The secret of Trump’s success? His campness

The Republican candidate has raised a uniquely American version of kitsch to a winning formula

There he stood; the man who had been and would be again, the most powerful person on the planet, decked in a branded apron, brandishing a brown paper bag filled with greasy and salted french fries. And he looked perfectly at home.
Like so many things that he does, Donald Trump’s recent stint working in a McDonald’s was motivated by spite – specifically, a desire to humiliate Kamala Harris who (perhaps dubiously) claimed to have worked there. However, while the incident undoubtedly demonstrates that Trump’s playground instincts remain as strong as they were in 2016, the fact he pulled it off with such glee points to an under-explored truth about the possible next president of the United States; he is deeply, deeply camp.
By camp, I am not talking about sexuality. In her famous essay on the concept, Susan Sontag described camp as an aesthetic mode characterised by a “love of the unnatural, of artifice, of exaggeration”, not just unserious but “anti-serious”. For all the ridiculousness of Trump calling a car full of Pennsylvanians “beautiful people” while chucking a bag full of Filet-o-Fish at them, the McDonald’s stunt doesn’t even make the podium when it comes to Trump’s campest moments.
First we have his musical tastes, which could conceivably be those of an ageing gay-bar owner on the Costa Del Sol. He blasts out Elton John and YMCA at every opportunity – including pausing a tribute to two people who collapsed during a Pennsylvania rally in order to play the Village People’s gay anthem. So many musicians have complained about their music being used at Trump rallies that there is now a Wikipedia page devoted to it. 
Another recent event opened to the theme of perhaps the most profoundly American, and profoundly camp, film of all time – Top Gun. The attempted storming of the US Capitol didn’t happen to a backdrop of well-orchestrated chants or military anthems, but to the strains of Laura Branigan’s 80s disco classic Gloria.
Then there’s Trump’s unique mode of insulting people; so catty it’s almost got whiskers and a tail. His recent appearance at a Catholic fundraiser in New York City was more like an end-of-the-pier show or a scene from Borat; an agonisingly awkward comedy roast featuring jokes about “White Guys for Kamala” and Tim Walz menstruating, while Michael Bloomberg and other prominent Democrats sat looking stony-faced. (Chuck Schumer, to his credit, managed to laugh at himself). There are echoes of the performative takedowns of drag queens, visible also in the nicknames deployed against opponents, “Crooked Hillary”, “Sleepy Joe” etc. 
There’s the Dolly Parton-level hair and makeup, the lack of filter and, per Sontag, the exaggerated speech. Everything is “beautiful”, or “special”. In a wonderful article about Trump’s camp style, the writer Matthew Walther describes his speech as “a parody of a New York accent, a stereotypical cab driver in an old episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. The campiness even extends to his First Lady. Jill Biden may have hosted drag queens at the White House, but you can imagine them actually performing Melania.
This is political satire made flesh; nothing is too obvious, too tacky, too aggressively awful to warrant inclusion. Perhaps this is why much satire of Trump involves straight SNL-style impersonation rather than new insights. How do you parody what is already a parody?
For all it gets up the nostrils of sensibilists on this side of the pond, part of Trump’s success is precisely because he is ridiculous. Most politicians are too serious to pull off the stunts he does. His own running mate, JD Vance, exudes earnestness – indeed, the pair are essentially dramatic foils to each other. The Harris campaign is keen to paint them both as “weird”: which may be true but it is in very different ways. And Trump’s bizarreness is surely part of the appeal, in an election just as much about personality, or at least the projection of it, as policy.
The irony here is that the Harris campaign has been at great pains to make capital out of glitzy celebrity endorsements and the idea that their nominee is “Brat”. However, the person who effortlessly pulls off a constant communion with popular culture in the age of the meme is not Harris, but Trump.
This is arguably because he “gets” America in a way Harris doesn’t. And the campness he exudes is part of that recipe. The McDonald’s stunt points to the particularities of Trumpian camp, and gives a hint as to its success. This is a distinctly American variety – not Kenneth Williams or Quentin Crisp-style waspishness, nor the slightly preening metrosexuality of President Macron or Edith Piaf. It’s Ethel Merman, it’s the girl from the Wendy’s sign, it’s Hulk Hogan crossed with Joan Rivers.
People who say Trump is stupid, or even mad, are missing the trick. The weirdness is studied; erratic, maybe, but certainly not mindless. In a democracy as heavily invested in the will of the people as America purports to be, politics will almost inevitably become a form of entertainment. Sontag wrote of being “strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” Americans may sometimes be strongly offended by Trump, but I suspect we will see in the coming weeks that they remain strongly drawn to him too. And what could be more camp than that?