Il buffone sul trono in nome del popolo. Per un’antropologia culturale di Donald Trump

This article proposes an anthropological interpretation of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency by treating it less as an institutional anomaly and more as a culturally intelligible figure of sovereignty. Rather than reading Trump through Max Weber’s model of charisma, the article argues that Trump is better approached through the comparative anthropology of religious symbolism and political myth as a modern variant of the trickster and, in a second step, of the sacred clown. The guiding idea is that symbolic archetypes can illuminate why a leader who violates political decorum, speaks in repetitive and elementary forms, and thrives on scandal can nonetheless be experienced as a popular redeemer. The first move is to frame “Trumpism” as trickster politics, following the early diagnosis offered in 2016 by Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, and connecting it to Ágnes Horváth’s theorization of political tricksters. The article treats the trickster as a cross-cultural archetype: a liminal agent of transformation who breaks rules and thereby generates new rules, mobilizing paradox and excess rather than stable moral authority. In Jungian terms, the trickster embodies a chaotic, unpredictable psychic layer that becomes publicly salient in moments of crisis. Trump fits this profile because he can present himself as an anti-system rebel while being, sociologically, an insider with wealth and influence. His political efficacy is located in ambivalence: the capacity to exploit disorder while claiming to restore order. A second argument specifies how this differs from Weberian charisma. Trump is described as lacking the classic marks of charismatic authority, such as elevated rhetoric, a “calling,” or a transcendent political mission. The article instead highlights a performative mechanism: a crude, repetitive style that produces immediacy, emotional synchronization, and an illusion of direct participation. Controversy does not weaken the figure but feeds it, because scandal becomes attention, and attention becomes authority. The media relationship is therefore treated as structurally trickster-like: rather than policing reputation, the leader metabolizes reputational damage into renewed presence. The article then argues that the trickster model, while insightful for 2016, is insufficient for explaining the consolidation of power in a second presidency. Here the interpretive lens shifts from the trickster to what David Graeber’s discussion of ritual sovereignty calls the sacred clown. In ritual, the clown’s licensed transgression is not pure negation but a political device that can, under certain conditions, be institutionalized. The article claims that Trump’s second mandate shows precisely this transition: transgression becomes the norm, and the “anomaly” is normalized as authority. The buffoon is no longer the tolerated disruptor at the margins but a ruler who rewrites the rules while appearing to restore them. To account for why this institutionalization becomes possible, the article links the symbolic shift to a cultural diagnosis of liberal-democratic fatigue. Trump’s victory is interpreted less as an affirmative embrace than as a rejection of the Biden-Harris period, described as widely perceived as ineffective on inflation and immigration and as unable to communicate credibly with voters. Against this background, the trickster’s resilience is explained by conditions of trust collapse, elite distance, and a widespread desire for a political language that resonates with “the people,” however that category is constructed. A substantial section addresses Jianwei Xun’s interpretation of Trump as a “trance operator” who inaugurates a new “regime of reality” through hypnotic, shamanic techniques. The article rejects this as overly mystical and proposes a counter-thesis: Trump’s strength lies not in manufacturing a new reality but in offering an electorate alienated from progressive discourse a felt return to concreteness, boundaries, and common sense. The comparison with Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings functions as an analogy: Trump resembles an unintentional therapist who shocks a lethargic public into motion, with destabilizing side effects. This “return to reality” is then illustrated through emblematic policy gestures of the second presidency. The article discusses a confrontation with Colombia framed as a display of sovereign primacy through tariffs and restrictions, while warning that systematic escalation of this style risks trade wars and economic slowdown. It then highlights an executive order “Defending Women” that dismantles “gender affirmation care” policies for minors, interpreting it as a reassertion of biological sex against progressive identity fluidity, and as a response to a demand for “objective criteria” over self-identification. A third example is the rollback of DEI policies, staged symbolically as a return to merit, even as DEI becomes an all-purpose scapegoat in public narratives. Across these cases, the article’s point is not programmatic endorsement but anthropological intelligibility: legal acts become ritualized signals that the sovereign is “bringing politics back” to everyday realism. The theoretical apex of the article reads Trump through Graeber and Sahlins’s paradox of sovereignty, in which royal power is imagined as absolute and “outside” ordinary moral limits, yet also must be sacralized and contained to prevent destructiveness. Trump is positioned as reopening space for a more “divine” register of power after a democratic administration characterized by self-restraint. The key claim is that this is not only imposed from above: there is a genuine popular demand for a form of power that can hold a world felt as unstable, fluid, and threateningly inconsistent. The leader’s clownish traits become, paradoxically, a credential of authenticity and a promise that fear of the future will be kept at bay. The conclusion generalizes the argument into a disciplinary critique. The article proposes “an anthropology of common sense” as a corrective to an anthropology that has, for decades, treated power primarily as suspect and has confined itself to a “sacral” posture of critique and deconstruction. Progressivism is described as having pushed a radical constructivism that recodes differences as mere conventions and weaponizes identity claims in ways many citizens experience as artificial and moralizing. In this reading, dismissing Trump voters as ignorant repeats a classic epistemic error, exemplified by the tendency to minimize Hitler as “only a clown”: it ignores the deep symbolic forces through which societies reorganize their relationship to reality, authority, and belonging. The article’s closing claim is that Trump’s re-election is less about one individual than about an anthropological demand for politics that restores ordinary structures of feeling and provides a stabilizing frame for everyday life, even when the vehicle of that restoration is disorderly and potentially dangerous.