Donald Trump: The Ultimate Prosumer

While it is far from his worst, or even his most defining, characteristic, Donald Trump is perhaps the ultimate prosumer. This is made clear in a December 12, 2016 New York Times article (“The New TV Reality: All Trump”):  “For the next four years at least, we are living in a TV show that Mr. Trump is simultaneously starring in, consuming and live-tweeting”.

Unpacking that statement in my terms, Trump is producing his act (his creation of the performance of the starring role in his- and the current U.S.’s- life), he is consuming that act as he reportedly continually watches himself on the television “shows” (where he also seems to get much of his information about the U.S. and the world), and he is using that information in producing live-tweets in response to some of what is said on those shows (often and not incidentally about himself). His tweets increasingly lead to re-tweets and further news coverage that he is likely to consume and to which he will, when the mood hits him, produce a response.

This endless cycle of consuming-producing-consuming is a particularly good example of prosumption– the interrelated process of production and consumption. While production and consumption are separated out in the preceding paragraph to make the elements of the process clear, they are in reality tightly intertwined in that case, indeed in all cases.

While this only serves to reframe Trump’s approach, there is a critique implicit in this reframing. That is, in this case, the prosumption lens reveals an extreme example of a person’s consciousness being shaped by interaction with others. While this is true of all of us, in Trump’s case it is more an interaction mediated by television where many of the normal interaction cues are more difficult to discern or are absent. Furthermore, Trump seems obsessed with looking at the mediated version of himself, and how others see him, on television. While most of us like to look in the mirror now and again, such narcissism takes a very different and more extreme form in Trump’s case. Furthermore, millions of others are peeking into that mirror at the same time.

As largely a prosumer of himself, Trump is not only shaping his own consciousness in this way, but more worryingly shaping the consciousness of many others, to say nothing of the domestic and foreign policies of the United States.