A lot of ink has been spilled and bytes spent on the reflections over Trump’s failed assassination this past weekend. I won’t pretend I know better, although as a regular academic that’s kind of my job and an occupational hazard. But as soon as my co-author texted me about the events in Butler, PA, I responded that a carnival usually ends with the execution of the mock-king. Once more details started to come in, especially about the identity of the shooter, it made even more “sense” (if any sense can be found in an act of violence). Let me explain.

6 years ago, I posted on the Duck explaining why Trump won the 2016 elections. By using Mikhail Bakhtin idea of carnival, I argued that Trump managed to turn the entire American politics into a (digital) carnival square where laughing culture and violence, as well as profanity and misogyny co-exist to give the illusion of power to those marginalised in politics. Carnival culture’s idea of transgression of cultural norms and values is the ideal critical tool for approaching all kinds of social and material interactions, Bakhtin would say. Thus, Trump managed to galvanise a substantial amount of support among the American population that perceived themselves as marginalised, in marketing himself as an anti-establishment figure by using elements of the carnival culture. 

While Bakhtin and many others have always praised carnival for its populist drive and giving power to “the people”, there were obviously groups that were excluded from the power grab. In the medieval tradition, violence was an inherent part of carnival. Primarily by inflicting bodily or moral harm on marginalised groups, carnival sustained the merriment that the majority wanted; whether hunting and torturing Jews on the streets or grabbing the women you know where, the violence was legitimised often as punishment for crimes against society (the reasons for that were, of course, Church-sanctioned antisemitism and misogyny). The ultimate pinnacle of violence was then the execution of the mock king. As Michael Bristol would argue, the carnival tradition of burning or hanging an effigy (in earlier carnival traditions, even killing the mock king) is the ultimate act in achieving social inversion that carnival is supposed to achieve (for a couple of days at least).

We argue in the book that

carnival preserves social hierarchy and ordering, rendering marginalized groups the focus of populist anger and frustration. The understanding that the hierarchy reversal and popular anger were play-pretend and not entirely real was a significant factor that was widely understood by the carnival crowd, hence the executions of the mock-king and ritual abuse of groups that are in the minority and are unlikely to have a claim to power.

Gaufman & Ganesh 2024

Wide-spread fantasies about concentration camps for undocumented migrants is part and parcel of the violence that carnivalesque politics can inflict. After all, it is much easier to project the anger about your economic grievances at people who will not have the opportunity to fight back. However, if you ever browse far-right chats and forums, you will realise that for some of their members Trump is no longer their man. They see him as a member of the Deep State, beholden (based on the conspiracy preferences of the poster) to different interests groups. I am not going to reiterate these theories here, but suffice it to say that even the MAGA movement has its much more extreme factions that see Trump as too soft and not radical enough who needs to be replaced by a different leader. The mock king may satisfy the needs for the carnivalesque crowd for a little while, but once the carnival comes to an end, the Carnival King is burned on the pyre. In American culture it can be an AR-15.