Is there a real difference between mad and sane?

On performative and delusional madness in Donald Trump and Judith Butler

Old habits die hard.

For 33 years I used to religiously listen to Phillip Adams on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Late Night Live” whilst I meditatively cleaned up the kitchen after dinner. (Please excuse my heteronormative sexism, but I recognize my wife’s superb culinary giftings, and my way of showing my appreciation is to clean up the kitchen when she has produced her astonishing works of love and art, after every family meal.) Over the years I have written many letters to Phillip - whom I adore - about various interviews he has conducted, and he kindly answered every one of them.

But my near life-long appreciative relationship with the ABC soured during COVID. One of my young-adult daughters refused to get a COVIC vaccine, and thus I became aware of a concerted state-backed public information sieve, heavily promoted through the ABC, which entailed ignoring or defaming all questions about where the virus actually came from, saying nothing about how much Big Pharma was literally invested in the information and responses our governments and academics produced to the pandemic, and simply not exploring what medical risks rapidly rolling out an entirely new form of vaccination, bypassing the usual careful testing process, entailed. And it was nasty too. During the COVID crisis the ABC and our government upheld a relentlessly assumed value judgement that “anti-vaxxers” (my daughter was entirely appreciative of the other vaccines she had received) were all lunatic conspiracy theorists who had evil intentions towards the health of the population at large.

Now I know my daughter is a very intelligent and responsible person, so the ABC’s total affirmation of the state mandated narrative did not sit well with me. Then another of my daughters – my sensitive, imaginative, socially awkward, autism spectrum daughter – disappeared into the on-line queer jungle under conditions of COVID lockdown. Before we could work out what was going on, she had been snared by predatory groomers and was tractor-beamed into the transgender identity cult. The ABC’s uncritical “affirmation” of all things transgender and queer, and their total refusal to even acknowledge what DEI was doing to vulnerable adolescent girls, and its radical erosion of sex-based rights for biological women and girls, became intensely disturbing to me. The ABC proudly signed up to the ACON DEI ‘best practice’ script, and almost every second story (and every presenter) was pro-gay, pro-trans, pro-indigenous, pro-queer, pro-Palestinian, and always DEI proud, in explicitly anti-heterosexual normativity categories. Any semblance of ideological neutrality on this controversial matter was entirely revoked. Seemingly overnight the ABC – and our universities, education departments, courts, and therapeutic authorities – became relentless state-endorsed DEI promotion engines. These past 6 years I have been in the news and opinion wilderness with no reputable state supported information and commentary go to place I can trust.

Before he retired from LNL, I wrote to Phillip Adams asking him why the ABC gave no coverage to Sall Grover, why they never talked to gender critical feminists, I asked him why the Lesbian Action Group and the LGB Alliance got no coverage on the ABC, and why the ABC would not even talk to Germain Greer, let alone Kathleen Stock, about difficulties with third wave feminism. Could not Phillip himself do something to balance things up a bit between transgender activists and gender critical feminists? Phillip recognized I had a point, but he did nothing about it as clearly, DEI morality was being rigorously imposed on all ABC presenters. So much for frank and fearless public broadcasting…

After COVID the ABC progressively and almost completely faded out of my life. But old habits die hard. I was doing the kitchen clean up late in the evening the other day, and I turned Late Night Live on. I listened to the new Late Night Live presenter – David Marr – talking to the Irish Leftist pundit Fintan O’Toole about “Trump’s madman strategy.”

O’Toole argues that whilst Trump is not clinically mentally ill, he is, nonetheless, mad. Non-clinical madness is defined by O’Toole as “a delusional state of mind.” Of course, O’Toole recognizes that Trump does pragmatically play at being mad – his confidence is an instrumental performance, his poker-faced bravado a calculative tool – and inevitably when bluff and bully fail to get him what he wants, he seamlessly recalibrates his story and claims his defeat as a victory. But effectively, O’Toole argues that Trump is mad because he sees no real distinction between performance and reality: performance is reality to Trump. O’Toole claims that “Trump’s persona is shaped entirely around performance.” Yet - so O’Toole believes - this is not ultimately going to work because “the thing about reality is it just doesn’t care whether you recognize it or not.” O’Toole, it seems, is a realist.

Now, this is interesting. Who else constructs who they are as a performance, and makes no material distinction between performance and reality? It is, of course, Judith Butler and all firm believers in the performative ‘reality’ of transgender identity. And perhaps this is why Butler hates Trump so much: he also plays a persona/identity performance game, but with the opposite political and ‘moral’ valences as Butler’s simply asserted normative preference.

As there is no objective physical – let alone moral – truth in the cosmos to Butler, but all words and values are human poetic performances, moral word games are simply political assertions of arbitrary normative preference to Butler. So there is no ‘reason’ why her morality is ‘true’ and Trump’s is ‘false’, she just doesn’t like Trump’s normative outlook, and she sees herself as being in a political PR contest to win normative hegemony from Trump, simply because she arbitrarily prefers her own poetic normativity performances of moral ‘truth’ over his. Reality does not come into it (‘it’ being - as per Foucault - power).

As far as I can tell, neither Trump nor Butler believes in moral (or any) reality, but both of them use normative assertions as a means of creating and projecting their own political and persona-orientated power. To hard core postmodernists like Judith Butler, something functionally (never essentially) becomes morally ‘true’ when you can persuade enough people to believe your (entirely poetic and totally performed) valuation. Hitler thought this too. I think a good argument could be made that Trump, Butler, Hitler, and Napoleon, are different peas in the same egocentric and projected power-ideology pod.

But obviously, O’Toole and Marr are not interested in treating their argument against Trump in any universal and realist manner. If they did they would have to admit that men who claim to be women are delusional madmen who see no actual distinction between what they poetically and imaginatively perform, and biological reality. But if they were serious about there actually being a distinction between performance and reality, this would destroy their commitment to the moral significance of the transgender social reformation cause. Further, O’Toole and Marr must maintain that if there is nothing inherently wrong about performing delusional identity fictions (and this is the only grounds on which transgender identity claims can be taken to be ‘true’) then if Trump can make people believe his performative delusions, then those delusions are just as functionally ‘true’ as the assertion that a man can gender identify as female.

The annoying thing about the very idea of ‘the truth about reality’ - which O’Toole and Marr do not seem to notice - is its universal bivalence, and its categories of objective and at least functional validity. That is, if something is true it is always true, whether or not anyone believes it, and there really are uncontroversial knowable facts about the world that only mad people pretend do not exist. Men pretending to be women are every bit as mad as Trump pretending to be omnipotent and always right. But such logical realities are now entirely un-acknowledgeable by anyone employed by the ABC.

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