This is basically what I study: celebrities and how the way we write about them captures an emotional climate. Yes, my work focuses on Franco Spain and deals with how foreign stars were written about under a censored Spanish press, but at its core, I analyze celebrities and the emotional attachments that they invoke.
Which is why the Donald's candidacy scared me from the very beginning. No matter the deeply offensive things he said in his announcement speech (and everything that has ever come out of his mouth both before and after). The man scared me because of the attention-seeking vortex that he is. He is not simply a celebrity, but one who has built his fame on a particular brand of cruel and callous behavior towards men and women who cannot fight back.
As much as I would like to think that US elections are based on policies and ideas, more often than not, they're based on whose name is the most recognized when the voters get to the ballot. And a celebrity is always going to be the most recognized name. That's their very nature.
The thing about celebrities is that they are able to hold the tension of the ordinary and the extraordinary; this is precisely WHY we like to talk about them so much. Ava Gardner was ungodly beautiful, with a hyper-feminine figure, who never wore make-up and preferred more masculine clothes; she was the sweet backwoods North Carolina girl-next-door who exuded sexuality. The Donald is the self-made man who inherited his wealth. It doesn't get any more of an enigma than that.
In her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed analyzes a paragraph taken from the Aryan Nations Website, and concludes that "it is the emotional reading of hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nation together...Because we love, we hate, and this hate is what brings us together" (43).
Two men in Boston beat up a homeless man, claiming he was an illegal immigrant (he wasn't), and all the Donald had to say about it was: "The people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want it to be great again. They are very passionate." Behind that passion, that love that the Donald thinks is so strong is actually a really thick current of hatred towards anyone who is not white or not male. Which is why his supporters inflict so much violence on the homeless, on immigrants, on Muslims, on African-Americans. And which is why he says cruel things about women and their bodies.
Specifically, the love and passion that the Donald cites is a love of power and dominance over others. In an insightful article, David Roberts of Vox breaks down the Donald's incoherent word vomit: he only uses words as tools with which to position himself in the social hierarchy. Speech, for him, has no meaning beyond whether it gains him attention. People attracted to his candidacy don't just project their own desires onto him. They also acquire (out of their adulation of him) the appearance of dominance that they desire. And when I use the word "dominance, I'm not talking physical mastery, but rather the societal matrix of power that most sociologists would label white male privilege.
The media has continually been flabbergasted that all his gaffes and missteps and just overwhelmingly terrible narcissism and criminality (I don't care if he's never been to prison--you don't get sued that many times over the course of your life and still get to claim innocence). And yet, the media (and pretty much everyone who is still flabbergasted and in shock at the state of our current electoral campaign) is missing the main part of his appeal: the grotesque and sadomasochistic celebrity that he represents and the way that it attracts the disenfranchised to his particular brand of cruel dominance.
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