The Treachery of Images, or: Trump’s New Replacement Theory
Widely known as “This is Not a Pipe” (1929), René Magritte’s (1898-1967) painting in fact is entitled The Treachery of Images (French: La Trahison des Images). So, the painting’s first treachery is that “This is Not a Pipe” is not “This is Not a Pipe.”
Bemused by the painting’s impact, Magritte reflected, “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture. ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”
One of Surrealism’s masterworks, the painting challenged how imagery manipulates us. The problem continues to haunt us in this age of image-based politics. Social media, too, are flooded with memes.
We are drowning in images and overrun by brands. While the electorate cried out to know Kamala Harris and the policies she would pursue, what she gave us was an image: the prosecutor who would know how to handle felons (like Trump). It was a great brand, but the suit lacked stuffing. Her prosecutor image had history but lacked future: what policies would she stuff into her presidency? Trump responded with an image: Biden-Harris’s treasonously high egg prices. Trump’s image was powerful enough to efface the fact that his promised tariff policy would make the price of eggs stink to high heaven.
Sometimes images lack stuffing, and sometimes images hide stuffing to come.
Trump, a master of images, in his first presidency changed little to the good — except what was good for tax-averse billionaires and regulation-averse corporations. For his second presidency he’s again made empty promises to the working and middle class — all image, no stuffing. His promises to the 1% you can take metaphorically and they will take literally to the bank. Once again, he will Make America Great Again — an image that, like the Mexican Wall, is all sizzle, and no steak. His image as change agent was pure fiction, pure imagination. His presidency was no more stuffed with policies than Magritte’s treacherous pipe is stuffed with tobacco.
The Love of Images
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman talks about what he calls psychological faith, which begins with “the love of images.” Founder of archetypal psychology, Hillman writes, “trust in the imaginal and trust in the soul go hand in hand.”
Well, perhaps, but not always. I knew James Hillman. We lost him in 2011. In 2008 he traveled to Ohio to campaign door to door in support of Obama. I’m sure had he lived longer, he’d have done the same in 2015 and ’24 in support of the never-Trumpers. When the Buckeyes opened their doors to him, he would have bent their ears unpacking the lies of Trump’s imaginal projections.
You can love images when they help you discover your soul and yet detest them when they are nothing but a pack of lies, lies without a soul, lies that hide a dark soul.
How can you Make America Great Again while seeking to change the fundamental definition of America, if in your remade America you have deleted democracy and the Constitution? Aren’t democracy and the Constitution definitional? Is it America without them?
Call it Trump’s New Replacement Theory.
With the cold north winds of Project 2025 filling his sails, Trump seems bent on changing “This is Not a Pipe” to “This is Not a Turd,” changing American democracy into American autocracy. I promise, he shouts, this is not a turd! And his cult believes him, thinking his turd smelled sweeter than the Democrats’ rotten egg prices.
Given his nominees for the cabinet and White House administration, Trump seems bent on founding a kakocracy (or kakistocracy), a government run by the least qualified, worst, or most unscrupulous citizens. Both forms of the word, which date to the mid-17th century, are based in a root that also gives us the word caca. The extra bit of treachery in Trump’s Replacement Theory will be that Trump’s Amerika will be a turd, floating in an undrained swamp freshly stocked with incompetence and white sovereignty.
Now there’s a string of stinky and treacherous images. For which I apologize. But it does give a new smell to the alt-Right’s You will not replace us, doesn’t it?
Do I catastrophize before the catastrophe arrives?
Well, there are those who say that when someone tells you who they are and what they’ll do, trust him. If someone says he’ll blow your government up and then sows his administration with a minefield, I say check Amazon for a mine sweeper.
So, I catastrophize and do so, alas, with the confidence of Cassandra, whose prophecies, you’ll remember, were always right but never believed. Nothing would make me happier than being wrong.
Theseus’s Ship
Trump’s New Replacement Theory reminds me of the thought experiment called The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox.
The story goes that Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, birthplace of democracy, rescued the city’s children from Crete’s autocratic King Minos by slaying the Minotaur, half man, half bull. Theseus then escaped on a ship to Delos, Apollo’s sacred birthplace. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. This went on for hundreds of years, long after Theseus’s death. Over time the citizens of Athens changed out piece by piece all the ship’s planks, masts, sails, and gear.
A question was raised by ancient philosophers, whether it was still the same ship when every piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced?
If Trump and his conservative-packed Supreme Court rebuild the Constitution plank by plank, making the presidency into a kingship, will it still be the American Constitution? Will Trump’s presidency be the same presidency Washington served?
The image Trump likes to project, that “I alone can do it,” is stuffed not just with rampant narcissism but also with a new idea about regal presidential power. The idea of “unitary executive theory,” first articulated by the Reagan administration, and championed by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, was all but made the law of the land by the largely Trump-born Supreme Court. The power is there for Trump to seize, or the Democrats to prevent.
In Trump’s little hands, the unitary executive theory would give the president complete authority over the executive branch. Departments which the executive oversees, like the judiciary or treasury, could no longer make independent decisions. Bent on retribution, without let or hindrance Trump could sic Justice, the FBI, and the IRS on his enemies. Plank by plank, the ship of state’s balance of power would be replaced.
As this chart suggests, the president’s reach is already broad.
Already expansive, how far will Trump’s unitary control extend?
With the Supreme Court’s ruling that acting as president the president cannot break the law, and with the regal presidency coming online, the skids that will take us to autocracy are well-greased. With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami as co-chairs of the nongovernment commission Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Congress’s most cherished power of the purse will become an executive function. Threatening to fire 50% or even 75% of federal employees, Musk has called for $3 trillion in cuts to the federal government. Not known for understatement, Musk imagines that the work of DOGE will “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Plank by plank, there will hardly be a need to rewrite the Constitution when it has been terminated by Trump, as he once threatened on Truth Social.
