Abstract

This short video essay was presented at Glasgow Buzzcut Symposium 'Side Burns' on Wednesday 5th April 2017. It is called The Weird World of Donald Trump. It argues how America’s current encounter with the world of Donald Trump is akin to the weird realism of H.P Lovecraft, drawing upon Mark Fisher’s account of the weird - defined by Lovecraft’s fiction - as an encounter that can encompass grotesque sensations of fear when experiencing an object or being that shape shifts and transforms itself. The weird, in this sense challenges and creeps into the perceived safety and certainty of everyday life to frightening political effect. The essay presents a short reading of Trump’s world against the philosophy of Lovecraft’s weird as a way of thinking about how the encounter with it might be understood and challenged. If a community can find a language to describe the sensation of what they are experiencing then there is hope that it can be collectively overcome, claiming a space within the weird, facing up to the thing on the doorstep.