Writer Gideon Jacobs joins NM the day after the US election to discuss his essay “Trump l’Oeil,” which ran in the LA Review of Books, November 3. Opening with the images of Trump working at McDonalds, the piece explores what happens when images start conveying a realness that is untethered from reality; images that are generated (rather than taken) and, like Trump, succeed by claiming truths rather than dutifully indexing their referents. This is not a conversation about US policy or politics. Rather, it considers how the current media era is reshaping how the public thinks about both.
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