Opinion: Trump is America’s first camp president
Lady Gaga in camp dress at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual gala Monday in New York. By Drew Goins Drew Goins Assistant editor in the Opinions section Email Bio Follow Assistant editor May 7 at 6:03 PM “Camp” is almost by definition hard to define. As Susan Sontag put it in her seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.
They needn’t have bothered. None of the attendees were ever going to outdo the singular example of the aesthetic plastered across our feeds and televisions all day, every day: Donald Trump is America’s first camp president. Everything about Trump is style without substance. Ever since he rode down the escalators of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy — about the campiest presidential debut one could conceive of — he’s been light on conviction. The majority of his actual priorities are unmoored from political necessity and defined by an obsession with spectacle, whether the subject is his dream of massive military parades or complaints about collusion at the Kentucky Derby.
For all the exaggeration and spectacle, though, camp in its most undiluted form is something simpler. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional,” Sontag wrote. “They are dead serious.” So is President Trump.
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