What is Real?

Whatever separation existed between the real and the virtual has evaporated in the air of the suspension of disbelief.

But I think his greatest distinction is as a surrealist. Not since Salvador Dalí has someone so ambitiously jumbled reality and hallucination. – Frank Bruni, New York Times

He doesn’t actually mean what he says. He doesn’t ultimately believe in anything. It’s all strategy, all spectacle. Sit back and enjoy the show. – Frank Bruni, New York Times

Trump has used a kind of sensory overload to numb us to the fictions he spins, the indecency he indulges. – Frank Bruni, New York Times

It is the camera lens that, like a laser comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death… a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society. – Jean Baudrillard

The Trumpian (post)Reality:

If you say it loud enough or long enough, people will believe it.

It’s just possible that Donald TRUMP is a performance disguised as a candidate played by a jester invoking the suspension of disbelief on an unsuspecting electorate.

If there was any doubt that American politics has become a SHOW, we have reached the cathartic denouement and well beyond.

In many ways, Donald Trump is a prophet for post reality America, feeding an electorate that is fascinated and consumed with the performance of politics, as opposed to its actual substance.

It is startling evident that a primal force of nature, something like a Hurricane Donald, is devastating the political campaign. This furious energy is pervasive: the dangerous potency of TRUMPIAN celebrity culture and reality television is storming the national consciousness.

An implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins. – Jean Baudrillard