The King in the Carnival: Trump and the Inversion of the Grotesque

Alfred Kubin The Moment of Birth, 1902, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You may have seen the video of the President of the United States, rendered in AI, wearing a crown, piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping what appears to be feces on a crowd of protesters below. Democratic leaders kneel. A sword is raised in something like coronation. The whole thing runs maybe thirty seconds.

I don’t know how it affected you if you saw it, but my reaction was horror. The video is the epitome of the grotesque, an aesthetic category with a history, a logic, and a big stake in the present. At the time I saw it, I happened to be reading The Other Side, a novel by Alfred Kubin, someone who like Bosch and Rabelais made the grotesque his native language, the only form adequate to what he saw. That coinciding exposure to things grotesque drove me to siderail my original plan for evidence-based creative from neuro- and computational aesthetics to better understanding the grotesque. What are the underlying components of its effects, how has it been used in the past, and what does it mean that it is being used against us by our President?

The word grotesque comes from the Italian grottesca, meaning literally “of a cave.” In the fifteenth century, workers excavating the buried rooms of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome discovered a style of ornamental painting no one had seen in living memory: hybrid creatures, figures dissolving into vines and animals, bodies merging with architecture, nothing staying within its categorical boundaries. These were Nero’s own decorations, his private aesthetic program, the visual excess of an emperor who had declared himself a god. The artists who descended to study them were crawling through imperial indulgence.

But Nero had buried those rooms. The Domus Aurea was famously covered over by subsequent emperors, its extravagance literally entombed beneath more sober construction. What the Renaissance excavators found was a sovereign secret beneath the decorative style: a self-portrait of exception or visual documentation of what the emperor kept hidden underground, because it could not be displayed above.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. (1750 - 1751). The tomb of Nero by Piranesi. Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c94173a0-c6c9-012f-b771-58d385a7bc34

This secrecy matters enormously. The grotesque was born as something that needed to stay hidden or covered.

The aesthetic that emerged from those underground rooms, named grottesca for its origin, became a popular style of renaissance artists and much later traveled from the palace to the street, was absorbed into popular and carnivalesque traditions, and over the following centuries became available to everyone. It moved from a secret of the powerful to a weapon aimed upward at the very kind of power that first produced it. Mikhail Bakhtin understood what it became in popular hands: Carnival, he wrote, was the feast of becoming, of change and renewal. The king was dragged down into the crowd, reminded that he ate and excreted and died like everyone else. The scatological humor of the lower orders was a philosophical act: the body as great equalizer, degradation as a return to the common earth from which everything grows.

What Bakhtin described was the grotesque as a fundamentally democratic instrument. It moved upward. It degraded from below. And it worked in part because the sovereign had kept his own grotesque locked underground, the private exception made public by the people’s laughter.

With Trump, something has dramatically changed.

The scholar Rémi Astruc, working in comparative literature, identifies three structural operations of the grotesque: doubleness, hybridity, and metamorphosis. Doubleness is the grotesque’s capacity to hold two irreconcilable registers simultaneously without resolving the tension between them. Hybridity is its violation of categorical boundaries, its insistence on merging what should remain separate.

Metamorphosis is the third trope. Let’s take a short detour to unravel the important role of metamorphosis in the grotesque for this essay. Metamorphosis names something specific: the grotesque appears at moments when a culture is changing faster than its vocabulary can keep up. The society does not yet have the concepts, the categories, the language to say plainly what is happening to it. So it produces grotesque images instead. The grotesque image of transformation, the figure that will not stop changing, the world that keeps deteriorating without arriving anywhere, the body mid-mutation, is the form a culture generates when change has outrun meaning.

Alfred Kubin, The Lady on the Horse, 1901, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When I apply these three concepts to the Trump meme ecosystem, it’s obvious that all three are present. The AI videos deploy doubleness expertly: they are simultaneously just a joke and a genuine assertion of dominance, satire and policy, entertainment and governance. The president-as-pope, the president-as-warrior, the president-piloting-a-jet: these are grotesque hybrids in the precise technical sense, figures fusing categorical registers that cannot coexist. And the metamorphosis is real: reality itself is being transformed, the relationship between image and fact, between office and content, between what a president does and what a president performs.

The concepts are intact, but the direction they are going in is inverted, because there is a fourth concept at work here, one that belongs specifically to this historical moment: what Nero covered in the grottos, Trump uncovers.

The king has to pretend to be normal in public. If people could see what he actually thinks he is, a creature above all laws and all human limits, the whole system collapses. So he keeps that self hidden. That’s what Nero did with the grottos.

Trump has abolished this distinction entirely. The grotesque is now the public face, broadcast on screens to millions, posted on Truth Social at three in the morning. The leader’s private exception is no longer private. The underground rooms have been turned inside out. And this inversion is itself the most grotesque act, more transgressive than any individual meme, because it destroys the architecture that gave the grotesque its function. You cannot excavate what has already been excavated. You cannot bring to light what insists on performing in the open.

The grotesque works by holding two things in tension simultaneously: funny and terrifying, real and impossible, joke and threat. That tension is productive. It makes you feel something you can’t quite name. Nero maintained it architecturally: dignified emperor above ground, monstrous interior below. The two never touched.

Trump collapses the distance entirely. The joke is the threat. The satire is the policy. When the House Speaker says “he is using satire to make a point,” the defense itself performs the collapse. Once the two registers are the same thing, accountability has nowhere to land. You cannot hold someone responsible for a joke. You cannot dismiss something as just a joke when it is also state power. That is the trap, and it is sprung deliberately.

There is a deeper logic here, one that anthropology has tracked across cultures and centuries.

The anthropologist David Graeber observed that sovereign transgression places the ruler beyond morality. The logic is circular but consistent. A ruler who creates a system of justice cannot himself be bound by that system. He stands outside it by definition.

This is why the grotesque is power’s honest self-portrait. Nero’s hybrid creatures were accuracy, full stop. Those walls showed what it actually felt like to be the one person in the empire exempt from every rule that governed everyone else.

So why does power keep reaching for the grotesque? Not transgression for its own sake. The sovereign simply recognizes himself in it. It is the only aesthetic that accurately describes what he actually is.

And Trump uses that recognition strategically. Bakhtin's carnival degraded the king by reminding him he was mortal and excremental, just like everyone else. Trump deploys his own excrement first, publicly, from a position of dominance, and in doing so preempts the whole operation creating immunity for himself. You cannot reduce to the common body a figure who has already crowned himself while wielding feces. The grotesque becomes a shield precisely because it was once a weapon.

Immunity and impunity share a common root, and the grotesque display is their visible expression. Corruption has historically required concealment. The torturer needed the night. Impunity, once achieved, announces itself, and the announcement is itself the act of dominance. You do not broadcast your exception until you are certain there are no consequences for broadcasting it. The meme is proof that impunity has already been completed.

The grotesque produces anomie, a state in which you no longer know what is real, what is serious, or what has consequences. Trump's meme ecosystem deploys the grotesque specifically for this effect. The hybrid images, the violated categories, the joke that is also a threat: these manufacture that disorientation continuously and at scale. The joke structure does the rest: the moment you name what is happening, you become the humorless one, the oversensitive one, the one who can't take a joke. The thing being named walks away intact [for more on impunity please see a previous essay: Why Are the Ultra-Rich Brutalizing Poetry?

Alfred Kubin published his novel The Other Side in 1909, five years before the world ended for the first time. It describes a Dream Kingdom in Central Asia, founded by an enigmatic sovereign named Claus Patera, to which the narrator is mysteriously summoned. The kingdom's grotesque is fully embodied: sexual depravity, animal plague, physical rot, bodies in states of dissolution that feel less like narrative events than like the world digesting itself. The whole landscape has the quality of a Bosch painting you have somehow wandered into. When an American industrialist named Hercules Bell arrives to challenge Patera with modernity and capitalism, the war between them is a grotesque consuming itself.

Kubin attributes a line to an old temple saying, sourceless, as if the Dream Kingdom always already knew this about itself: upon blood stands madness. A description of what has already happened.

The novel was declared degenerate art at the Anschluss in 1938. Franz Marc called it a magnificent reckoning with the nineteenth century. Kandinsky called it almost a vision of evil. What neither said, perhaps because it was too obvious, was that it described a world in which the grotesque had been captured by the sovereign and turned into an instrument of governance. Patera governs through atmosphere, through the slow contamination of everything, through a quality of unreality that makes resistance difficult to locate. The Dream Kingdom is a tyranny you cannot point to. It is a weather.

Patera differs from Nero and Trump in a crucial way. He does not use the grotesque strategically. He is it. The Dream Kingdom’s atmosphere of decay is an emanation of the sovereign’s nature, ungoverned and ungovernable, the underground rooms turned inside out by constitution, involuntarily. Patera cannot keep his exception hidden because there is nothing left of him that is not exceptional, nothing sealed away beneath the palace. And this is why he loses control. The grotesque, when it is the sovereign’s entire nature and has lost its instrumental edge, eventually consumes the one who embodies it. Upon blood stands madness applies to Patera most of all. He built the kingdom on blood, and the madness is his.

Patera could not control the grotesque because he was it entirely, with nothing held back. Trump still appears to wield it deliberately. But the longer a performance continues, the harder it becomes to find where it ends and the person begins. Kubin's novel suggests what happens when that line disappears. We may be watching it disappear in real time.

Alfred Kubin, The Past Forgotten Swallowed, 1901, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The grotesque, in Bakhtin’s analysis, was temporary. The carnival ends. The king returns to the throne but carries with him the carnival’s lesson, that the throne was contingent, that the body beneath the crown was common. This is why power has always been ambivalent about the grotesque: it needed the pressure valve but feared the knowledge that came with it.

There is a quieter consequence worth naming: the deadening of aesthetic range. The grotesque is supposed to be temporary. It disrupts, disorients, and then releases. When it runs continuously, as a permanent condition rather than a shock, it stops functioning as grotesque and becomes background noise. And background noise deadens everything. Victor Hugo argued that the grotesque and the sublime are complements, and beauty a third distinct mode: three registers that together constitute the full range of aesthetic experience. Saturate the field with one of them, run it without interruption, and you compress access to all three.

Daniel Berlyne’s research on aesthetic response found that sensitivity across that full spectrum depends on range, on a nervous system that has been allowed to move freely between states of arousal and rest, disruption and resolution, transgression and calm. Habituation compresses that range. A field saturated with grotesque-as-weapon, cycling endlessly without the regenerative turn Bakhtin insisted was the grotesque’s purpose, gradually raises the threshold at which any of these registers can be felt at all. The consequence is a uniform flattening: we lose access to the grotesque as meaningful disruption, to the sublime as its high counterpart, and to beauty as the mode of experience that resolves what the other two hold open. What remains is a middle register where nothing quite lands. This is, in its way, also a form of impoverishment, and also a form of control.

I keep thinking about those Renaissance artists descending into Nero’s buried rooms. We will never experience what they did, the way we can still feel something close to it watching the Lascaux cave footage, that shock of encountering what someone made in the dark, for reasons we can’t fully recover. What they found was the emperor’s private excess, his true face, kept underground precisely because it could not be displayed above. They brought it back up, gave it a name, and for five centuries it traveled, accumulating its democratic charge, becoming the people’s instrument against exactly the kind of power that first produced it.

We are back in the cave, but the emperor has kicked the door open himself. The circuit is complete and the direction has reversed. What needed concealment to function has been broadcast. What was once the sovereign’s secret is now a feed.

Upon blood stands madness. Every culture that gets far enough carves it somewhere.

The question is what to do inside that. The answer, I think, is the same thing those artists did: go into the cave anyway, look directly at what is there, and come back up with a name for it. The grotesque has always been the people’s weapon as much as the sovereign’s secret. Naming it matters. Refusing the flattening matters. Insisting on the full range of aesthetic experience, the disruption of the grotesque, the overwhelm of the sublime, the resolution of beauty, is a form of resistance that does not look like resistance because it looks like simply being alive to the world. But that aliveness is precisely what the permanent carnival is designed to erode. Protecting your capacity to be horrified, moved, and consoled in equal measure is not a luxury. It is the ground from which everything else grows.

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References

Astruc, Rémi. Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010.

Astruc, Rémi. Vertiges grotesques: Esthétiques du choc en littérature et arts du spectacle. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.

Berlyne, Daniel E. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971.

Graeber, David. “The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the Human Condition.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–62. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1.002

Hugo, Victor. “Preface to Cromwell“ [1827]. In Preface de Cromwell, translated by George Burnham Ives. Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901. Widely available in translation.

Kubin, Alfred. The Other Side [Die andere Seite, 1909]. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Sawtry: Dedalus, 1988.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922]. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.