The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles

Abstract

“Bubbles,” “silos,” “cocoons,” “echo chambers” are labels now commonly used by media commentators and citizens alike to lament the divided communicative condition of the US electorate. Taken as an indicator of the state of liberal democracy in the United States, anxieties about bubbles bespeak the continued potency of the intertwined social and communicative imaginaries of an “American public” forged through common participation in a public sphere of discourse. The sorts of media technologies that make such a common space of discourse imaginable have been the topic of much discussion among communications scholars and linguistic anthropologists. But how does a communicative imaginary of bubbles—as a kind of less‐than‐public sphere—take shape? A significant catalyst, I argue, is the speech of Donald Trump. Here I focus particularly on the incoherent remarks and incredible claims that are a hallmark of Trump's oratory, as well as the media's annotations and fact checks that report and comment on them. Together, Trump's rhetoric and these genres of reporting serve as “signs of circulation” that delineate the communicative bubbles in which mainstream media audiences have discovered themselves to be enclosed. As an increasingly compelling communicative imaginary of the polity, these less‐than‐public spheres now serve as a framework through which people are reorienting themselves to their fellow citizens and their future together.

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