent it is off the cuff. As regards the lowest point of his performance in office, which was surely his refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and his conspiratorial allegations of election fraud, there is good reason to believe that there was nothing ad-lib about it. Trump had prepared that script many years previously. This is a point convincingly made in episode four of The Trump Show, ‘Downfall’.

Tim O’Brien recounts an airplane flight with Trump when he was conducting research for his 2005 biography TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.²³ On the flight, Trump watched the 1941 cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane, acted and directed by Orson Welles. Trump is said to have paused the film at one point and said to O’Brien, ‘this is an amazing scene’. The scene is the one in which a newspaper owned by Charles Foster Kane runs the headline ‘Fraud at the polls’ after Kane loses a political election. It seems that Trump kept the script to that scene filed away for many years and might have pulled it out for the 2016 election had he lost it. We can deduce this from his third televised presidential debate with Hillary Clinton (20 October 2016), in which the convenor asked Trump if he was prepared to commit to the principle of peacefully conceding to Clinton in the event of losing the election. Trump replied, ‘I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?’ The fact that he won in 2016 meant that the Citizen Kane script could be kept under wraps on that occasion, but when he lost the 2020 election it was duly dusted off. Kane’s ‘Fraud at the polls’ became Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’, a slogan coined by right-wing political agitator Roger Stone in 2016.²⁴ Regardless of the shortcomings of its ideology, the slogan ‘Stop the Steal’ is a brilliant example of rhetorically effective drafting. It is in form a simple tricolon of monosyllabic words with a powerful alliterative repetition of the ‘st’ sound. No sound is rhetorically more potent than ‘st’, for it is the sound of stasis. It is the sound of a static obstacle or state which an active political movement will instinctively desire to shift and overcome. The effect of the ‘st’ sound has been deeply embedded in human psychology since prehistoric times. It is a potent example of sound symbolism, for the ‘st’ sound – which supplies our language of stasis, stopping, and standstill – is itself made when the mouth brings the movement of air to an abrupt stop.²⁵ Probably unintentionally, Trump used the ‘st ... the st …’ slogan as a way to depict the Democrat’s election victory as a stubborn obstacle to be overcome.

Trump’s Two Tongues

Several commentators have remarked upon Trump’s use of simple speech. An article titled ‘Trump’s cleverest trick is sounding stupid’ notes that the Flesch–Kincaid readability test assesses Trump’s language to be pitched at the level of nine- and ten-year-olds, Hillary Clinton’s at thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, and George Washington’s 1796 farewell address at university degree level.²⁶ Others have noted that Trump’s language is a highly polarized mix of phrases, some of which appeal more to men and others more to women.²⁷ What has not been closely analysed is the way in which Trump frequently combines a highbrow, presidential style alongside a low-brow, populist style within a single passage of speech. This enables him to speak to two audiences at once. Instances of Trump’s double-speak are too numerous to list, but there are several examples in Trump’s first official press conference as president held on 16 February 2017 in which Trump expressly addressed two different audiences at the same time: ‘I’m making this presentation directly to the American people, with the media present.’²⁸ He was talking at the media, but he was talking to the people. The following short passage from that press conference illustrates the way that he uses pithy repetitions (underlined) and colloquial language (italicized) alongside more highbrow clauses to speak in two registers at once with the aim of satisfying the immediate audience of news reporters while appealing directly to members of the wider public audience watching from their homes:

The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it … to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.

(4’17)

Examples of Trump’s two-tongued technique can be found in every one of his campaign speeches. Listed next are just a few of the many instances that appear in a single speech delivered at a 2020 presidential election rally in Rome, Georgia.²⁹ In each case, the phrase that demonstrates his low-brow linguistic mode appears in italics to contrast it to the more sophisticated style of the text immediately preceding it. Repetition is again underlined:

With your vote, we will continue to cut your taxes, cut regulations, support our police, support our great military, protect your second amendment … Defend religious liberty, and ensure more products are proudly stamped with that beautiful phrase ‘Made in the USA.’ That’s happening.

(2’14)

Biden has vowed to abolish American oil, fracking, natural gas. You ever see a guy fracking?

(7’31)

As long as I’m president, we will remain number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. We are now number one.

(9’29)

Joe Biden is a globalist who spent 47 years outsourcing your jobs, opening your borders and sacrificing American blood and treasure in endless foreign Wars. Don’t worry, they’re all coming home.

(12’20)

If you want a vaccine to kill the virus, a job to support your family well, and freedom to live your life, then go cast your ballot for a man named Trump. We’re doing a job. We’re doing a job together.

(25’15)

We will mass distribute the vaccine in just a few short weeks and it will quickly help us to eradicate it. It’s going to go anyway.

(21’15)

The last example in this list illustrates perfectly the dumbing down technique of Trump’s two-tongued technique. Just in case the word ‘eradicate’ has too many syllables for some of his audience, he translates it immediately as ‘going to go’. Journalist Ben MacIntyre observes that ‘Trump’s unique brand of Basic English may sound stupid to some but it is highly effective, carefully calculated, and the shape of things to come’.³⁰ How ‘carefully calculated’ (as opposed to instinctive) it is may be doubted, but Trump’s double-speak is certainly effective. Part of its appeal to his supporters may lie in its ability to mimic their own hotchpot patterns of thought. Journalist and Trump biographer Gwenda Blair notes that Trump’s habit of speaking in ‘incomplete thoughts and sentence fragments has an unmediated, stream-of-consciousness feel’, so that for the members of his audience the way he talks amplifies ‘the voice inside their own heads – a rich and sometimes dark stew of conversational snippets and memory scraps, random phrases and half-thoughts’.³¹ Incoherence also has the advantage of shifting the work of solving the puzzle onto the audience, which not only captures the listeners’ attention but also leaves them with the Making Sense that they had a hand in constructing the outcome as co-Creator and co-Producer. Whatever its merits or demerits, Trump’s language is undeniably a key factor in creating his distinctive brand. As linguist Jennifer Sclafani acknowledges in a video interview for the Washington Post: ‘You can use language to construct an identity … that works towards creating an authentic persona that people will pay attention to’ (7 July 2017).

The Making Sense of Trump’s Hand Gestures

We now turn to consider another symbolic register in Trump’s performance repertoire – the action of his hands. The very word ‘action’ is a cousin to ‘agriculture’, the connection being the idea of driving on beasts. This early association with the manual work of driving animals was later coupled with driving on a lawsuit (hence ‘legal action’) and with the gestural rhetorical performance of the hand (called ‘actio’) by which charismatic politicians drive their followers on in something like the way that a gesticulating shepherd drives sheep into an obedient flock. This idea of ‘driving people on’ is the precise etymology of the word ‘demagogue’, which is worth bearing in mind as we come to puzzle Donald Trump’s distinctive and seemingly innate aptitude for gestural performance. As with his linguistic register, Trump’s register of manual gestures employs a sort of double-speak. This could be read as a sign of weakness or confusion, but on the contrary it seems to serve him well as a way of appealing to a broad range of gestural spectators through a single performance event, just as his linguistic double-speak helps him to connect to socially higher and lower sections of his audience through a blend of higher and lower modes of speech. The authors of the article ‘The Hands of Donald Trump’ advance the theory that Donald Trump is popular because he is a comedic performer. They make the point that comedy is a language that works on more than one level and therefore transcends differences in social status and taste:

[S]treet performers, clowns, criminals, or jokers may become popular – and valuable – precisely because of their skill at entertaining. In the liminal space of comedic entertainment, distinct identities of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture may remain in the interpretation of verbal and gestural form, but viewers laugh, even if not for the same reason.³²

Trump’s mixed gestural language, particularly his favoured technique of blending expansive gestures with pinpointing gestures, allows him to convey the sense that he knows how to use the broad brush as well as the fine needle. A great deal has been written about Trump’s idiosyncratic gestural idiom. My aim in this section is not to duplicate the vast volume of observations and analysis that has been offered up by psychologists, rhetoricians, and experts in performance and communication, but to select and synthesize some of their insights to propose and support a new theory about Trump’s gestural symbols. The theory is that Trump’s gestures start to make integrated sense when we see them as gestures of making. This is in addition to, and without prejudice to, the suggestion that Trump’s gestures can be read as elements in a comedic routine. After all, comedy can itself be considered a mode of making, one which makes communities by making people laugh at the folly that makes us who we are.

Trump is a maker. As a businessman he makes deals and makes money. As a celebrity he makes television. In the 2016 presidential election he made ‘making’ the central message of his campaign, promising to ‘Make America Great Again’ and to ‘Build a Wall’. Since effective performance in rhetoric and theatre demands that the action should suit the word, and the word suit the action (a paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet), it should follow that ‘making’ will be as central to Trump’s gestures as to his speech. This is indeed what we find, for his gestural repertoire can be read as mimes in which he performs fabricating manipulations of invisible stuff. The abstract to the article ‘The Hands of Donald Trump’ hints at this reading when it observes that ‘Trump crafts with his hands to … accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven’.³³ At another point in their account the same authors even compare one of Trump’s signature moves to a mode of culinary craft. We will come to that and to other specific examples of Trump’s ‘making’ mimes shortly. The broader point is that Trump’s gestural activity is rhetorically persuasive not only because it entices the spectator to enjoy the comedic exaggeration of his gestural performance, but also because it draws the observer into a sense of participation in Trump’s projects of making. Television audiences are especially seduced by programmes – including gardening shows, DIY shows, and cooking shows – that offer the vicarious experience of manual making. It is not insignificant, therefore, that Trump’s former television show, The Apprentice, challenged competing teams to make a success of a weekly task which very often involved manual making. Examples included the restoration or renovation of real estate locations, the devising of new ice-cream flavours, designing a new pizza, and making chocolate bars, cupcakes, and pies. The very first episode of the very first series set a task that is the American cultural archetype of making stuff in order to make money – selling home-made lemonade from a street stall. Before we turn to some specific examples of the making mode in Trump’s manual performance, it is useful to make one or two general points about his gestural idiom.

The first point is that Trump’s gestures are extremely dynamic. Trump’s involvement in high-paced business is expressed through the frenetic busyness of his hands. He is active – always doing, doing, doing. His hyperactive hands mirror this not only through their perpetual motion but also through the remarkable way they leap from one type of motion to another. He takes his hands, or his hands take him, on an ever-circling tour of his favourite gestural topics – moving from his expansive, double-handed, symmetrical, open-palm-facing-forward, outward-circling, ‘window-cleaner’ action (which I call his ‘large circle’) to his precise one-handed pinched circlet of thumb and finger (which I call his ‘small circlet’). The latter is Trump’s signature gesture. When Michelle Obama gave a celebrated speech denouncing ‘hateful language … from public figures on TV’ and someone who is ‘cruel or acts like a bully’, she did not refer to Trump by name, but by using his signature ‘small circlet’ gesture we were left in no doubt that he was the target of her denunciation.³⁴ Trump tours through his repertoire of stock gestures like a businessman doing his rounds – checking off his stocks, looking in on his projects one by one. We will shortly see that his two gestural poles – the large circle and small circlet – are especially useful for illustrating the way in which Trump’s gestural language conveys the Making Sense.

A second general and foundational feature of Trump’s hand gestures is that taken together they are expansive – ambitious in a spatial sense. This sprawling attribute is entirely to be expected from a man who is personally ambitious and larger than life, who is physically tall and corpulent and extremely proud of his big hair. Trump’s costume is also larger than life. His unusually long ties and excessively baggy suits are clown-like. Writing in Vanity Fair, Kenzie Bryant conjectures that Trump’s ever-widening trouser legs might be down to the fact that he is shrinking with age or that he is wearing the cut of trouser favoured by Juggalos – the hardcore fans of hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse who are frequently to be seen sporting clown wigs and make-up.³⁵ Sometime British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is another political leader who favours the clown cut of baggy clothing and a ‘cut’ of hair that is even more clownish than Trump’s.³⁶ Boris Johnson’s nickname ‘BoJo’ is quite at home in the pantheon of famous clowns alongside Bozo, Coco, Vercoe, and Blinko. The Italian press, attuned to their native tradition of commedia dell’arte, seized upon Johnson’s clown-like persona in the aftermath of his resignation on 7 July 2022. Corriere della sera presented a photo gallery with the title ‘Bojo the Clown Surrenders’.³⁷ In England, The Economist covered the resignation with the pithy front-page headline ‘Clownfall’ (9 July 2022). The ancient Greek comic actors preferred to wear tights, but in two respects their costume has come down to Trump, for they wore heavy padding and exhibited a large phallus.³⁸ In Trump’s case the padding is his own actual flesh, and the phallus is his long dangling tie.³⁹ The long tie survives to this day as a staple of the costume of circus clowns. As to the colour, Trump’s preference for a red tie on a white shirt is no doubt a nod to the red of the Republican Party, but it inadvertently serves a deeper semiotic purpose, for red against white is one of the most ancient and innate signs of dramatic, ritual performance.⁴⁰ Red on white, whether in the form of a red wax seal on white parchment, or blood on white skin, is the primal and archetypal sign – indeed, the word ‘seal’ is itself derived from the Latin for ‘small sign’.

The expansiveness of Trump’s tie, baggy trousers, big hair, and bulging body extends even to a tendency to splay his fingers apart. Swell sells, and Trump wants us to know that he’s Mr Big and a swell guy. It is no surprise therefore that Trump bristles at any suggestion that his hands might in fact be on the small side. He was acutely defensive in response to a political rival’s mischievous implication that Trump’s manual shortcomings might be mirrored in the scale of another anatomical extremity.⁴¹ Trump countered in a televised Fox News debate by proudly splaying his hands and, dismissing the implied slight of his manhood, assured his audience, ‘I guarantee you there’s no problem’.⁴² As he uttered that guarantee his left hand delicately alighted on the mic stand in a manner that might have been a Freudian slip. Trump’s standard gesture of splayed fingers may be an instance of the sort of dominance displays – especially those that give the impression of superior size – that are exhibited by mammalian males across a wide range of species. In addition to the size aspect, there is also a vigour, performative energy, and dynamism in the splayed fingers. That dynamism is lacking in the stock gestures so often favoured by other politicians, such as the chopping axe-hand (favoured by Hillary Clinton) and Barack Obama’s clenched ‘signature precision-grip gesture’ (discussed later).⁴³ It is almost as if Trump’s hands have internalized the secrets of dynamic dance. The famous ‘jazz hands’ dance move, for example, is performed with elbows in at the waist and arms out to the side with fingers splayed. One online tutor advises the dancer to ‘think of energy shooting out from each fingertip’.⁴⁴

The authors of ‘The Hands of Donald Trump’ repeat a question that has been asked frequently by bemused political commentators: ‘How does a businessman situated in the uppermost tier of American wealth capture the allegiance of the working classes?’⁴⁵ The authors of the article put it down to his class-transcending comedic appeal, but concealed in their question and buried in their own analytical response another answer presents itself – it is that Trump appeals to manual workers because his hands are always manually at work, and specifically at work in gestured processes of manufacture. Unlike members of the orthodox political cadre, Trump has seldom been accused of craftiness, artfulness, and subtle manipulation. This may be because the brute openness of his gestures combined with other aspects of his performance suggests a lack of guile. His hand actions are those of a down-to-earth crafter, an artisan – a manipulator only in the sense that he constantly mimes manual making.

Kneading Bread, Pulling Thread

We now consider two of Trump’s gestures in detail to demonstrate how they mirror manual activities of making. There are, of course, a great many more gestures in Trump’s range, but these two – the ‘large circle’ and the ‘small circlet’ – are a good starting point because they lie at polar extremes as being respectively one of the most expansive and one of the most tightly focused actions in his repertoire.

We will commence with Trump’s ‘large-circle’ gesture – his double-handed, symmetrical, open-handed, palms facing the viewer, window-cleaning action. Jennifer Sclafani observes that this tends to move ‘either in the vertical (downward-moving) or horizontal (outward-moving) direction’, which she likens to two different modes of manual craft – kneading-dough and combing out tangled threads – saying that:

[T]he openhanded configuration of his hands [gives] the impression not that he is trying to pinpoint an idea but is instead trying to ‘flatten’ (in the case of vertical downward movement) or ‘spread’ (in the case of horizontal-outward movement) an idea. Together these movements recall the action of kneading and stretching pizza dough – taking something amorphous and putting some shape to it. Finally, the spreading of the fingers give the impression that he is combing his way through a large snarl … Trump’s indexical gestures … construct Trump as the big, strong, forceful Washington outsider who will comb through the current political mess the country is in and will restore order to American life.⁴⁶

In the early days of the 2020 US presidential campaign, Sky News Australia interviewed Louise Mahler, billed as ‘Australia’s leading body language expert’, who gushed that ‘Donald Trump is the master of body language’.⁴⁷ She might not like him or his politics, but as a professional gesture analyst, she was impressed by his performative prowess. (Another body language expert, Mary Civiello, acknowledges likewise that ‘he’s entertaining, even if you don’t buy a thing he’s saying’.)⁴⁸ Louise Mahler singled out his large-circle gesture as the ‘key tool’ by which he is able to ‘work with people, so that they come with him’. As she demonstrated the gesture, she emphasized that it operates by bringing his supporters in. As if working a ball of dough, Trump constantly massages his audience, presses them, and pulls them, until they a worked into his project and manipulated into the form of a mass. He kneads his support base as if it were a pizza base.

The authors of ‘The Hands of Donald Trump’ mention in passing that Trump ‘used his craft as an entertainer to forge a new hybrid of politics and comedy’,⁴⁹ but it could also be his craft as a manual maker, a manipulator of stuff – an actual ‘forger’ – that assists him to make contact with his support base of manual workers. This is borne out by the second of the two gestures that we focus on here: the ‘small circlet’ made by pinching the thumb and index finger together while splaying the non-pinching digits outwards and upwards. The small circlet is a species of ‘precision grip’, which, as Michael Lempert explains, ‘refers to a family of gestures … named for the prehensile motion in which something small appears to be grasped’.⁵⁰ A simple way to replicate Trump’s small circlet is to imagine that you are holding a sewing needle between thumb and index finger. Pretend to push the needle through cloth and then pull it up with the other fingers splayed upwards, as if drawing the thread through the fabric. Not only will this put your hand in the classic Trump small circlet position, but it will force your hand to follow a typical Trump trajectory – from midriff or chest level upwards to somewhere near shoulder height. Trump’s first solo press conference after his inauguration is infamous for his lengthy (seventy-seven minute), impassioned tirade against ‘mainstream media’, and it is also notable for his heightened gestural activity, including repeated use of the small circlet gesture.⁵¹ The first time that he holds that gesture, rather than simply flashing it, he very clearly demonstrates the entire upwards trajectory of the needle-pulling-thread action (5’35). It’s not just a stitch. It’s a stitch up. It can be read as a sign that Trump is fabricating, or to talk in terms of another threading process – spinning a yarn. Ironically, and revealingly, he makes the fabricating gesture at precisely the moment that he says, ‘to be honest’. He then holds it until the next emphatic statement, ‘I inherited a mess’. The needle-and-thread action therefore demonstrates Trump’s resolution to get a grip on, and perhaps even to patch up, the political problems he had inherited. The next time he holds the gesture (11’29) it accompanies the claim that his own administration is running like a ‘fine-tuned machine’, thereby demonstrating the gesture’s ‘precision-grip’ credentials.

Adam Kendon makes the point that precision-grip gestures go beyond mere preciseness of grip to imply preciseness of process, and specifically a process of making: ‘the semantic theme that they share is related to ideas of exactness, making something precise, or making prominent some specific fact or idea’.⁵² On the word ‘mess’, Trump moved from his small circlet to a new gesture by flicking up his index finger to make an upwards pointing pistol pose with the thumb tucked against the forward-facing palm and behind the middle finger. A variation of this is to flick out the thumb at the same time as flicking up the index finger in order to make an upwards pointing L-shape pistol hand. Mary Civiello notices that Trump often emphasizes the precision of the point he is making by moving immediately from the small circlet to the L-shape pistol.⁵³ In Trump’s gestural performance, the right to bear arms carries a new meaning.

Barack Obama’s favoured precision gesture is a compound of Trump’s small circlet and Trump’s upwards pointing pistol finger. Obama makes an index-finger-touching-thumb ring as in Trump’s small circlet, albeit somewhat more pinched,⁵⁴ but in Obama’s case the other digits are flexed inwards to touch the palm. Whereas Trump, with fingers splayed, appears to be gripping a needle, Obama appears to be gripping a pen. Trump has a great many go-to gestures, including an index finger pointed directly towards his audience (this is a version of the ‘pistol hand’ that he used in The Apprentice when firing competitors), but the small circlet is his signature manual action. The challenge is to discern its meaning. It is plausible, as I’ve just argued, to regard it as a stitching gesture, but of course I am biased by my project to make sense of it through the Making Sense. That’s the thing about gestures: they are extremely susceptible to the interpretations we bring to them. The co-Productive participation of the viewer or reader of a gesture is fundamental to making it mean something. One of the merits of reading the small circlet as emblematic of the making process of sewing is that it is a natural extension of the basic gestural sign of getting a precise grip, and specifically of getting a grip for a productive purpose. Trump’s two key gestures – the needle-holding, thread-pulling, ‘small circlet’, and the pizza-kneading, thread-combing, ‘large circle’ – together present a president who is always crafting something, always manipulating. If he isn’t stitching something up, he’s cooking something up.

Trump as Mime and Mimic

Mime artists have always exploited familiar everyday activities in order to produce sympathetic associations in their spectators. In Modern Times (dir. Chaplin, 1936), Charlie Chaplin performs a classic pantomime scene in a café involving such quotidian actions as opening a car door and engaging in romantic flirtation. In Les Enfants du Paradis (dir. Carné, 1945), the mime Jean-Louis Barrault in the role of Jean-Gaspard ‘Baptiste’ Deburau (the creator of Pierrot and father of modern French mime) rendered a sublime pickpocket scene incorporating such familiar daily acts as checking a pocket watch. The celebrated mime Marcel Marceau, who refined his craft as a member of Jean-Louis Barrault’s company, made a high art of such commonplace actions as walking against the wind.

Trump’s particular penchant is for mimicking opponents by caricaturing aspects of their character or physical attributes, which is acting in the impersonation mode discussed in Chapter 6. Trump’s most infamous impersonation was a mocking representation of reporter Serge Kovaleski. What made it infamous is that Trump’s positioning of his hands was interpreted by many to be a deliberate parody of Mr Kovaleski’s hands, which are affected by a congenital joint condition. Whatever the truth of that interpretation, there is no doubt that Trump’s wild, flailing gestures on that occasion were undignified and unbecoming of a US president. He probably hasn’t read Quintilian, who warned that whereas ‘a somewhat more agitated style of Delivery is regarded as acceptable, and is indeed appropriate in some contexts’, it ‘needs to be under control, lest, in our eagerness to pursue the elegance of the performer, we lose the authority of the good and grave man’.⁵⁵ Trump was on safer ground when he employed the mime of reading a script to mock Hillary Clinton and the mime of falling asleep to lampoon Jeb Bush.⁵⁶ What’s especially striking about his decision to ridicule Clinton as a script-reader is that this mocks an attribute that in a politician might be considered a reassuring sign of rigour and devotion to detail, but which in a theatrical or television performer comes across as unprofessional, unprepared, and damaging to the credibility of their performance. Trump is judging her, and encouraging his audience to judge her, by the standards of the actor’s craft rather than by the standards of statecraft. Purists might say that Trump’s set-piece impersonations aren’t true mimes because they are accompanied by speaking, but Trump’s distinctively disjointed and jumbled speech patterns become a sort of background noise that caption the mime just enough to give it context without distracting the spectator’s attention from the spectacle of his gestural performance. They might be compared to the barely decipherable mumblings uttered by Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Mr Bean’ character as he engages in his comedic gestural escapades. Indeed, this may be one of the unintended effects of Trump’s rambling sentence structure – that it liberates his spectators to judge him more by his actions than by his words, and licences him to blame offensive words on innocent acting or to excuse offensive acting with innocuous words.

Late in 2016, I recommended to my students of rhetoric and advocacy that they should watch the US presidential debates with the sound turned off and assess for themselves which speaker – Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton – had the greatest gestural and performative appeal. The suggestion arose from my own accidental experience of watching a news report of the televised ‘town hall’-style Second Presidential Debate (10 October 2016) with the sound turned off. As I watched, it struck me that Hillary Clinton’s performance seemed rather rigid and repetitive, with lots of chopping hand gestures and a generally constricted and awkward comportment. Her use of the stage space was also static and constricted. This is ideal in a lawyer in a courtroom and perhaps commendable if one is trying to communicate political stability, but Clinton’s fixed status as part of the nation’s political furniture was one of Trump’s main points of attack against her. His mobility across the stage signalled that he was bringing a new movement and disruption to the settled state of things. It is true that at one point in the debate he seemed to stalk Clinton as he followed her from behind, which came across as somewhat predatory behaviour (a Saturday Night Live parody accompanied it with the famous threat music from the movie Jaws), but in brute performative terms it does no harm for a populist to present himself as being at the top of the political food chain in contrast to the immobility of a career politician and member of the Washington establishment (the same Saturday Night Live picked up on Clinton’s somewhat robotic movements and general lack of gestural ease). Trump’s mobility across the stage might have made him look like a shark, but in contrast Clinton’s incessant paddling on the spot made her look like a lame duck stuck in what Trump calls ‘the swamp’ of the political establishment. The New York Times published a video summary of the second debate with the title ‘Trump’s Looming Onstage Presence in Presidential Debate’.⁵⁷ Jim Rutenberg’s commentary accompanying that video provides an excellent summary of the candidates’ contrasting styles:

I think what we saw in this debate that we didn’t see in the last debate was Donald Trump’s comfort in front of a camera, his ability to command the stage. However, it was a looming presence: looming behind her, pacing around her … the huge risk is that that will be seen as not only disrespectful, but patently aggressive. His back was so up against a wall, that he went to what he knows best in sort of the reality TV showman. He did own the medium tonight, and that’s not to say Hillary Clinton didn’t. She was composed, she kept to her mark, as they call it, on the stage. She wandered when she had to, but it was in the practiced way a politician does it. Donald Trump’s career has been lived on television. Hillary Clinton’s career has been lived in the halls of Congress, in the White House, and tonight you really saw that.

Clinton’s gestures were seldom smooth but tended rather to punctuate and beat out her words in the percussive manner that is known as a ‘baton’ gesture. Lacking gestural variety and interest, the cumulative effect can give the viewer the sense that they are being beaten down by the repeated hammering home of points. In this respect, Clinton’s gestures were as aggressive as Trump’s, only in a different way. Arguably, and counter-intuitively, they might even have been more stereotypically masculine than his. It could be that Trump’s freely flowing hands, smooth stage-gliding, and even his soft-edged hairstyle are actually more typically female in their register than Clinton’s more tightly sculpted hair, erect posture, deliberate gait, and chopping hands. Linguists examining the performance of candidates in the presidential primaries concluded that the femininity of Donald Trump’s voice was second only to Hillary Clinton’s and that, when placed alongside such nonverbal cues as gestures and facial expressions, he was the most feminine of all the candidates.⁵⁸ Haley Freeman, a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece entitled ‘Imagine if Donald Trump Were a Woman: You Simply Can’t’;⁵⁹ but an experiment in political performance at New York University has successfully imagined precisely that. Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science, worked with Joe Salvatore, an associate professor of educational theatre, to commission an actress to play Trump, ‘replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim’, while a male actor did the same in the role of Clinton.⁶⁰ Guadalupe and Salvatore found in rehearsal that their own preconceptions were challenged, leading them to ask what the male Clinton (actor Jonathan Gordon) was ‘smiling about all the time’, and did he not ‘seem a little stiff, tethered to rehearsed statements at the podium’, while the female Trump (actress Brenda King) was ‘plainspoken and confident’ and ‘freely roamed the stage?’⁶¹ In performances of their show, Her Opponent, audiences ‘were shocked to find that they couldn’t seem to find in Jonathan Gordon what they had admired in Hillary Clinton – or that Brenda King’s clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they’d remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out’.⁶²

The authors of ‘The Hands of Donald Trump’ note ‘how Trump elevates his entertainment value by crafting comedic representations of his political opponents as well as himself’.⁶³ These crafted representations ‘involve the dramaturgical replaying of an actual or imagined event, action, or behavior’, often by impersonation (‘assuming another’s alleged subjectivity’). The authors add that ‘[t]hese representations take the form of a kind of embodied performance’ which include what gesture scholars call ‘bodily quoting’,⁶⁴ ‘transmodal stylizations’,⁶⁵ ‘full body enactments’,⁶⁶ ‘gestural reenactments’,⁶⁷ and ‘pantomime’.⁶⁸ The last of these – ‘pantomime’ – is especially pertinent to their analysis of Trump as comedic performer, because pantomime is a highly crafted and conventional art form. It is unlikely that Trump has studied the art form and consciously crafted his performances in keeping with its conventions, which compels the conclusion that he is an accidental mime. He is not obeying the tenets of comedic pantomime but has stripped it back to its ancient origins in human, even animal, gesture. There is also, though, a sense in which Trump might be said to have internalized a general appreciation for the extensive and deep-rooted culture of ‘knock-about’ comedy. The various tributaries of this culture – commedia dell’arte, ‘Punch and Judy’ shows, modern French mime, silent movie slapstick, and circus clowning – can be traced back to ancient sources, including the visceral and lascivious Graeco-Roman mime and the somewhat more refined arts of the pantomimus that was popular in Augustan Rome.

Whereas Roman mime is said to have sometimes involved actual sexual and homicidal acts, the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the pantomimus as a ‘nonspeaking dancer in the Roman theatre who performed dramatic scenes, acting all the characters in a story in succession using only masks, body movement, and rhythmic gestures’. Commedia dell’arte developed on the more refined side, whereas Punch and Judy puppet shows emphasize the brutal. Pulcinella, a stock character of the commedia, was Anglicized as Punchinello (‘Punch’) sometime after certain Italians, probably Neapolitans, brought him to England. Samuel Pepys’ diary dates the first recorded performance in England to 9 May 1662 in London’s Covent Garden, where he saw ‘an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw’. When Punch and Judy became especially popular with children on their seaside summer holidays, Punch’s mistress (a vestige of the Roman penchant for sexual mime) lost her place in the puppet line-up, but even as a children’s show the spectacle generally retains scenes of baby beating, wife beating, evasion of police, hanging, and even a crocodile attack that wouldn’t be out of place in the Roman circus. There are echoes of the Punch and Judy show in Donald Trump’s remarkable ability to evade the legal consequences of alleged sexual and financial impropriety. Even the Devil, who eventually comes for Punch, is outsmarted by the slippery protagonist. ‘The Donald’ has his own devils, including his Democrat opponents, and although they have impeached him twice and sought to have him removed from office almost from the moment that he became president, at the time of writing they have yet to drag him down. A similar dynamic can be observed in Bill Clinton’s impressive Punch-like success in slipping substantially unscathed from the noose of impeachment. James L. Mast puts this down to Clinton’s theatrical appeal in contrast to that of his adversary, Newt Gingrich, noting that ‘[i]n drama, a villain can be the star if he is more attractive than the other characters’.⁶⁹

Trump in the Tradition of the Commedia Dell’arte

Trump’s performance does not fit squarely with any one of the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, but he displays characteristics of several of them. Being a privileged member of America’s financial elite, and at the same time a populist with special appeal to grassroots labourers, from farmers to truckers, he reflects the duality of Pulcinella whom Ducharte summarizes as a conjointure of higher and lower social status: ‘The “upper” Pulcinella is intelligent, sensual, sly, keen … The “lower” Pulcinella is a dull and course bumpkin.’⁷⁰ Trump also displays attributes of other stock characters of the commedia. Like Il Capitano, Trump is a ridiculously hyperbolic braggart who shows off his virility with boasts of sexual prowess, and, like the commedia mask (character) called ‘Il Dottore’, Trump pretends to have expertise in a great many subjects of which he is in fact quite ignorant. Trump even thinks he deserves a Nobel Prize for ‘a lot of things’⁷¹ – a claim made in a joint press conference with Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, who on that occasion seemed to be thoroughly enjoying Trump’s larger-than-life comedic turn. One of the great many reasons why ‘Il Dottore’ Trump didn’t win the Nobel Prize in chemistry or medicine was his notorious speculation that Covid-19 might be cured by somehow injecting disinfectant into the human bloodstream. More probably, he had his sights set on the Nobel Peace Prize, to judge from the offer made (in the press conference just mentioned) to mediate between Khan and Prime Minister Modi of India if they should ever need his help. The offer was accompanied by the boast, ‘I’ve never failed as an arbitrator’. How reminiscent this is of Ducharte’s recollection that Il Dottore ‘undertook one day to use his vast learning in an affair that did not concern him in the least’.⁷²

Another stock character of the commedia with whom Trump’s performance has more than a passing resemblance is the Venetian Magnifico (high status man) ‘Pantalone’. Literary scholar Allardyce Nicoll suggests that if we were to seek Pantalone’s ‘present-day counterpart’:

[W]e should not be far wrong in thinking of a middle-aged businessman, wealthy and well esteemed, apt at times to dally with ladies of doubtful virtue, at other times apt to show himself the devoted father anxious to protect a young son or puzzled by the actions of a daughter he does not understand.⁷³

Nicoll adds that Pantalone ‘can prove himself stingy, avaricious and credulous on occasion’.⁷⁴ These attributes chime with the self-styled ‘billionaire’ Donald Trump and his insistence that Mexico is ‘going to pay for the wall’, which he promised to build to keep illegal immigrants from entering the USA at its southern border.⁷⁵ Pantalone is mature of years but more virile than senile. He is energetic and athletic, with his comedy residing in large part in the fact that for a middle-aged Magnifico who ought to be a sober man of affairs, he is ridiculously lustful, passionate, and excitable. Another point of resemblance is Trump’s partnership with his vice-president, Mike Pence, which parallels the classic master–servant pairing that runs through the commedia and is exemplified by the Venetian merchant Pantalone and his Bergamask servant Zanni. In their relatively rare joint performances, Pence is typically to be seen deferring obsequiously to his master. In one video interview on Trump’s private jet, Pence simply smiled and nodded silently while his Pantalone pontificated at length.⁷⁶

Other Populist ‘Presidents’: Blair and Macron

Trump is not the first vainglorious and vaguely comedic politician to have played the populist card in recent years. In the UK, the first modern paradigm was Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007). A wannabe rock star,⁷⁷ he never missed a chance to sprinkle himself with celebrity stardust imported from the USA. It was on Blair’s watch that the UK’s highest court of law – the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords – was rebranded in American style as the ‘Supreme Court of the United Kingdom’. Blair’s party also rebranded the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’ and did its best to rebrand Blair and traditional cabinet government along more presidential lines. I personally saw Blair once when he visited the University of Warwick for a summit with US President Bill Clinton. I was standing outside in a small crowd of university staff and assorted spectators as we watched Clinton’s motorcade glide past. Sitting in the shade of his limousine and wearing a dark suit behind tinted windows, only Clinton’s vague silhouette was visible and the white cuff of his shirt sleeve as it conferred a regal wave on the assembled onlookers. Blair put on a very different performance. He leapt out of his limo, grinning manically and waving excitedly in all directions with his waving hand held high in the air. As he waved in the direction of my section of the crowd, he seemed to be looking above our heads as if acknowledging a much larger crowd arrayed in a grandstand of well-wishers. I distinctly remember turning around and thinking ‘who is he waving at?’ There was nobody there. To this spectator on the ground, Blair looked both deluded and foolish in that moment, but to quote Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’ (2.2.202–203). What I’d just witnessed was entirely for the benefit of the television audience that would later tune into news coverage of the event. They would see Tony Blair acknowledging a mass gathering. It was a Trumpian move straight from the populist propaganda playbook. (For a more recent example, witness Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waving as he stepped out of his plane on arrival at the 2021 G7 summit in the UK – were there really public crowds there to greet him in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic?)

French President Emanuel Macron has adopted Blair’s populist tactic of positioning his politics outside of traditional party lines. I have in mind Peter Mair’s definition of populism as ‘a means of linking an increasingly undifferentiated and depoliticized electorate with a largely neutral and non-partisan system of governance’.⁷⁸ Like Blair, Macron comes across as a vainglorious political weathervane. Not welded to established party doctrine or respect for tradition, he seems to spin for a vote whichever way the wind blows. In 2016, Macron established a new political party, or movement, with the amusingly non-committal and excitable name ‘La République En Marche!’ – complete with exclamation mark! It says something about the party’s lack of roots and populist responsiveness that it was rebranded in May 2022 as ‘Renaissance’, despite being founded under its former name as recently as 2016. The highly animated, personality-driven politics of characters like Trump, Blair, and Macron can be charismatic and attractive, but loose cannons are dangerous. In the case of Trump, Blair, and Macron, their instinct to goad the popular will and lackey the populist tide has arguably cost lives, albeit indirectly. In Trump’s case the movement utterly lost control when his supporters stormed the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, resulting in fatalities. In Blair’s case, his instinct to follow like a tributary wherever the fount of US foreign policy flowed, led him on a flimsy premise to send UK forces to join the USA in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The official inquiry into the basis for that invasion was critical of Blair’s bluster, including the legalese spin that the former lawyer put on the dossier of evidence presented to the House of Commons in September 2002. Blair had incorrectly summarized it as establishing ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam Hussein’s regime was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. In Macron’s case, he made the dangerous mistake of playing politics at a critical stage in his country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 by groundlessly describing the UK-developed AstraZeneca vaccine as ‘quasi-ineffective’ in older people.⁷⁹ A staunch supporter of the EU and vociferous opponent of Brexit, Macron has also been accused of shoring up his domestic standing by pushing the EU to adopt a hard line against the UK in Brexit trade negotiations. In response, certain unnamed UK sources were reported to have labelled talks with the EU as ‘performance art’.⁸⁰ Boris Johnson responded by walking away from the talks, but six days later the talks resumed. On that occasion it was reported that ‘[t]he theatrics of Boris Johnson’s walkout lasted less than a week’, and ‘[t]he pantomime is over and now the serious work begins in the UK–EU trade negotiations’.⁸¹ All politicians put on a show to seek popularity, but danger attends popularity that is pursued at the cost of principle. Trump, Blair, and Macron were acting presidents who were applauded into power by popular approval. (We can add Johnson and Trudeau to the list if we include leaders more firmly grounded in the traditions of an established political party.) An acting president’s moment centre stage is brief. Whether the performance stands the test of time is judged ultimately not by the quality of the acting but by the fruits of their actions.

8 Political Confection Making a Meal of It

A confection is a thing made with other things (Latin: con-facere), which is to say that it is a thing made by combining physical ingredients and also (or alternatively) by combining elements within a process. Confectionary Performance is always complex in the etymological sense of plaiting or weaving elements together, but many Confectionary Performances are nevertheless mundane and easy to perform. Even the most basic method of making a cup of hot tea by using a teabag involves a combination of physical elements – at minimum these are water, heat source, teabag, and cup – as well as a combination of procedural elements, which typically include procuring the teabag and the cup, placing the teabag in the cup, boiling the water, and pouring the water into the cup. There are of course numerous background elements to confectionary processes, including environmental conditions, but such elements are properly regarded as contributions to the performance only to the extent that they have been selected or influenced for that purpose. In a Confectionary Performance, as I use that term, the maker and the spectator will both appreciate that the performance is a deliberate one of making something by combining other things. ‘Synthesis’ and ‘articulation’ would serve as satisfactory synonyms for ‘confection’, but the advantage of ‘confection’ as a description of making processes that persuade spectators is the word’s association with pleasing sweetness. The very word persuasion originates in the idea that a person is moved ‘through sweetness’ (per-suade). Persuasion first entered our lexicon because our ancestors understood that moving rhetorical effects are produced through sensory stimulation. Sweetness, in rhetoric or in food, can be delightful. Horace quotes the young knights who, rejecting dull poetry, said that ‘[h]e has won every vote who has blended profit and pleasure, at once delighting and instructing the reader’.¹ Cicero stated similarly that the ‘supreme orator’ is ‘one whose speech instructs, delights, and moves the minds of his audience’;² and, following Cicero in the early modern period, Thomas Wilson described the ‘ende of Rhetorique’ as being ‘To teach. To delight. And to perswade’.³ Sweetness is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine of a message go down. As Wilson puts it, ‘to delite is needfull, without the which weightie matters will not be heard at all, and therefore him cunne I thanke, that both can and will ever, mingle sweete among the sower’.

A Question of Discipline: Psychology and Rhetoric

Richard R. Lau, a professor of political science, contributed the chapter ‘Classic Models of Persuasion’ to The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion.⁴ In it he asserts that ‘[t]he scholarly discipline in which the study of persuasion fits most directly is psychology – social psychology, to be specific’.⁵ We can certainly learn a great deal from modern psychological science as we try to understand why people derive so much pleasure from observing Confectionary Performance and are so potently persuaded by it. To that end, we examine the insights of modern psychology in some detail in the next section. I would contend, however, that there is another scholarly discipline that deals equally directly with modes and means of persuasion; one with a much longer pedigree in explaining the dynamics of human behaviour and which is truly ‘classic’ (to use Lau’s word). I am referring to rhetoric. Rhetoric began in ancient times as the study of the technical arts of public speakers (in Greek ‘rhetors’; in Latin ‘orators’) of the sort that we would today call lawyers and politicians. From there it developed into an art of poetic, literary, and dramatic practice. Rhetoric, as practised through dramatic performance on the theatrical stage, on the political stage, and in the court room, can be considered a precursor (and now a partner) to social psychology practised through experiment. Hence the statement attributed to Eugene O’Neill that ‘dramatists were psychologists – and good ones at that – before psychology was thought of’.⁶ Shakespeare, who was intensely educated in rhetoric at school and became a master practitioner of the art, has been called ‘a very great psychologist’.⁷ In the introduction to his book Theatre and Mind, Bruce McConachie boasts of theatre’s longstanding psychological wisdom, writing ‘it’s nice to see that science has caught up with the theatre’.⁸

Psychology and rhetoric offer different perspectives on persuasive performance because the two disciplines exist for different purposes. Rhetorical study is intensely practical. It observes that certain techniques produce certain effects, and it demonstrates the efficacy of those techniques through practical demonstration – that is, through performance. The psychological sciences are more concerned to establish why, as a matter of human cognition and behaviour, certain techniques work the way they do. In the course of its endeavour, social psychology occasionally coins new terminology for concepts that rhetoric named millennia ago. Take the idea of ‘attitude’, which Lau says has ‘proved indispensable to social psychology’.⁹ Something like it was a feature of rhetorical studies as far back as Aristotle, when it went by the name of ‘ethos’. If one wants to understand the motivations of human behaviour and the means of human persuasion, it is still highly informative to start with the rhetorical wisdom of ancient authors and to consider how that wisdom has been applied in practice over the centuries since. Consider the example of one of the psychological insights described by Lau. He observes that ‘[s]ocial judgment theory derives from a long line of research in cognitive psychology on the perception of physical stimuli’ and that the influence of individual stimuli on judgment is in part ‘a function of both the total range of stimuli to be categorized or judged and any anchor or norm that is provided’. He illustrates this idea of the ‘anchor’ by noting that ‘the first 50-degree day after a long cold winter seems delightfully warm while the first 50-degree day after a long hot summer is very cold ... Different anchors or adaptation levels lead to very different judgments’.¹⁰ As social judgment theory attributes variability of human perception to such factors as the anchor of prior experience, so we find in Shakespeare acute awareness of the fact that a taste or sound which seemed sweet at first can cease to be pleasurable in excess. The famous opening words of Twelfth Night provide one of several instances: ‘If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die’ (1.1.1–3). Where Lau discusses the psychology of differing human perceptions of a ‘50-degree day’, Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke identifies psychological limits to our capacity to relativize temperatures imaginatively:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

…

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

(Richard II, 1.3.294–299)

As rhetoric and psychology differ in their aims, so they differ in their ethical aspect. Rhetoric, from its earliest iterations, has been concerned with the contribution of performance technique to the improvement of an individual’s ethical good life and its contribution to the commonwealth of the political community. Plato rejected bastard forms of rhetoric that neglect this ethical motivation, and Aristotle (doubtless mindful of Plato’s critique) subsequently promoted a species of rhetoric that has ethical considerations at its heart. In the early modern period, in which there was a renaissance of Aristotelian rhetoric as developed in the works of such Roman writers as Cicero and Quintilian, Thomas Wilson (the author of the popular early modern rhetorical manual The Arte of Rhetorique) described rhetoric as the ethical art of ‘moving pittie, and stirring men to shewe mercie’.¹¹ Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) can be appreciated as a study in the political chaos that ensues when rhetoric is concerned not to make political peace but only to win a political contest. The rhetoric of Mark Antony in that play is exemplary of the point.

The fact that the most excellent exponents of the art of rhetoric have been lawyers, politicians, and dramatists reveals that rhetoric has always been about something more than persuasion. It is about social construction. Good rhetoric for the lawyer, politician, and dramatist succeeds when it engages in disputes constructively, and when it aims to constitute communities through consensus. It is probably fair to say that nowadays too few lawyers and politicians appreciate that their rhetorical performance ought to be directed, not towards beating down the opposition, but towards building up society and making peace. Psychology, for all its merits as a scientific discipline, does not, cannot, and should not pursue ethical outcomes in this way. It is inherent in the nature of pure scientific endeavour that its ethical ambitions should be negatively framed in terms of avoiding unethical means rather than positively framed in terms of achieving ethical ends. The discipline of rhetorical practice is subject to no such ideological constraint.

Holding a Mirror Neuron up to Nature

Studying the rhetorical arts will assist us greatly as we consider the persuasive effects of Confectionary Performance, but the science of psychology also offers several potentially important insights. Perhaps none is more important than the psychological finding that watching others perform tasks triggers in our brains the same sense that we experience when we perform similar tasks ourselves. The phenomenon has been demonstrated using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which shows that in response to the external stimuli of performance actions, a mirror response occurs in various parts of the observer’s brain,¹² and that hand gestures, for example, trigger different mirroring pathways to facial gestures.¹³ What is less clear is the biological basis for the phenomenon. The leading theory attributes it to the presence of ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain. Experiments conducted in the early 1990s in the lab of Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, showed that mirror neurons in the monkey brain fired when the animal carried out an action or saw (or heard) another animal performing the same action.¹⁴ As Rizzolatti noted at the time:

We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others. Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.¹⁵

Any suggestion that mirror neurons are the sole psychological seat for the complexity of human emotions must be doubtful, but how significant it is in our post-truth age to appreciate that the Confectionary Performances of politicians might bypass our logical thought processes in order to influence us through our feelings.

Dr Vittorio Gallese, one of Rizzolatti’s group at the University of Parma, confirms the next logical conclusion, which is that representative arts engage us because they produce effects through our neural mirror response. He cites the work of Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In Bernini’s sculpture, The Rape of Proserpina, when we see the hand of the god Pluto grabbing Proserpina’s thigh, we perceive a real hand pressing into real flesh rather than a single inanimate slab of marble carved into forms of hand and thigh.¹⁶ Italian scientists continue to be highly influential in the field. Marco Iacoboni, a Roman by birth and subsequently a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, has reported some of the most exciting demonstrations and made some of the largest claims for the phenomenon. It seems fitting that a scholar born in Rome should continue a tradition of behavioural observation that was in ancient times so minutely systematized by rhetorical scholars and practitioners in that city. Iacoboni and his colleagues report that when presented with the performance of the simple action of picking up a cup of tea from a table, mirror neurons automatically anticipate the actor’s intention (to drink from it or to tidy it up) according to the different contexts of the action (being respectively a table set neatly ready for tea to be taken, and a messy table at which tea has apparently already been taken).¹⁷ This is a radical new insight, for it suggests that intentions might be inferred from witnessing an action in context, and not just inferred to others but in some way sympathetically experienced and anticipated in the brain by the observer of the action.

It has been shown that human brains evidence a mirror response not only when someone ‘kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked’¹⁸ but also when someone ‘says or hears the word “kick”’.¹⁹ Our brains automatically suit the action to the word – which is precisely the pairing that Shakespeare’s Hamlet encouraged theatrical players to pursue in their performances. Thanks to modern psychological science, we now know what dramatists have suspected all along – that if actors accompany speech with unsuitable actions, the subconscious psychology of the audience will automatically detect the error. Thus, one study observes that in everyday life, ‘motor imitation can be influenced by providing verbal instructions but also disrupted by task‐irrelevant single words’.²⁰ As such, an instructor who utters a random word out of place might cause a trainee to misplace a stage in a manual process. One reason why speech and gesture are still so hard to separate, even in the language-dominated world of the modern human, is that speech is thought to have developed from, or alongside, gesture. Indeed, they still share the same psychological communication system.²¹

One of Iacoboni’s largest and most significant claims is that mirror neurons are a neurological basis of human empathy:

[I]f you see me choke up, in emotional distress … mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling.²²

What Iacoboni’s Roman forbears would have called pathos generated through rhetorical action, the modern psychologist calls empathy or sympathy generated through a neural response to gestural behaviour. The language has changed, but the story stays the same. One thing that has changed radically are the media through which our performances are displayed. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic forced it upon us, in-person, face-to-face performances were losing territory to performances mediated through video and film. A child cannot be taught to mimic human behaviour by a television screen so well as by a present-in-person human parent, and by the same token adults are not as susceptible to mediated gestural performances as to live ones. Iacoboni again: ‘Mirror neurons work best in real life, when people are face to face. Virtual reality and videos are shadowy substitutes.’²³ That said, mediated performance is still powerful, as is evident from our emotional susceptibility to cinematic ‘weepies’, Netflix comedies, high-adrenaline video games, and YouTube videos of people comedically but painfully coming a cropper when attempting hare-brained stunts.

Of further relevance to our concern to understand the persuasive effect of witnessing Confectionary Performance is the finding that action imitation following the stimulus of hearing the names of manufactured objects (e.g. ‘thread’, ‘pen’, ‘chopsticks’, ‘watch’, ‘cup’) induces stronger brain activity in the mirror neuron system than hearing other types of word.²⁴ This might suggest innate human affinity for active engagement with things that have been made and are manipulable. Another experiment compared the effects of observing a complex task (turning a key in a lock) with a more basic manual task. It found that both observations activated the fronto-parietal mirror system, but that brain activity is higher in the observation of the complex task than in the observation of the simple task.²⁵ Psychology is therefore gradually gathering the neurological evidence to prove what rhetoricians have always assumed on the basis of anecdotal experience: that observers and audiences engage more actively with more active forms of performance, are more likely to grasp points made through performances that engage the hands in the manual manipulation of graspable objects, and are most intensely stimulated by complex sequential processes of making things – what I call ‘Confectionary Performances’.

The Great British Bake Off

The fact that Confectionary Performance triggers the brain’s mirror neuron system might explain the extraordinary popularity of cooking shows on television. In the UK, none has been so popular as The Great British Bake Off (GBBO), a show that features a knockout competition between amateur bakers.²⁶ The show, which was originally judged on the BBC by celebrity cook Mary Berry and celebrity baker Paul Hollywood, and which is staged in the setting of a village fête marquee, is in many ways quintessentially British. Its reassuringly typical depiction of British character might be part of its appeal in America, where it has been aired to critical acclaim,²⁷ but this hardly explains the popularity of cooking shows in general. The best, perhaps only, way to account for the intense and ostensibly unlikely appeal of watching people cook food which viewers can neither smell nor touch nor taste, is to accept that the activity of watching others make things is in itself psychologically engaging and satisfying. The pleasure comes in part from the sensory stimulation of imagined textures, scents, and tastes, but also in large part from the vicarious experience of participation in a process of Production. Nothing stimulates our Making Sense quite so effectively as witnessing a Confectionary Performance, and few modes of Confectionary Performance are quite so enticing, quite so appealing to the full range of senses, as cuisine craft. It may be that Confectionary Performance appeals to the brain so powerfully because the brain recognizes the Making Sense of the complex activity of confecting cuisine to be similar to its own activity of making integrated sense of diverse stimuli.

To recognize the popularity of GBBO and shows like it, the National Television Awards in the UK invented a new awards category for the ‘Skills Challenge Show’ (subsequently ‘Challenge Show’). GBBO won the inaugural ‘Skills Challenge Show’ award in 2015 and two of the three losing nominees were other competitive cooking shows (MasterChef and Come Dine with Me). The third unsuccessful nominee was The Apprentice, a show most famous now because the American original was hosted for more than a decade by Donald Trump. The man who promised to ‘Make America Great Again’ came to popular prominence through a show grounded in the vicarious pleasure of watching others perform complex tasks and the voyeuristic pleasure of watching them fail. Many of the tasks featured on the show were Confectionary Performances, such as devising new sandwiches and designing new toys. In psychological terms the popularity of skills challenge shows, especially those that involve making, may be attributable in large degree to the ways in which Confectionary Performance triggers the mirror neuron system in the human brain. That said, there is at least one rival to cuisine craft in this regard. A study has suggested that the mirror neuron system might also explain the popularity of pornography.²⁸ Mrs Berry (not the celebrity cook, but a character in a George Meredith novel) advised, ‘don’t neglect your cookery. Kissing don’t last: cookery do!’,²⁹ but in terms of their psychological appeal the two activities might not be so very different – certainly it wouldn’t be surprising if essentially the same neurological source lies at the base of vicarious viewing pleasure in both cases. It is to generate vicarious viewing pleasure, and to foster a sense of viewer participation and co-Production – or to use a more usual term, to generate ‘engagement’ – that Confectionary Performance has become a common trope of political media. This is our next topic.

Kitchen Cabinet: When Politicians Cook

The most blatant example of politicians using Confectionary Performance to show that they have the common touch and can make complex things cooperatively must surely be the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television programme Kitchen Cabinet. The programme is as charming as its title is witty. The format is a conversational interview with an Australian politician conducted by political journalist Annabel Crabb while she and the politician prepare a meal together, usually in the politician’s home. The programme works brilliantly to make the politician appear approachable and down-to-earth. (We can note in passing that descriptions by which a person is said to be ‘down-to-earth’, ‘grounded’, prepared to ‘get stuck in’, to ‘roll their sleeves up’, and to ‘get their hands dirty’ are always taken as compliments, which is a testament to the fellow feeling generated by the observation that someone is willing to carry out basic manual work.) Guests on Kitchen Cabinet have included Scott Morrison, who went on to be Australia’s thirtieth prime minister.³⁰ We encounter Mr Morrison’s manual skills again in Chapter 9 on ‘State Building’, where we find him putting together a cubby house with his daughter. It would be cynical to suggest that he is deliberately manipulating his media image to appeal to Australians’ characteristic affinity for informality in their politicians, but he certainly seems adept at manual craft and at putting on a performance without seeming crafty. It is a performance, though. He lets slip in his Kitchen Cabinet interview that as a child he witnessed his father’s work in local politics and ‘quite enjoyed the theatre of it all’.³¹

Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is certainly a man who relishes political theatre. He has gone out of his way to cultivate celebrity status throughout his political career, including through guest appearances on popular television shows such as the soap opera Eastenders, the ancestry show Who Do You Think You Are?, the automobile magazine show Top Gear, and, as guest host, the political quiz show Have I Got News for You. On his Top Gear appearance, his host Jeremy Clarkson said, ‘most politicians … are pretty incompetent and then have a veneer of competence … you do seem to do it the other way round’. In response to this playful taunt, Mr Johnson demonstrated his trademark self-deprecating jocularity, saying ‘you can’t rule out the possibility, that you know, beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a, you know, a blithering idiot, there lurks … a blithering idiot’. Of course, Mr Johnson is no idiot, and he knows it, but a master of the ‘elaborately constructed veneer’ he certainly is.

Taking full advantage of Mr Johnson’s performing talents, the Conservative Party has occasionally produced short promotional videos featuring Confectionary Performances by their leading man. We focus here on three videos which at the time of writing can all be accessed on the party’s YouTube channel. The first was posted during the 2019 general election campaign and is tagged ‘Boris Johnson’s hilarious election advert | 12 Questions to Boris Johnson’ (12 November 2019).³² It originally went out on Twitter with the teaser: ‘We bumped into Boris on his tea break. Here’s what happened.’ The second was posted after the Conservatives and Boris Johnson won the general election and is tagged ‘Boris and Stanley Johnson made some mince pies and it was brilliant’ (24 December 2019).³³ The third, released in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, is tagged ‘This is how we’ll BUILD BACK BETTER – watch our latest Party-Political Broadcast!’ (7 October 2020).³⁴ The mince pies video isn’t subtle. Not only does it seek to tap quite transparently into the nation’s penchant for cooking programmes, and GBBO in particular, but Boris Johnson also made a candid admission as he cooked. Giving an insight into his rhetorical method, he said: ‘the whole thing is an extended metaphor. What you have here is a series of ingredients … and what you need is a binding element, there … the egg … which will bring it all together.’ This binding together of ingredients is, of course, the very definition of a Confectionary Performance. He then suggested that the NHS might be the nation’s ‘binding element’. A few months later he would find himself both personally and politically in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic and bound to the NHS more tightly than he could ever have foreseen. As Boris the baker pops his tray of mince pies in to cook, he declares them ‘oven ready’ – a favoured metaphor for his government’s Brexit deal with the EU.³⁵ The video titled ‘This is how we’ll BUILD BACK BETTER’ (7 October 2020) is considered in more depth in Chapter 9, where we examine ‘Boris the Builder’ and his fondness for Confectionary Performance in relation to construction language and projects. Suffice to say here that even the ‘BUILD BACK BETTER’ video has a brief moment of baking in it, when we see cupcakes being constructed in a family kitchen. The video we will spend most time with here is the one in which Johnson is interviewed ‘on his tea break’. It is slightly more subtle than the other two only in this respect: that its elements of Confectionary Performance, while present, are not expressly advertised to the audience as being deliberately metaphorical and are not expressly mentioned in the title of the video. Despite this, the essential message of the tea break video can be read as one of hands-on making. It sought to impress upon voters the need to cast their vote at the 2019 general election in a way that would form a new Parliament to support the government in delivering Brexit. Through hands-on making processes and talking about hands-on making processes, the video impressed upon voters the sense that the power to make a difference lay in their hands.

What, then, are the linguistic and performative elements by which the ‘tea break’ video sought to conjure the Making Sense in its audience? To answer that question, there now follows a brief commentary on six elements of script and action selected from the video, followed in each case by some thoughts on their relevance to the Making Sense.

I

Script

Interviewer: ‘How do you typically start your day?’

Johnson: ‘I tend to get up pretty early and then I go down and take the dog for a walk, and dog does his business and so on and so forth.’

Action

Johnson performs no accompanying actions of note, but the phrase ‘get up’ followed by ‘go down’ employs antithesis to establish a dramatic sense of theatrical space and movement.

The Making Sense

We are invited to imagine Johnson engaging in an everyday physical task, including, if our imagination runs that far, the humble (and socially responsible) task of stooping down to clean up after his dog. This might convey the sense that he is a man who is not afraid of the hands-on work of clearing up a mess made by others. The humble nature of the task following the spoken antithetical sequence of ‘up’ and then ‘down’ produces a sense of condescension, not in the modern patronizing sense, but in the older sense of a higher-status person coming down to meet others at the level of their common humanity. Shakespeare’s Mark Antony uses this technique in his forum speech at Caesar’s funeral when, with the words ‘shall I descend? And will you give me leave?’, he asks the crowd’s permission to join them on the floor of the forum (Julius Caesar, 3.2.160).³⁶ All these elements taken together excite aspects of the Making Sense through making contact and evoking humble hands-on labour with the promise of making an improvement to the state of things. In short, the act of condescension from high status to low performs the hope of making a better society.

II

Script

Interviewer: ‘When was the last time you cooked, and what did you make?’

Johnson: ‘The last time I cooked was last night and I made steak and oven chips, which were very good.’

Action

Johnson points his right index finger on ‘steak’ then gives a thumbs up (with his right hand) on ‘very good’, before turning to lead the interviewer towards the threshold of a small kitchen.

The Making Sense

Johnson’s express references to the meal he ‘cooked’ and ‘made’ continues his performance as the hands-on politician who gets things done. Cooking is employed for its direct appeal to the Making Sense. Whether intended or not, the reference to ‘steak’ produces a homophonic connection to each individual voter’s ‘stake’ in society, and the accompanying stabbing motion of the index finger can be read as a gestural illustration of the act of ‘staking out a claim’. The reference to humble ‘oven chips’ advances his performance of a rhetorical ethos of humility and confirms his ‘common touch’.

III

Script

Interviewer: ‘What’s your favourite band?’

Johnson: ‘Look, this is either The Clash or it’s The Rolling Stones, and mainly I listen to The Rolling Stones nowadays, so you can make of that what you will.’

Action

Johnson walks towards the kitchen work surface and picks a solitary tea bag out of an open transparent plastic storage jar of teabags. He drops the teabag into a white mug.

The Making Sense

The words ‘make of that what you will’ are uttered exactly simultaneously with the action of removing the tea bag from the jar. This may be coincidence, but if it was calculated it was a rather brilliant combination of word and action, for the effect is to invite the viewer to make a choice while giving the viewer the impression that the performer knows how to make things simple. It is significant that Johnson never once mentions that he is making a cup of tea. He demonstrates it through action rather than words. As for his taste in rock bands, what should we make of his preference for ‘The Clash’ and ‘The Rolling Stones’? Again, it may be entirely coincidental, but the names of both bands conveniently conjure up the sense of action, movement, and breakthrough that Johnson evokes elsewhere in the video through the phrases ‘going gangbusters’ and ‘knock it through’, the latter referring to his stated aim of getting Brexit done. The fact that both bands are English combines with the tea-making to produce a performance calculated to appeal to Brexit-supporting voters.

IV

Script

Interviewer: ‘What would you say to someone who’s wondering who to vote for at this election?’

Johnson: ‘I would say it is a very, very simple choice.’

Action

Johnson picks up the mug containing the teabag and walks over to a tap. He pours ready-boiled water from the tap into the mug.

The Making Sense

The interviewer’s question raises the crucial issue that all previous questions and answers have been building up to. Performing the very simple action of pouring pre-boiled water into a mug demonstrates through the simplest mode of making a cup of tea that it is easy for voters to act to make a difference through their action of voting. The fact that tea-making is one of the most common Confectionary Performances in the daily lives of UK voters serves again to cultivate the sense that Johnson has the common touch and helps to relate the Making Sense of his Confectionary Performance to their own performance of making a choice at the ballot box.

V

Script

Johnson: ‘A coalition of chaos with Jeremy Corbyn at the lead, at the head ... ’

Action

Johnson bends down to retrieve a plastic container of milk from a small fridge, then twists off the cap.

The Making Sense

Twisting the ‘cap’ off the container is literally to twist its head off (Latin caput = ‘head’). Performing this action just after he talks of his rival Corbyn being the ‘head’ of a chaotic coalition of Johnson’s political opponents gestures a figurative decapitation of his rival or, less viscerally, a removal of the opposing party’s figurehead.

VI

Script

Johnson: ‘ … or you can go with us, get Brexit done with our deal, which is ready to go, oven-ready, slam it in the microwave, it’s there.’

Action

Still holding his mug of tea in his right hand, with his left arm (elbow raised upwards) Johnson mimes an awkward under-arm, back-handed action of slamming shut the door to an imaginary microwave oven.

The Making Sense

Following the Confectionary Performance of the elements in tea-making, Johnson makes express reference to his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal as he enacts an element in the Confectionary Performance of cooking. Both performances – tea-making with a tea bag in a mug and microwaving food – are the simplest modes of making tea and making a meal. He is stressing through words and performance that he trusts the voters to make a simple choice at the ballot box (to pop their vote in the box in the way he pops a teabag in a cup and a meal in a microwave), while inviting them to trust him to bring simple finality to Brexit by slamming shut the oven door.

More than a year after this video was made, Boris Johnson (by then prime minister) returned to his theme while adding a reference to the contentious issue of EU member states fishing within UK territorial waters. In his Christmas message, delivered on Christmas Eve 2020 he said: ‘That oven-ready deal was just the starter … This is the feast – full of fish, by the way.’ Johnson even wore a tie adorned with a repeating fish pattern and showed off a dog-eared bundle of paper – a working copy of the Brexit deal in the final form that had just been agreed. As ever with Johnson, the performance was total, right down to costume and props. Whatever else he makes, he always makes an impression.

As with all propaganda, there is of course a risk that a Confectionary Performance will backfire. To judge from comments on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, Johnson’s tea break video played well to many viewers, but to his entrenched opponents it simply made him look more ridiculous and disingenuous. Rishi Sunak (prime minister at the time of writing) suffered a similar backlash when he sought to take a leaf out of Johnson’s book. Just a week or so into his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Johnson’s government, Sunak tweeted an image of himself in an office kitchen holding a metal teapot in one hand while his other hand plucked a teabag from a massive, catering-sized pack of Yorkshire Tea. He captioned it: ‘Quick Budget prep break making tea for the team. Nothing like a good Yorkshire brew’ (@RishiSunak, 21 February 2020). Sunak is the Member of Parliament for Richmond in North Yorkshire, so the choice of Yorkshire Tea was an understandable one. However, the performance rang somewhat hollow. It was not so much that Sunak, who was born and educated in Hampshire in the south of England, had no strong personal association with the county of Yorkshire, but that his immaculate dress, speech, and generally ‘posh’ demeanour sat awkwardly with the staged use of budget teabags and his colloquial use of ‘brew’ as shorthand for ‘cup of tea’. It might be thought that a budget bag of teabags would communicate an attractive blend of Britishness and economic prudence, and for some viewers it probably did, but his opponents apparently struggled to see past Sunak’s political party allegiance and the widely publicized fact of his own personal wealth. The social media backlash resulted in a veritable ‘storm in a teacup’, with some even calling for a boycott of Yorkshire Tea. Concerned for its brand image, the company responded by pointing out that the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had made a similar gesture during a visit to York in 2017, when he’d said that he’d happily discuss climate change with Donald Trump over a pot of Yorkshire Tea.³⁷

‘Hot Dish Is a Great Unifier – Just Like Amy’

The United States supplies an example of cuisine-based Confectionary Performance in a political context that suggests a tantalizing connection between making food and making laws. In 2011, Al Franken (the then Democratic senator for Minnesota) inaugurated a cooking competition between the members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation. The winner was fellow Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. She went on to make the most of her victory, for the New York Times reports that when Ms Klobuchar was running for the Democrats’ nomination for president in 2020 she hosted a number of ‘Hot Dish House Parties’ at which she served her winning ‘Minnesota hot dish’.³⁸ Invitations to the house parties advertised the metaphoric potential of the humble baked dish with the line: ‘Hot dish is a great unifier – just like Amy’.

Katie Rohman, the managing editor of the Duluth News Tribune, was right when she called Klobuchar’s ‘Hot Dish House Party’ a ‘piece of political theatre’, but only partly right when she called it ‘amusing’.³⁹ It was amusing in the sense of being light-hearted and in the sense that the Confectionary Performance stimulated participants’ physical senses in a manner akin to an ‘amuse bouche’, but there is serious political power in amusing performances of this type. Amy Klobuchar’s communal gatherings around food show that she has understood that politics is itself an art of Confectionary Performance by which ingredients and people are bound together to make a whole – e pluribus unum (‘out of many, one), as the national motto of the USA puts it.

The connection between making food and making laws is suggested by another of Amy Klobuchar’s accomplishments. According to GovTrack data for 2017, the legally trained Senator Klobuchar was the first ranked among all senators of more than a decade’s standing when it came to cosponsoring bills, a rise of one position from her achievement in 2016. As the GovTrack website explains: ‘Cosponsorship shows a willingness to work with others to advance policy goals.’ In 2017, she was placed third for cosponsorship compared to all senators. In 2018, she maintained third spot, and in 2019 rose to second in the all-senator list of cosponsors. So we can see that Amy Klobuchar is not only a champion maker of meals, but also a champion maker of laws in cooperative mode. The fact that she particularly excels in cosponsored laws may be revealing of her aptitude for confection – the process of making something by bringing diverse elements together.

Odour Is in the Brain of the Beholder

As with all modes of rhetorical performance, Confectionary Performance depends for its success upon the co-Productive participation of an audience. In political contexts, hot dish house parties and the like can work with small-scale gatherings, but Confectionary Performance to the masses is normally remote and mediated in ways that make it impossible for the performer to influence members of their audience through direct contact with their senses of touch, taste, and smell. If such a performance is persuasive in the strict etymological sense of delighting and moving ‘through sweetness’, it can only be because the audience has been engaged through conscious and subconscious appeals to their imagination and through the sort of sympathetic sensory response that we now associate with the brain’s motor neuron system. With this in mind, it is worth pausing to consider the part played by the audience’s taste as a factor in the Making Sense as it relates to Confectionary Performance.

The sense of smell or scent is central to our perception of nuanced taste, and taste and scent are together central to our sense – and to our language – of nuanced judgment. Bad smells and tastes produce a signally strong negative reaction, which is no doubt down to their deep-seated primitive association with diseased, rotten, and otherwise unpalatable food and unhygienic environments. Hence, we still communicate the strongly negative judgment that ‘something’s off’ or is ‘rotten to the core’ or is ‘sickening’ with such visceral sensory phrases as ‘that stinks’, ‘something’s fishy’, ‘it leaves a bad taste in my mouth’, ‘that’s in poor taste’, and ‘you’re just bitter’. One of our standard words for strongly negative judgment – ‘disgust’ – literally means ‘contrary to taste’, and psychologists have shown that the severity of our moral judgment is amplified when choices are made in the presence of disgusting smells and in disgusting environments.⁴⁰ The evolution of language confirms the evolution of biological psychology, for judgment in the sense of ‘choice’ is etymologically nothing other than a description of ‘taste’, the Proto-Indo-European root *geus- being the basis both of the English word ‘choice’ and Latin word ‘gustum’ (‘taste’).

When we use the word ‘olfactory’ to refer to making smells, the relevant ‘factory’ is the brain of the receiver rather than the originator of the physical stimulus. A rose does not produce a scent – the human brain does. At the very least, the receiver’s olfactory sense must be regarded as a co-Producer of the aroma. The brilliant Italian jurist, rhetorician, and philosopher Giambattista Vico made precisely this point almost three centuries ago when he wrote that ‘a living being makes the odor in the smelling’ (‘animans odorem olfactu faciat’).⁴¹ Human sensory ‘faculties’ are so-named, he says, because the senses make sensations (‘faculty’ being derived from the Latin verb facere, ‘to make’). In the late nineteenth century, Dewey put the point in modern scientific language when he wrote that ‘sensation is the result of the activity of the psycho-physical organism, and is produced, not received’.⁴² The social psychologists Waskul and Vannini observe likewise that ‘[t]o sense … is to make sense’,⁴³ adding that ‘[t]he physiological nature of odors is, in fact, the raw material of which olfactory perception is fashioned – and that fashioning is quintessentially cultural and natural at the same time’.⁴⁴

We prefer our bodies, our clothes, our cars, and our homes to smell pleasant, and even in virtual or remote performance we might respond sympathetically to Confectionary Performance when it evokes some of our culture’s favourite scents. The popularity of GBBO and Boris Johnson’s decision to ape it in his mince pie–making video makes sense when one appreciates not only that Confectionary Performance appeals holistically to the Making Sense, including the haptic sense evoked by hands-on processes, but also because baking makes pleasant scents – not in our nose (it’s a rare television that emits a perfume) but in our brain. The smell of ‘freshly baked bread’ ranked first in one survey of the UK’s fifty favourite smells, and the smell of ‘cakes baking in the oven’ ranked fifth in the same survey.⁴⁵ A question put to Boris Johnson in his ‘tea break video’ also makes sense when scents are borne in mind. The interviewer put to him the choice ‘fish and chips or a Sunday roast?’ Those meals rank at positions nine and eight respectively in the nation’s top-fifty scents. Boris Johnson’s reply – ‘fish and chips on a cold night on the beach’ – brings in the ‘seaside’ (ranked sixth in the list of favourite smells). It might seem that Johnson missed an olfactory trick when he made tea instead of coffee (the smell of coffee comes in at number four, whereas tea didn’t make the top fifty), but one can appreciate why he would prefer the traditional appeal of tea to the British psyche (even if by some measures coffee is now the most popular hot beverage in the UK). For all his olfactory prowess, as demonstrated in the tea-making video, Johnson risked undoing all his good work when he referred to the act of cleaning up after his pet dog. The performed humility and civic responsibility of the act might not be enough to compensate for the bad smell it leaves in the audience’s mind.

Johnson’s tea break and mince pie videos conjure up half of all scents ranked in the top ten by popularity. The five not alluded to are bacon (2), freshly cut grass (3), coffee (4), freshly washed clothes (7), and fresh flowers (10). Perhaps a future video will capitalize on the popularity of gardening television shows and bring us a politician with a flask of coffee cutting grass and flowers then popping their muddy clothes in the wash. The bacon, however, is best avoided – partly because it may be off-putting to vegetarians and observant Jewish and Muslim voters, but also because UK politicians and voters remember ‘How a Bacon Sandwich Derailed Ed Miliband’s UK Political Career’.⁴⁶ That’s the Huffpost headline to an article looking back on the day in the 2014 general election campaign when former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband staged a photo-op of himself buying flowers for his wife (a good olfactory choice) and eating breakfast. It was the latter that proved a disaster for those who, in the words of the article, ‘had been crafting his image’.⁴⁷ He was meant to be consuming a bacon sandwich, but newspaper photographs gave the visceral impression that the sandwich was consuming him. The lesson for politicians is simple – if you want to ‘make it’, make it – but never eat it.

Political performance works best when it appeals (we might say ‘panders’) to popular taste. In the mid-seventeenth century (even before Vico), Baltasar Gracián had associated the senses with the cultivation of ‘good taste’. Patrícia Branco and Richard Mohr suggest that this may be ‘the earliest use of the term in the sense of refined judgment’,⁴⁸ adding that Gracián, like Vico, ‘identifies taste not with the tongue, but with “olfato”, the olfactory’.⁴⁹ The tongue is a rather crude touchstone of taste. It covers such basics as sour, salty, sweet, bitter, and savoury (umami), but cannot detect more nuanced flavours. Fine judgment belongs to the nose,⁵⁰ and specifically to the sense of smell.⁵¹ Branco and Mohr note that Gracián favoured the cultivation of a sort of sixth sense or common sense (sensus communis) to govern the five major senses.⁵² Modern psychology suggests that the brain does indeed manage sensory stimuli synaesthetically in something like the way that Gracián anticipated. The Making Sense as I describe it is likewise associated with the combined cognition and critique of sensory impulses. When we make things or see others making things, our brains employ our sympathetic sense of making to make combined sense of what would otherwise be discrete, confusing, and potentially contradictory stimuli. A good example of the brain’s capacity to impose a dominant sense upon stimuli that are quite literally contradictory is the McGurk effect, by which the brain hears the sound shaped by the movement of another person’s lips even when the audible signal received by the ear is a different sound.⁵³ To be precise, the McGurk effect stimulates the eye with the sight of a person silently and repeatedly mouthing one syllable (‘va’) while the sound of another syllable (‘ba’) is simultaneously emitted. Remarkably, the brain hears the syllable that is silently mouthed and cannot hear the syllable that is actually being emitted. The brain decides that if the auditory signal contradicts what the eye has seen, the sense of sight should be preferred.

We conclude by returning to the observation made at the outset of this chapter that the art of rhetoric has always appreciated the psychological realities that modern science is only now beginning to confirm. When it comes to producing a persuasive rhetorical performance, the rhetoricians knew that the key is to appeal to the Making Sense by making or talking about making, and to perform in ways that delight the senses. There is, though, a danger in delight. Bertolt Brecht used the term ‘culinary theatre’ to decry drama that panders to the audience’s tastes and which only seeks to feed them through feelings rather than provoking them to think.⁵⁴ The complaint has an ancient antecedent in Aristophanes’ critical depiction of public speakers in his play The Knights,⁵⁵ where it is suggested that ‘a sausage seller is the ideal orator, for he will know the most delicious recipes’.⁵⁶ It is at the point of sale that our role as co-Producer comes into play and we are required to exercise ‘Receiver Responsibility’ (an attribute I discuss in more depth in Chapter 11 in the context of ‘fake news’). If we develop our awareness of the power of Confectionary Performance and of its capacity to make opinions palatable and persuasive, we will be forearmed to counter and resist. Just because someone’s making it, doesn’t mean we’re swallowing it.

9 State Building

Donald Trump called ‘Make America Great Again’ his ‘whole theme’.¹ He blazoned the slogan in signal white on his red baseball cap and even trademarked it.² ‘Let’s make America great again’ had been the election slogan of Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential election campaign. Accepting the Republican Party’s nomination to run as its presidential candidate, Reagan portrayed his party as one with ‘positive programs for solving the nation’s problems, a party ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom’. He founded these values in the compact made between the Pilgrim Fathers:

Three-hundred-and-sixty years ago, in 1620, a group of families dared to cross a mighty ocean to build a future for themselves in a new world. When they arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, they formed what they called a ‘compact,’ an agreement among themselves to build a community and abide by its laws.

Reagan called for a communal effort to rebuild America on those first foundations, promising to ‘those who’ve abandoned hope’ that his party would ‘welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again’. Reagan talked of building ‘consensus’ and ‘community’, and of ‘making a commitment to care’. Absent the alliterative ‘crusade’, such language is about as close as a conservative on the political right can come to aligning with the politics of the political left as described in the following terms by one Fabian commentator:

To end citizens’ disillusionment with politics, we need to craft a different idea and practice of political power. Politicians should see themselves as creators not managers, as leaders who build and nurture institutions in which people negotiate and agree a common plan of action for mutual interest.³

Reagan put America first, but he also acknowledged that making a better America was compatible with the project to ‘make a better world for others’.

Making Enemies

There was no such note of consensus building in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech when the Republicans nominated him to run for president.⁴ On the contrary, his references to building and making were invariably framed in opposition to others, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Chinese trade rivals, or Washington political elites. The most blatant example was his notorious promise to ‘build a wall’ on the US-Mexico border: ‘We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.’ Whenever he talks of building his own people up, he seldom misses the chance to put others down. For example, his promise to ‘outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America’ was immediately followed with the assertion that ‘these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests’; and his statement, ‘[w]e are going to start building and making things again’, follows talk of renegotiating ‘horrible trade agreements with China and many others’. Even when expressing the positive belief that his economic plan ‘will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow [which] in turn, will create millions more jobs’, he posits an enemy to his plan – not a political rival or a foreign power – but hard-working teachers in struggling (and presumably inner-city) schools. That’s the implication of his very next line: ‘We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.’ Likewise, when he promises that ‘[w]e will completely rebuild our depleted military’, the constructive point is immediately followed by criticism of others: ‘and the countries that we protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share’. It is significant that ‘Rebuilding America Now’, which has been identified as the ‘primary’ super PAC (political action committee) backing Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign,⁵ spent $17 million attacking Hillary Clinton and less than a quarter of that sum positively supporting Donald Trump.⁶ Even as this book goes to press in February 2023, the tagline on its website under the banner ‘Rebuilding America Now’ is ‘Vote #NeverHillary’.⁷

Trump is a property developer by background, and is fond of boasting his credentials as a ‘builder’:

[T]he bottom line is we have to rebuild our country, ’cos the infrastructure … and who can do better than me with that … the building, nobody can do building like I do building, and even the builders in New York will tell you ‘Trump builds the best’.⁸

The populist brand of building promoted by Trump and his primary supporters, including Rebuilding America Now, is not of the consensus-building sort, but of the demolish and rebuild sort. There is seldom a ‘put it up’ without a corresponding ‘put them down’. With his negative emphasis, Trump departs from standard political wisdom on the use of metaphors, which holds, as Jonathan Charteris-Black summarizes it in his index of metaphors, that ‘Good Governing Is Creating’ and ‘Bad Governing Is Destroying’.⁹ When the Rebuilding America Now website does put across its message in more positive terms, as in its one-minute campaign video ‘America Soaring’, it appeals to the Making Sense. It opens with the negative observation that ‘[s]killed craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they love shoot thousands of miles away’, but promises that it can be turned around:

It will be American steel, just like the American steel that built the Empire State Building, that will fortify America’s crumbling bridges. It will be American steel that rebuilds our inner cities. It will be American steel that sends our skyscrapers soaring. It will be American hands, American workers that remake this country … we’re going to Make America Great Again for everyone. Greater than ever before.¹⁰

All this is the standard puff of presidential election campaigns. The reference to building bridges is especially potent metaphorically as a way of combining the virtues of building with the political ideal of connecting people. Hence Bill Clinton’s slogan for his successful 1996 presidential election campaign was ‘Building a Bridge to the 21st Century’. Rebuilding America Now’s reference to ‘[s]killed craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers’ is also a cliché of campaign advertisements. Indeed, an April Fool’s Day video from 2016 entitled ‘This Is a Generic Presidential Campaign Ad’ contains the line: ‘machines spark in the foreground when I tour the few remaining places where they manufacture things’.¹¹ In the hands of property developer Donald Trump, the cliché of building and making had a particularly plausible appeal to his base voters.

Made in Germany

Like all performers, Trump knows his audience and how to play to them. His talk of ‘building and making things again’ might be especially appealing to that section of the electorate whose heritage is one of manual craft and industry, and in that respect few sections of American society are as significant as the German-Americans. Per Urlaub and David Huenlic, scholars in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, have written an article which asks in its title: ‘Why Are the German-Americans Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters?’.¹² It is an important question because, as they note, ‘46 million Americans claim German ancestry and therefore constitute the largest national heritage group in the United States’, and the counties in which they are the largest ethnic group correspond closely to counties that supported Trump in 2016.¹³ In answer to Urlaub and Huenlic’s question, we can perhaps dismiss the relatively superficial fact that Trump is himself of German extraction. Some scholars have pointed to race as a significant factor in Trump’s support in the northern heartland states where German-Americans are prevalent,¹⁴ but that is hard to square with support for Obama in swing ‘German-American counties’ in 2008 and 2012.¹⁵ The scholars who posed the question regarding German-Americans being Trump’s most loyal supporters answer it by pointing not to race or to Trump’s ancestry but to a more complex blend of socio-economic and cultural factors. These factors can be read together, I would argue, to suggest that the root of German-American support for Trump is his appeal to the Making Sense. When German farmers and skilled workers settled in the USA in the nineteenth century, they had a huge hand in the cultivation and industrialization of the mid-west:

Agriculture and entrepreneurial craftsmanship generated wealth that sustained families and communities for more than a century until globalization undermined the economic sustainability of family farms and domestic manufacturing. … the collapse of communal structures, and the loss of a rich cultural heritage that provided a sense of being, made people receptive for Trump’s anti-establishment gestures and his xenophobic messages.¹⁶

The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ is rhetorically effective because it appeals powerfully to significant topics of rhetorical persuasion. ‘America’ appeals to nation. ‘Great’ appeals to power and success. ‘Again’ appeals to nostalgia. ‘Make’, though, may be the most actively persuasive word of them all. It is in prime position at the start of the slogan and is the only verb – the only active word – of the four, but most significant is the fact that the type of action it appeals to is the action of making. Insofar as the slogan excites the Making Sense, it will have psychological appeal to voters. For some (including, one suspects, many Native Americans and African Americans) this will be offset by a lack of nostalgia for the ways in which America was made in the first place. For German-Americans, on the other hand, and for descendants of other groups for whom the ideal of America is positively inseparable from their skill in making, crafting, and cultivating with their own hands, the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ must sound like an anthem to ‘Make America’s Makers Great Again’ in the face of the twin existential threats of urbanization and globalization.

Washington: America’s Chief Architect

Five years before the ‘Make America Great Again’ motif appeared in US politics, ‘Make Britain Great Again’ had been the slogan of the far-right party The National Front in their campaign for the UK to answer ‘no’ in the 1975 national referendum on the question ‘Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?’. The ‘Make Great’ slogan has a particular relevance to the UK because ‘Great Britain’ is the traditional label for the territorially largest – that is, the physically ‘greatest’ – of the British Isles, but despite the slogan’s unique suitability to the UK, it is no surprise that it has migrated so effectively into US politics. The idea of building has always been at the heart of the rhetorical performance by which America has sought to form its national identity, right down to the fact that the original performers of the rhetorical texts on which the nation was built were named the ‘founding fathers’.

The nation’s capital, Washington, DC, is named for the keystone of the founding fathers – George Washington. Washington the man has been transformed into Washington the national symbol. In a political system designed to operate by checks and balances, the symbolic fulcrum is the massive stone needle of the Washington Monument – the tallest monumental obelisk in the world. The main architectural sentence in the rhetorical expression of the national polity is the grand articulation of the National Mall. It stretches out, the Lincoln Memorial at one end and the Capitol Building at the other, with the Washington Monument somewhere near the mid-point. The monument is a fitting tribute to a president who was acutely attuned to the architectural construction of his personal and political image, and who – as befits a pragmatic military general and political performer – eschewed architectural theories in favour of a simple respect for structures that ‘please the eye’.¹⁷ George Washington practised as a professional surveyor from his teenage years. He was also a Master Mason – not of the artisan variety, but as a senior member of the fellowship of freemasons which he had joined as a young man. Among the founding fathers, Ben Franklin and John Hancock were also freemasons and it is believed that at least one in six of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and at least one in three of the signatories of the Constitution of the United States were freemasons. As architects and freemasons, the founding fathers were self-consciously in the business of state building.

Freemasonry was, and largely still is, a principally male affair. The political association between building and political life is also dominated by male politicians, but there are nevertheless significant examples of female politicians leaning on building metaphors. Hillary Clinton’s concession speech after the 2016 presidential election featured a call, figured as a rhetorical tricolon, ‘to build that better, stronger, fairer America we seek’ (9 November 2016). In the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May closed her first speech as prime minister with the words: ‘together we will build a better Britain’ (13 July 2016). When accepting the 2020 Democratic Party nomination to run for vice-president, Kamala Harris spoke of ‘building this country back better’ to ‘create millions of jobs … so the future is made in America’ and of her vision to ‘build on the Affordable Care Act’ (19 August 2020). She was here echoing a key theme of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, for when accepting the nomination to run for president, Biden said:

Together, we can, and we will, rebuild our economy. And when we do, we’ll not only build it back, we’ll build it back better. With modern roads, bridges, highways, broadband, ports and airports as a new foundation for economic growth. With pipes that transport clean water to every community. With 5 million new manufacturing and technology jobs so the future is made in America.

(20 August 2020)

In his first address to the nation as president elect, Biden reasserted his building theme:

I sought this office to restore the soul of America. To rebuild the backbone of the nation – the middle class. To make America respected around the world again and to unite us here at home … And now the work of making this vision real is the task of our time.

(7 November 2020)

In his inaugural presidential address, Biden sought to galvanize the nation to undertake the shared challenge, and to take the shared opportunity, of having ‘much to do … Much to repair … Much to restore … Much to heal … Much to build … And much to gain.’ Combining making and building, he went on to replace the ‘great’ of Trump’s slogan with an idea of the common ‘good’:

We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice. We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.

(20 January 2021)

Boris the Builder

Joe Biden’s 2020 alliterative tricolon ‘build it back better’ was published shortly after then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s press release ‘Build, Build, Build’, in which Johnson committed his government to ‘build back better’ in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.¹⁸ Johnson’s government also used the motto as the slogan for the G7 summit hosted by the UK in 2021, where the main agenda item was global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. In Johnson’s case, the phrase was used not only metaphorically but also literally. The policy advertised in the press release was concerned with ‘making it easier to build better homes where people want to live’. A further policy announced in 2022, which aimed, with a typical alliterative flourish, to turn ‘benefits to bricks’, promised to help working people in receipt of housing benefits to save for their own homes. Johnson seems to enjoy playing the role of ‘Boris the Builder’. Like the animated television character ‘Bob the Builder’, he is frequently to be seen wearing a builder’s yellow hard hat and on one memorable occasion his party published a video of him driving a JCB digger emblazoned with the British flag and the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ through a polystyrene wall bearing the word ‘Gridlock’.¹⁹ Johnson likes a big building venture. He eagerly adopted and promoted the UK’s HS2 (High Speed Rail 2) project even though it was running massively over budget, would cause environmental damage to the rural heartlands of Conservative Party support, and had originally been proposed by the opposition Labour Party. When he was London Mayor, Johnson put his name to the London Olympics and to the construction of London’s new Crossrail development, as well as being a prime mover in a project to build a new London airport on an artificial island in the Thames, a project almost as impractical as his talk of building a bridge joining Northern Ireland to Scotland. The cynic might say that Johnson deliberately initiates or adopts huge infrastructural projects not only to grab headlines and to appear to be productive, but also to distract the public from the finer details of his political performance. He undoubtedly appreciates the rhetorically performative benefits of being seen to build. As Tom McTague summarizes: ‘He loves infrastructure, mobile infrastructure especially – planes, trains, bicycles, trams, even bridges to Ireland and airports floating in the sea. And he loves photo ops.’²⁰ ‘Mobile infrastructure’ is an apt phrase, for it tells us that projects of this sort achieve the rhetorical ideal of performing political change in tandem with political stability.

Building up the House Down Under

The building trope is also favoured in political performance elsewhere across the globe. In Australia, male politicians in particular have been at the forefront of notable building performances. As befits the more informal tone of Antipodean politics, we more than once find prime ministers embedding their performances in the context of a casual trip to Australia’s popular hardware store Bunnings (shorthand for Bunnings Warehouse). Interestingly, and perhaps to offset the traditionally macho associations of building work, female family members have on these occasions been cast in supporting roles. So we have the example of Scott Morrison, the then prime minister of Australia, who uploaded a video to his Facebook account with the following tagline:

In honour of Father’s Day, I thought I’d share a quick video of one of my best dad moments from this year – building a cubby house with my daughter Lily for her school project. It’s not perfect, but doing it together was.

(Facebook, 6 September 2020)

Within the first ten seconds of the video, he announces: ‘we’ve been to Bunnings’. By enlisting his daughter’s help in the construction, she becomes a sort of representative figure for the viewing public – encouraging Australians to imagine themselves as co-Producers participating in the prime minister’s political project.

On 1 September 2013, the then Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, launched his party’s campaign for the Australian federal election with the motto ‘building for the future’. This time his wife, businesswoman Thérèse Rein, played the supporting role, introducing him to the stage with an amusing account of when her husband visited Bunnings and came back with all manner of goods (step ladder, extension cable, etc.) but not the one thing she’d asked him to buy – a single ‘mozzie candle’. The anecdote neatly framed the ensuing speech in which the prime minister exploited the building trope to the full, saying:

We are in the business of building the house up. We have been building this vision – brick-by-brick over the last five years … we, for all our faults, are always having a go at building a better Australia.

Chinese Walls

The popularity of building slogans with politicians is also observable in China. When Chinese artist Zhang Dali produced his photographic artwork The Slogan Series, which was based on political slogans placed on state-sponsored billboards across Beijing in 2007 and 2008, nearly all of the artist’s chosen slogans featured at least one theme relating to making, building, construction, or development. In Professor Maurizio Marinelli’s English translation, they were:

• ‘Effortlessly build up a saving society. Implement a sustainable development.’

• ‘Seek the truth and be pragmatic. Open up to innovation. Promote the balanced development of the three cultures.’

• ‘Study ceremony and propriety and you will make yourself more cultivated. Behave according to ceremony and propriety and you will make (your) life more beautiful.’

• ‘Enhance an advanced culture. Promote the social development.’

• ‘Take to heart the study, the implementation, and the fulfilment of the spirit of the Party’s Seventeenth Congress. Push forward the construction of the harmonious socialist society.’

• ‘Strengthen the construction of morality in the way of thinking. Elevate the cultural quality of the citizens.’²¹

The predominance of themes of cultural construction in this selected list of slogans might be down in part to the artist’s bias – he was, after all, using them in the construction of his own cultural contribution – but it is more likely attributable to the dominance of the building theme in Chinese political ideology. The state’s national goal is summed up as ‘building up a socialist political civilization’.²² The authors of an article on building metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches note how Chinese nationalist Kuomintang presidents of Taiwan have promoted the Chinese communist ideal of building through their use of building metaphors, whereas presidents opposed to Chinese rule have preferred metaphors that convey the idea that ‘Communists are Destroyers’ and ‘The Communist Takeover is Destruction’.²³ Of course, the important thing with all political propaganda is to treat with prudent suspicion any suggestion that the ideals behind the metaphor are sincerely held and sincerely pursued by the propagandist. After all, even Vladimir Putin, whose name is nowadays a byword for wanton destruction, is apparently an ardent enthusiast for metaphors of building.²⁴

The Universality of Linguistic Construction

One reason for the global appeal of the building metaphor, despite great regional differences in language, is the basic fact that the formation of linguistic sentences is itself a constructive activity. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. observes that ‘people automatically construct imaginative understandings of metaphors that are closely tied to their mental simulating … Metaphorical simulations are not abstract, or amodal, but are created in terms of “as if” bodily action.’²⁵ For example, when we talk metaphorically of ‘grasping a concept’ we really do think about the motor function of ‘grasping’, and for this reason the seemingly abstract metaphor is cognitively realized and made real. This finding flows from cognitive or conceptual metaphor theory as pioneered by such scholars as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.²⁶ They argue that the cognitive basis for metaphor usage entails that in certain contexts, including the context of law, ‘metaphor is made real’.²⁷ Andrew Ortony acknowledges that this ‘constructivist approach … tends to undermine the distinction between the metaphorical and literal’, but that it establishes ‘an important role for metaphor in both language and thought.’²⁸

The rhetoricians of antiquity appreciated in their own way the essential cognitive connection between language and thought. When the Roman rhetorician Quintilian wrote that in the construction of a sentence each word ‘has to be placed in its proper position, as in a structure of unshaped stones. We cannot cut or polish words to make them fit together’,²⁹ he was talking metaphorically but also in a way that expressed and revealed the cognitive reality of the art of crafting a sentence. The idea of language as practice in rhetorical craft, and specifically of the builder’s or mason’s craft, continued into the medieval period³⁰ and still survives today. James Boyd White pursues a similar thought in his chapter on ‘Making Meaning in the Sentence’, where he observes that ‘in our writing and talk we do not in fact produce a series of unconnected clauses but fashion them into what we call sentences, built up by a process of subordination and coordination’.³¹ Use of the words ‘produce’, ‘fashion’, and ‘built up’ reveals that he has a material process in mind. More prosaically, we are accustomed to talk of a ‘well-constructed’ sentence. It is the feel, the shape, the sound, the solidity, and the form of the sentence that makes the matter and makes it matter. In criminal convictions we even talk of judges ‘passing down’ or ‘handing down’ sentences as if they were material things. Judicial and juristic sentences are indeed made things – whether ‘made’ is here understood to refer to Invention through the choice of linguistic fragments, or to Creation of a material expression out of the grain of an idea, or to the public Production of an utterance to be handled by the hearer or reader as co-Producer. To utter a sentence, says White, is to ‘engage in creation’.³² Not surprisingly, it is to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who coined the idea of ‘creative reading’, that White turns for support.³³ Emerson brings in the audience’s role as co-Producer of a sentence when he observes that:

The maker of a sentence like the other artist, launches out into the infinite and builds a road into chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.³⁴

As with all language, ‘metaphor … is not a mere reflection of a pre-existing objective reality but a construction of reality’,³⁵ and metaphors are especially constructive, for they present a puzzle (e.g. ‘hope is a rose bud’) which prompts the mind to erect a cognitive bridge between an abstract concept (hope) and a concrete image (rose bud).³⁶ Where metaphor – which is a constructor – uses the imagery of building, its power of construction is amplified, for in a building metaphor the builder builds. No wonder, then, that Charteris-Black’s analysis of fifty years of British party-political election manifestos reveals that building imagery accounted for ‘nearly a quarter of all metaphors’ used;³⁷ although how many of these were ‘building as completed edifice’ and how many ‘building as process’ is not said. That distinction matters, because whereas the former speaks of stability, the latter conjures the equally significant but very different political value of change. Charteris-Black does make the important point that the popular political metaphor ‘we have laid the foundations’ expresses both present stability and the potential for future change.

Building, Not Building

It is important to clarify that the most effective rhetorical performances are not those that present ‘building’ as a noun (the product as completed construct) but those that present ‘building’ as a verb (the thing in the course of construction). Presenting the building process opens up the possibility, or at least the perception, of public participation in the co-Production of the national commonwealth. Building as activity encourages the Making Sense of communal building and of building community in a way that presenting ‘a building’ as completed edifice does not. I am drawn back to a beautiful passage in Horace’s Ars Poetica in which he represents art’s ability to build society through persuasive influence:

Amphion too, the builder of the Theban wall, was said to give the stones motion with the sound of his lyre, and to lead them whithersoever he would, by engaging persuasion.³⁸

Music is symbolic here of all the lyrical arts inspired by the muses – what the Greeks called mousiké – among which we can certainly include the rhetorical art of performed speech, which in ancient times was inseparable from law and statecraft.³⁹ A key feature of what makes this passage in Horace so persuasive and engaging is that it does not present a picture of the built wall but instead draws the audience into the activity of building. It evokes the Making Sense. Present the public with the chance to participate in making, and you make friends. Present the public with a finished product over which they can have no creative influence, and you are likely to make enemies. Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May found this to her cost.

In the final Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons before the 2017 UK general election, Theresa May said ‘strong’ thirty-one times and ‘strong and stable’ ten times (26 April 2017). This was a rather clumsy attempt to lodge in the public ear the Conservative Party’s election slogan ‘Strong and Stable Leadership in the National Interest’. She was not presenting a building as such, but she was presenting her leadership and her government as an established and immovable object with the definite sense that it was the finished and firmly founded article – a fait accompli. Theresa May’s offering came with no inherent sense of flexibility, growth, or capacity to change. As leader of the incumbent government, she was seeking to establish in the public imagination the statue-like stability of the state and the status quo. It seems that the possibility did not occur to her that voters would want to push against the strong and stable stone she presented to them rather than give her a mandate to build upon it. Shakespeare dramatized a historical precedent for the same sort of political blindness when his Julius Caesar boasted right before he was assassinated that he was ‘constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament’ (Julius Caesar 3.1.58–62). I have argued elsewhere that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar can be read as an extended rhetorical engagement with connotations of the Latin verb stare ‘to stand’ (the foundation of such words as ‘state’, ‘status’, ‘statue’, ‘statute’, ‘constitution’) and by the same token as an extended rhetorical study of the dramatic dynamic of overcoming political stubbornness and the stasis of the state.⁴⁰ Making a broadly similar point, the celebrated Shakespearean director Michael Bogdanov notes that Shakespeare often ‘poses a status quo against which he pits a protagonist’, and that the protagonist ‘usually smashes him or herself to pieces against the rock of state’.⁴¹

The supposed stability of any static state, whether it be the state of the nation or the individual playgoer’s state of mind, sets a challenge to the dramaturge, for the essential urge of a dramatist is always to move their audience. In the drama of the 2017 general election, Theresa May smashed herself to pieces on the rock of her own stability. Interestingly, her premiership had begun in July 2016 with an appeal to the Making Sense expressed in her hope to ‘build a better Britain’ and ‘forge a new role for ourselves in the world’ after departure from the EU. By 2017, the dynamism of that initial message had become static to the point of stagnancy, having been stymied by parliamentary reluctance to deliver the Brexit outcome called for by the 2016 referendum. Whichever way individuals had voted in the 2016 referendum, few among the electorate at the 2017 general election had any appetite for the status quo, and yet this is precisely what Theresa May’s ‘strong and stable’ mantra was offering them. In the event, the public rejected Theresa May’s insistent and stagnant offer of stability. She had called the 2017 general election in the hope of improving her party’s parliamentary majority in order to strengthen her government’s hand in Brexit negotiations with the EU, but the election wiped out her majority. The electorate likes building but doesn’t necessarily like buildings.

Law in the Making

It is in the nature of politics that a government ‘must be stable and yet it cannot stand still’. These words, borrowed from American jurist Roscoe Pound, were originally applied to law. He went on to say that ‘all thinking about law has struggled to reconcile the conflicting demands of the need of stability and of the need of change’.⁴² Judge Benjamin Cardozo once observed similarly that ‘the lover of stability, of things as they are [and] the zealot who pants for change. Each is a builder of the Civitas Dei; and so, let us believe in all humility, is every craftsman in this process of ours’.⁴³ To retain popular respect for its processes, the law must somehow exude a sense of reliable stability while at the same time promising responsive plasticity. How can it communicate these two conflicting qualities at one and the same time? Cardozo’s words demonstrate that one of the law’s successful methods for simultaneously displaying stability and change is the use of metaphors and allegories of building, and particularly those that communicate building as an ongoing process. When the law can demonstrate that it is in the course of erecting a strong edifice it is able to communicate present progress and change even as it performs its belief in permanence and stability. The performance is at its most effective when the law, by which I mean legal actors and the law’s human representatives, can demonstrate that it is offering not a fait accompli but (in the title of Professor Allen’s book) Law in the Making.⁴⁴ The balance between stability and change is demonstrated, for example, in an official video about the construction of the permanent premises of the International Criminal Court, for, despite the descriptor ‘permanent’, the video focuses on the construction stage and the narrator expressly notes that ‘it is important that a formal institution like the ICC does not constitute barriers for people, on the contrary, it must express the very essence of democratic architecture’.⁴⁵ These words have the effect of inviting the public into the making process and of encouraging them to participate and even (given the express aim to produce ‘democratic architecture’) to have a sense of co-Production in the project. When the French Ministry of Justice embarked on a revision of its courthouses in the late 1980s, it likewise sought to express ‘the values of democracy’ in the construction of its new court buildings.⁴⁶ Eliza Garnsey makes a similar observation on the Constitutional Court of South Africa when she writes that:

The physical existence of the court building is a realisation of South Africa’s transition; this is the site of justice … the Court is simultaneously a utopian good place (a site constituting justice) and a utopian no place, a prospect yet to be realised (a sight of justice in the making).⁴⁷

The subtitle of Garnsey’s book is Creative State-Building in Times of Political Transition. It hints that art – whether it be Amphion’s musical art or a politician’s rhetorical art – is especially well suited to performing the seemingly paradoxical task of building the state as a stable thing while responding to social movements and transitions through time. The special qualification of musical, rhetorical, and other arts in this regard resides in their dependence upon settled rules and their creative capacity to adapt those rules in new ways to new conditions. There is rhetorical and dramatic genius in any performance that can simultaneously promise stability even as it enacts change, for what most humans desire is to be exposed to conditions in which the twin goods of security and variety exist in harmonious balance.

Equitable Architecture

The word ‘architect’ is derived from the Greek arkhitekton. It means ‘master builder’ and, more anciently, ‘chief weaver’. The word conveys the sense that an architect is a person whose superior technical skill confers superior social status; a sense that also appears from the Old English counterpart heahcræftiga (‘high crafter’). Many a lawyer is content to function as a mere technician, when they ought to aspire to the status of ‘high crafter’. As the lawyer Pleydell says in the novel Guy Mannering by Scottish author (and sometime legal advocate) Sir Walter Scott, ‘[a] lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect’.⁴⁸ The idea of the architect first became prominent as a description of experts who oversaw the technical design and building of wooden, stone, and brick constructions, but it readily became a metaphor to describe an expert in rhetorical techniques of state building and constructing laws. It was in this metaphorical sense that Martin Luther King Jr referred to America’s founding fathers as ‘the architects of our republic’.⁴⁹

So similar are the architectural crafts of law and building that when Aristotle contemplated the seemingly intractable conflict between law’s rigidity and life’s variability, he found a solution in a building metaphor. In Greek thought, a law properly so-called was an inflexible and unchanging thing to be laid down against the shapes of life to enable a judge to determine where life had fallen short of law. It was Aristotle who identified the need for equity (he called it epieikeia, which means something like ‘gentleness’ or the quality of ‘yielding’) to act as ‘a rectification of law where law is defective because of its generality’.⁵⁰ The solution, he said, was not to lay down law in the form of a universal and rigid rule, but to apply discretion through judicial decree in the particular case. He likened this flexible mode of justice to ‘the leaden rule used by Lesbian builders; just as that rule is not rigid but can be bent to the shape of the stone, so a special ordinance is made to fit the circumstances of the case’.⁵¹ The metaphor seems to have been inspired by a curved or leaf-like motif used in architectural decoration on the ancient Greek island of Lesbos. The lesson of the metaphor is that a builder or carpenter wishing to fit material to an irregular (non-rectilinear) support must bend their rule to fit the contours of the context, just as a judge must bend rigid legal rules to fit the organic shapes of human life in the context of a particular case. Law should bend to fit life, rather than life bend to fit law.⁵²

Another Brick in the Law

The activity of equity demonstrates that law at its most imaginative aspires to the difficult task of integrating rules to life, so that laws take on human shape. James Boyd White writes that:

The art of the lawyer, like that of the judge, is to put together the prior texts that are the material of law in new compositions, which, while respecting the nature of each item, so order them as to create a new arrangement with a meaning of its own. The art of law is the art of integration.⁵³

Law sets itself the ambition of integrating every section of law, old and new, with every other to produce a whole that is as coherent as possible. This aims to achieve consistency and predictability as necessary features of a just legal process. The American jurist Rosco Pound stresses the importance of ‘the process of adjusting the legal materials handed down from the civilization of the past to the demands of the civilization of the present and of finding or creating new materials and fitting them with the old into a more or less harmonious system’.⁵⁴ The lawyers’ art of integrating law with itself entails the craft of constructing the whole with an eye to the part and construing the part with an eye to the whole. The proper construction of a statutory section or the proper construction of a contractual clause is only achievable through the expert practice of this highly technical – indeed architectural – art. As interpretation of a document is an art of integration, so too is drafting a document so that all the clauses and subclauses fit together to form an impenetrable wall.

Judge-made law is an integrated (if not entirely coherent) whole built out of cases, and cases in turn are formed out of the skilfully assembled fragments we call facts. The basic building blocks of judicial craft are the speech units that constitute the judicial fact and the speech units that constitute the judicial statement of law. The legal maker of a well-formed juristic sentence must have an eye to the construction of the whole edifice. The jurist who does this well may be compared to the high crafter who carefully selects suitable stones to form a dry-stone wall, or else to the artisan who lays down the law brick-by-brick to build the integrated stable wall of the legal edifice.

The word ‘brick’ is a close cousin to ‘break’. A brick is always a fragment of a greater whole. A lone brick is estranged from its intended purpose, which is to be joined with other bricks to make an integrated edifice. A stone, unlike a brick, can be a freestanding thing. The earliest law codes were inscribed in the form of standing stones called steles, and famous examples survive including the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and the basalt stele in the Musée du Louvre that bears almost the entire Code of Hammurabi. Even in modern English, derived as it is from prehistoric, Proto-Indo European roots, the stone-like stability of inscribed law is clear from the similarity of the related words ‘statue’ and ‘statute’. They are both standing things. The legal image of the brick in the wall fits with the language by which we typically describe infractions of law in the language of ‘breaking’ and ‘breach’. The notion of ‘law-breaking’ implies fragmentation of a whole, whereas ‘law-making’ can be conceived as the opposite process of building a whole out of fractions brick-by-brick. Thus law-bricking and law-breaking are processes by which the law is rendered more or less integrated. If the legal drafter leaves holes in the whole, the draft document may prove draughty. When we use the term ‘loophole’ to describe a weakness in legal drafting, we are using the imagery of medieval warfare. The loophole was the narrow slit or gap in a castle wall from which arrows were fired out, and through which a well-aimed arrow of the enemy might pierce. As always with legal loopholes, the point of vulnerability in the law’s edifice is simultaneously one side’s weakness and the other side’s opportunity. The challenge facing the legal draftsperson is to build the law brick-by-brick without a loophole. One brick out of place might produce a dangerous infraction of the integrity of the whole. It is complicated enough in private drafting, but the edifice of the law is also built on a grand scale through the work of Parliament and judges. On the grand scale, the bare passage of time can produce social movements that unsettle the structure. Particular bricks are sometimes eroded by social change. If a judge thinks, for example, that a former case was decided rebus sic stantibus (‘as things then stood’), the judge might depart from the former decision and in effect remove the brick from the wall of the law. When breaches or loopholes appear in the wall for any reason – whether it be the passage of time, human error, or the vagueness of language⁵⁵ – the law must make good the whole by supplying a new brick to fit the need. In the common law, this work of constant repair and maintenance falls not to the architect of any grand design but to the humble work of the judge as bricklayer in the particular case. The inevitable conclusion is that there is no conclusion. The building (verb) of the legal edifice is continuous. The building (noun) of the law is never complete.

Law is engaged, then, in two simultaneous building processes: one to achieve its own integrity, the other to integrate law to life. The very word ‘order’, which has come to be associated with the force of rules and commandments, is more properly (i.e. etymologically) associated with the integration of social structures through a positive process of ‘joining together’. This should entail not only the joining of law with law to establish its own edifice for its own purposes, but also the joining of law to human social life so that the law remains a thing made by the people for the people. A positive and hopeful way to think of legal utterance – the legal sentence – is to regard it as an example of the art of building order through articulation with a view to producing something harmonious. All those key words – ‘art’, ‘order’, ‘articulation’, and ‘harmonious’ – are cognate with the conjectured Proto-Indo-European root *ar- meaning ‘to fit together’.

The question arises as to the mutual compatibility of the endeavour to join law to law and the endeavour to join law to life. There is potential tension between the need to build the integrity of the law’s own edifice and the need to develop integrity between law and society as a whole. That being so, it is surely desirable that priority should be given not to establishing the impenetrability of law’s design but to the more difficult craft of making the law fit flexibly with human experience so as to maintain the integrity of the entire social fabric. Milner S. Ball has more than once embarked on similar metaphorical musings. His thoughtful conclusion is that both can be achieved when law promotes the business of building peace:

If law is to be anything other than a bulwark, what transforms the fear, self-protectiveness, and love of power that the bulwark serves? … An alternate conceptual metaphor for law … depends upon its family connections for its vitality and fullness of expression … Within the family, its integrity is maintained. Law is a medium of solidarity where there is a community needing a medium for its mutuality.⁵⁶

Law as Cathedral

If we assume that law is building its edifice brick-by-brick and stone-by-stone, the question is whether we can we tell what it is yet. Perhaps it is becoming a defensive castle, or a factory of some sort – maybe something like a cotton mill, or a place where weaving is undertaken on an industrial scale, or perhaps the craft of law is building a terrace of homes in which judges as artisan weavers work by the light of garret windows. There are doubtless as many ways of working law as there are candidate varieties of edifice. I wonder, though, if ‘the cathedral’ serves best as an image of the sort of structure that the law is working on. I don’t mean the pagan temples of the Greeks and Romans that have inspired the neoclassical design of so many courthouses, especially in the United States of America, but the old medieval cathedrals of Europe. The courtroom designed as a neoclassical temple is a clue to the secular religion of modern law, but the classical temples of Greece and Rome were built by slaves. So too were some of the old courthouses still in use in modern America. The medieval cathedrals of Europe were quite another matter.

Richard Schechner identifies the building of the medieval cathedrals as a multi-authored work. The process of building a cathedral is, he says, an example of a production in which the process must take place in public, in something like the way that a theatrical performance must be presented before witnesses.⁵⁷ Perhaps it is the drama inherent in the public construction of these majestic places of worship that has so endeared them to authors and dramatists. Ibsen’s play The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness) concerns the erection of a church spire, and its climactic scene brings the public together to witness the dramatic grand opening at which the architect Solness climbs to the top of the spire only to fall to his death. Referring to Ibsen’s play, Frank Kermode observes that ‘[a] building comes completely into being before it is ‘topped out’ but architects want the ceremony’, adding, ‘[i]t is not a fact that there are no facts, indeed it is because there are so many that we need our fictions’.⁵⁸ An example like Ibsen’s, is Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1937 play The Zeal of Thy House. Commissioned to celebrate the work of artisans connected to Canterbury Cathedral, it was based upon the real-life master builder William of Sens who died following a fall from scaffolding during a renovation of the cathedral. Sayer’s study The Mind of the Maker, which we discussed at length in Chapter 2, was developed from a passage in that play.

In the construction of a medieval cathedral, members of the public were not passive onlookers but active co-Producers. Almost the entire witnessing public would have had some hands-on part in the work, from chiselling or hoisting stones to feeding the labourers or donating to the building fund. David Turnbull has observed that:

Gothic cathedrals like Chartres were built in a discontinuous process by groups of masons using their own local knowledge, measures, and techniques. They had neither plans nor knowledge of structural mechanics. The success of the masons in building such large complex innovative structures lies in the use of templates, string, constructive geometry, and social organization to assemble a coherent whole from the messy heterogeneous practices of diverse groups of workers.⁵⁹

How close this sounds to the craft by which common law judges, proceeding without any codified plan, work together across many lifetimes to construct an edifice which, by respecting the humanity of individual lives in particular cases, comes to deserve the reciprocal respect of the public it serves. Schechner adds that in the case of works that span the lifetimes of many authors, such as the Homeric Epics, the Bible, and the medieval cathedral:

[T]he process of making the work has an extra step, that of arriving at a ‘finished form’ that cannot be known with certainty beforehand. This solidification may take many generations and be ratified historically in structures which, under different circumstances, may have turned out differently. For example, Notre Dame in Paris has only one ‘finished’ tower; but how ‘wrong’ it would be to finish the ‘incomplete’ structure. As an ideal cathedral the building lacks a tower; as Notre Dame it is complete only as it now stands.⁶⁰

It is not apparent to the casual onlooker that one of the two towers of Notre Dame de Paris is unfinished as Schechner observes, but his point about allowing the cathedral to live out its unplanned life according to its own organic nature is well made. One thing that is clear to the naked eye is that the north tower is larger than the south tower. Here, again, the discrepancy does not diminish the beauty of the whole. The narrator of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Warden shares this very thought when contemplating the edifice of the parish church at Plumstead Episcopi, Barchester:

[I]t is built in a faulty style: the body of the church is low – so low, that the nearly flat leaden roof would be visible from the churchyard, were it not for the carved parapet with which it is surrounded. It is cruciform, though the transepts are irregular, one being larger than the other; and the tower is much too high in proportion to the church. But the colour of the building is perfect … and though in gazing on such a structure one knows by rule that the old priests who built it, built it wrong, one cannot bring oneself to wish that they should have made it other than it is.

Anthony Trollope appreciated, as Aristotle appreciated, that a life built strictly to rule and to the letter of legal rights will be cold, mean, attenuated, and austere. Rules that yield a little to the contours of natural life are far more fitting to the humans who make them and the societies that are subject to them. As John Ruskin wrote in his essay ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in which he advanced the superiority of medieval artisanal building over the architectural techniques of his own time: ‘no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect’.⁶¹

Arguably, the common law method has an advantage over its civil law codified counterparts when it comes to finding the right ‘fit’, because the common law builds its edifice responsively and organically – its judges working like Trollope’s ‘old priests’ – rather than according to a preordained architectural scheme.⁶² The only question is whether the advantage of working without a master plan outweighs the disadvantage of slight wonkiness and inconsistencies in the resulting structure (these are certainly features of every common law, case-based system). If there is doubt as to whether the advantages are worth it, they might be offset by adjustments in the next round of building, for the common law, as stated earlier, is always building and is never finally built.

The adversarial nature of common law pleading is another feature of the common law that is illuminated by reference to the analogy of cathedral construction. Conflict in law and drama teaches us that criticism can be constructive where opponents work together to produce a mutually beneficial outcome. In law, legal advocates are professionally opposed, but they are supposed to be united in seeking to produce an outcome that is just and satisfactory not only to their client but to the cause of justice and therefore to society as a whole. Hence, it is said in the legal system of England and Wales, as elsewhere, that an advocate’s first duty is not to their client but to the court. In theatrical drama, the parts of protagonist and antagonist are opposed to each other, but the actors’ enterprise, like that of the law, is the shared one of working together in a production that gives scope for expression and resolution of conflicting passions and wills. What might modern politics and social debate look like if opponents were more civil in their appreciation that each side needs the other in order to produce a satisfactory and enduring civil society? One answer is that it might resemble the apparent opposition between the exterior wall of a medieval cathedral and the ‘flying’ buttress that pushes against it from the outside. (In England, the cathedrals of Lincoln and Winchester supply some of the most striking examples.) The formal opposition between wall and buttress is a productive partnership. The buttress supports the very thing that it pushes against. More than this, the wall and buttress are not in partnership for their own sakes, but for the common purpose of reducing the bulk of the wall and thereby to enable the inclusion of larger windows. Through this simple picture, we can see how constructive opposition in law, politics, and other social contexts can operate to let more light into the scene.⁶³

This Insubstantial Pageant

Our procession around the medieval cathedral is complete and we have come full circle. We began by noting the rhetorical power of the ostensibly positive slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, but also by lamenting the way in which it has not fulfilled Ronald Reagan’s expressed hope that it should promote a society for the good of all citizens. It has instead become the mantra of a divisive and nihilistic brand of politics that insists on razing existing structures to the ground before a new work of building can begin. One of those structures is an actual building – the Capitol Building in Washington, DC – which is the concrete and conceptual home of the legislature of the United States of America. When Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, it was an assault not only against governmental institutions and a particular governmental building but against the very idea of building a civil society upon the foundations of the past. So it is with all insurrections, coups, and revolutions – buildings suffer as citizens strike a symbolic blow against the stability of the status quo. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks overran the Tsar’s Winter Palace in Petrograd, an event commemorated three years later in a mass theatrical spectacle. In the French Revolution of 1789, the equivalent event was the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July.

I suggested early on in this book that the president of the ‘brave new world’ of the United States is a sort of Prospero figure. He (one day she) is invested with an almost mystical rhetorical power of state building, but when the magic fails the edifice cannot be sustained. In that moment we see that it was all a front – like the fascia of a Wild West saloon thrown up for a Hollywood movie. Without its sustaining mystique, it falls flat on its face. On 6 January 2021, the spell of Trump’s performative presidency was broken. It is notable that when Shakespeare’s Prospero called time on his own magical statecraft, he did so with the material language of building and specifically of the playhouse. His reference to the ‘great globe’ is presumably an allusion to the playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote after 1599, and when Prospero confesses that the performance had been all along a ‘baseless fabric’ and an ‘insubstantial pageant’, those phrases are also references to early modern theatre spaces (The Tempest 4.1.153–155). Today, ‘fabric’ is associated with woven textiles, but in Shakespeare’s day ‘fabric’ denoted a building or other structure, and to describe it as ‘baseless’ was to say that the building had no foundations. The phrase ‘insubstantial pageant’ had practically the same meaning. A pageant was a stage structure erected for the purpose of ostentatious and theatrical public display, and to describe it as ‘insubstantial’ was a reference to the fact that it was usually pushed about on wheels – like a float at a modern carnival. There was literally nothing stable standing under it (nothing ‘sub-sta’) to make it ‘substantial’. A theatrical show is judged primarily according to appearances. If the surface pleases, we tend not to worry about the substance. So it has been from the medieval pageant to the fake store front of a Western movie lot. Ronald Reagan, an actor in those classic Westerns, was looking back to the founding fathers when he issued the invitation, ‘Let’s make America great again’. When Donald Trump issued his mandate, ‘Make America great again’ he was looking forward to the sort of state building that begins with demolition. The key to understanding what happened on 6 January 2021 is to realize that there was nothing standing under the Trump presidency.⁶⁴