The Artist Is President:Performance Artand Other Keywords in the Age of Donald Trump

Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as aperformance artistand his campaign asperformance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramovic's work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It's hard to make sense of such bizarre, distorted images-let alone to recognize ourselves in them. This article insists that, nonetheless, we should try. Trump and his movement pose special challenges to American political culture-and also to academic performance theory. His rise has revealed the limitations of a politics (and performance theory) based on norms and their transgression. It has also given the lie to politicians' false belief that they (and only they) are notperformingtheir politics. The challenge now-for academics, activists, citizens, and journalists alike-is to articulate how performanceworks, how it provides models of cultural power.