“You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s six feet tall. She’s got the best body. — Trump on the Howard Stern show, 2003
“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. . . Is that terrible? — Trump appearance on ABC’s The View 2006
“Yeah, [Ivanka] is really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father . . .” — Trump to Rolling Stone magazine, September 2015
Um, yeah . . . So there’s that.
Trump periodically jokes about getting busy with his daughter. It is, on the one hand, par for the course. And Trump clearly enjoys trotting out that scandalous little tidbit every so often just to remind the world what a roguish little rapscallion he can be, apparently oblivious to the distinction between, say, jokes about screwing your friend’s wife (“oh, Donald, you’re SO bad”) and jokes about screwing your own child (“no, seriously, dude, that’s very bad”). In the audio and video from each of the times he’s said it, there’s that “not really . . . really” quality to the whole business.
What’s interesting here from the perspective of relevance is not that he says it. (I certainly don’t want to get into or care whether Trump does or doesn’t really want to um, “date” his own daughter.) At a minimum, it is unquestionably true that it is the the younger Ivanka (age 34) rather than his slightly older wife Melania (age 45) who is Trump’s campaign arm candy of choice.
But what’s most interesting is how the media through which he says these kinds of things process them and digest them into fabric of their various rules and formats.
On the View appearance of 2006, the ladies all clucked and tittered exactly as they would have if Trump had said he wanted to date one of them. Joy Behar pivoted to something about Woody Allen and smiled as if she had just thought of the cleverest thing in the world.
There’s a lot to be said about Trump’s iconography . . . from the micro details (skin, eyes, hair) to the bigger picture iconography (how he interacts with audiences, speech patterns, framing his life story). How does Trump assemble these pieces of his self-presentation, big things and little things, to enhance the likelihood a person will find him relevant in a given moment in time.
But it makes sense to start with this one very unusual piece of the Trump iconography — is it a theme? is it a meme? — the part where he jokes about sex with his daughter Ivanka.
On the face of it, what could be more guaranteed to alienate people of all kinds than this kind of distasteful kidding around. If, say, Chris Christie or John Kasich were to kid around about dating his daughter, they’d be toast.
Why does Trump get a pass? Or, even more astonishingly, why does this kind of shit seem to help Trump somehow?
Part of it must simply be this: if you define yourself, winkingly, jokingly as a person for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply, you desensitize your audience to the fact that you are consistently a person for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply. And, in an election cycle where the “ordinary rules” are precisely what’s on the table for discussion, people who want to sweep away the ordinary rules (rather, than, say reform them, improve them, retool them) . . . these people are going to be attracted to the guy for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply.
So that’s at least part of it. And Trump’s signal that he’s an ordinary-rules-don’t-apply-to-me guy have to be big enough to matter (he can say things like “my daughter has the best body”) but they also have to be re-domesticated in a way that make the rule breaking seem not so terribly bad after all.
As a result, from a relevance creation perspective, we are roped into an interesting double play. The first involves exploiting the relevance of outrageousness. This is a common Trump motif. The weirder the thing he says, the more people are keyed in to waiting with a kind of eager anticipation for the next weird thing he might say.
But the second part involves encouraging people to believe that the weird thing they were waiting for isn’t really so weird after all. Or at least is nothing more disruptive than an off-color joke. He accomplishes this by saying his weird things in forums and via media that are the most conventional he can find.
We live in the world Marshall McLuhan described and foretold, a world where “the medium is the message” . . . where, for example, The View provides the non-threatening guardrails within which any statement made on The View can be understood and contained.
So Trump can do a segment on The View and say anything, up to and including “In a slightly different world I might date my own daughter” and the outlandishness of the statement is buffered by the audiences confidence and certain knowledge that anything that happens on The View will fall within certain, carefully defined and non-disruptive parameters.
Anything said on The View is automatically contained within the set of utterances we know The View must contain and is defined in the viewer’s mind first in those terms.
As a relevance cultivation savant, Trump is, interestingly, doing several things at once.
- As we’ve seen, he’s signalling to his audience that he lives beyond the rules.
- Like an old elastic waistband he’s also stretching to the point of distortion what the rules might be (or at least making people question whether they’re just old fuddy-duddies for not thinking it’s cute that he talks about sleeping with his daughter).
- He’s re-domesticating his out-of-bounds thoughts and ideas by delivering them via the most conventional and declawed mainstream communications channels imaginable. Trump loves him some Barbara Walters interviews, some Live with Kelly and Michael, some Wendy Williams Show and so on.
- Then, finally, he is, by virtue of his own bizarre shamelessness, the only person in the world capable of occupying the new out-of-bounds field of play he has just created.
In other words, part of how Trump stays relevant is by being a reliable source of shit no one should ever say . . . then making people think, well, that’s kinda weird but not so bad. I wonder what he’s going to say next.