Introduction: celebrities for/against Trump

Abstract

Perhaps the academic disclaimer 'at the time of writing' has never been so unavoidable, and at the same time so futile, as in the era of Trump. Since the 45 th president of the United States took office in 2017, the span of the news cycle seems to have been reduced to the average time gap between two of Trump's rapid tweets. No matter how hard political historians, sociologists or media studies scholars attempt to keep up, it seems almost as if their research projects are destined to be outpaced by the train of events making up this presidency. However, it is important that we remind ourselves that breaking news and scoops are the stuff of journalism, instead of criteria for the value of academic research, and that relevance is never to be reduced to recency.The four authors whose Forum contributions are collected here in a special issue of the Forum, themed on 'Celebrities for/against Trump', have all attempted to single out and close-read media events that have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the fast-paced history of Trump's presidency. Those events may have been followed by many new developments, redirecting our attention elsewhere, but that has certainly not affected the timeliness of the authors' analyses. Quite on the contrary, in fact: later turns of events have brought about just how timely, and even foretelling, these contributions continue to be.These four pieces are not the first, of course, that signal that Trump has caught the attention of scholars in the field of celebrity studies. The phenomenon of the reality television personality-turned-president has been analysed extensively (see, among many other publications, Kellner 2016, Street 2019, McDonnell and Wheeler 2019, Biressi 2020, Prins 2020, from a wide variety of perspectives. In general, however, these publications tend to focus on the celebrity of Trump. What makes the contributions collected in this Forum stand out, is that they focus on the relations between particular celebrities and Trump. As celebrity culture reflects as well as refracts the tensions and divisions that characterise contemporary societal dynamics, those relations are as polarised as in American society at large, varying from biting critique to passionate endorsement. The list of stars who have publicly taken a position for or against Trump is obviously long and diverse, so there are numerous others that could have been the focus of attention in this special issue -

Супруги Губернаторов И Их Стратегии Саморепрезентации: Знаменитости Или Домохозяйки?

“…Отметим, что победы таких шоуменов, как Д. Трамп [McDonnell, Wheeler, 2019] и В. Зеленский 2 , говорят о проникновении этого явления в очень разные по своим исходным характеристикам общества: как постиндустриальные западные, так и постсоветские. Политика занимает все более важное место в контексте celebrity studies, а авторов, обращающихся к проблематике социологии, политологии и культурологии, становится больше с каждым годом [Lalancette, Cormack, 2020;Franssen, 2021].…”