Jack Halberstam, in his beautiful book, The Queer Art of Failure, uses the cases of failure as a provocative way to think about the structures of power. We often think about failure as an individual act. All the onus is put on the individual. The individual is blamed. Halberstam, on the other hand, shows how failure makes visible the invisible operations of power and the disciplining of our lives. Thus, failure allows us to live otherwise and refuse the dictating, policing power of heteronormativity and homonormativity.
In this blog piece, I am interested in conceptualizing failure as a vital tool of power. There is something else about failure that is so important to understand in our current historical moment. Donald Trump is a failure. Donald Trump fails at almost everything. But this failure is powerful. This failure is successful. What does this tell us about failure? Is it even relevant? Specifically, I see failure as vital to the continuous assertion and accumulation of power. Let me explain.
Trump has failed at almost everything. Whatever he touches, as the kids would say, turns to shit. In fact, his life is about continual failures. As a financial mind, he was a total failure. One just needs to look at the various bankruptcies he filed. Business failure. With regards to the conservative right’s claim to moral superiority with marriages, Trump failed. He had several marriages, not to mention the various cases against him for sexual assault. Social and moral failure. Trump has pushed forward wars during both his terms, domestically and globally. Peace and community building failure. In his first Presidency, he did not push forward policies that moved the needle socially, culturally, politically, or even financially. Political failure.
Yet, what is it that made him so desirable? Why would he win the 2024 election with a considerable margin for his second Presidency? What is the draw? The draw is his failure!
With poverty wrecking lives across the US, Trump’s ability to fail frequently is the draw. Everyday people are struggling to make a living, to live amidst such precarity, losing homes, and losing jobs. Inflation is out of control. In this context, Trump has become a hero to the working-class and middle-class communities across the US. Trump comes to stand in a masculine hero who seems to only amass wealth and power despite the many and continuous failures. For people in the US struggling with poor economic conditions, they desire this type of mobility. They substitute his whiteness for themselves whereby seeing such financial accumulation by one who fails so often is indeed desirable for the American public. White mobility and, what David Roediger theorizes as, white advantage is deeply desired.[i] Trump gives the American public a way to idolize him while displacing the structural failures, that allow for him to amass considerable wealth, onto working-class Latinx communities and undocumented people. Trump’s failure opens a space for people to feel connected to his presidency regardless of the economic results: such as the fact that while the upper-class benefits from the constant diversion of public funds to the very rich, there is a continuous dismantling of the social welfare net. There is this belief that “he is one of us.”
This “one of us” and heroization results from the very failures of Trump. His vile histories of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism are foundational to the redemptive power of failure. They are not hidden from his story but rather integral to the clamor of his failure. His failure is a structural, social, cultural consolidation of whiteness. His failures are worthy, valuable, and redeemable because of the ways he continues to amass wealth, control cultural production, and accumulate political power, especially through his racism, misogyny, and homophobia. His failure is relatable and validates the failures of others. The sought after white hero (in a multi-cultural, multi-racial nation).
For men who feel like they have lost their patriarchal power and that LGBTQI communities are invading men’s spaces, which is evident with their rabid hatred of trans girls and trans women, Trump’s success despite his failures is the perfect sounding board for these patriarchal, heterosexual anxieties. His ability to further gain power alongside his homophobia, transphobia, and sexism (such as his phrase “grab her by the pussy”) makes him a hero. The white hero of old that men desire, regardless of race and ethnicity, comes to life with Trump. His toxic masculinity and whiteness are desired because it resembles the cultural and political foundation of the country. In fact, he captures this historically desired tough and rough whiteness and makes it stretch across time into the present moment.
Furthermore, the image of the suffering working-class white person is harnessed not to provide critique of class violence and structural violence; it celebrates the failure of Trump and his acts of redemption. With his failing, Trump names immigrants, especially Latinx communities, African communities, Haitian communities, Somali communities, and immigrants and refugees from various Muslim countries as the cause of working-class people’s failings. This is the very brand of racism that secures upper-class whiteness as the desired, heroic masculinity while stigmatizing working-class people. Such xenophobia and hatred allow all communities, even communities of color (just remember all the people of color at the January 6th insurrection), to secure a pathway to whiteness, no matter how temporary. Thus, his failure is desirable because it enables anyone to practice the American spirit of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
People are so drawn by the redemptive story of his success through failure, it is the millionaire version of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Yet, this is a multi-millionaire securing greater wealth by stealing from the working-class (as a slumlord), crushing the social welfare net to convert public money into private profit, defund education and defund science to crush prospects for mobility and the good life, creates more wars that puts working-class people in life-threatening danger on the battlefield, and continues to be a threat to women (Epstein case as just one case) while stigmatizing trans women and women of color.
His failures do not leave a mark on him and do not ostracize and stigmatize him, rather they elevate him into the pantheon of desirable white masculinity—the American hero. His failure is both hyper visible and invisible. It is invisible that these failures are not barriers to his power-taking. Thus, Americans are willing to give us their moral compass, their social mobility, and their histories and education for someone whose response to personal failure has been to attack a wide swath of Others. This is the American way where whiteness needs failures to consolidate itself and justify the violence against a wide swath of communities. These Trumpian failures do not address and showcase the normative structures at play. Rather, his failures are the structure. The structure of white heteronormativity. It shows that whiteness, regardless of the individual failures of others, can sustain white advantage and enrich generationally the wealth of (affluent) people. What we have here is the impossibility of white rich man’s failure as an impediment. Rather it is a structural pathway to continued power and mobility. The American way!
At this moment where his failure is being redeemed through genocidal campaigns in Iran and Lebanon, we must not let this failure stand as celebration. His failure chastises and stigmatizes not only communities of color locally but also the global south. We must organize to call an end to the wars, strengthen local politics, end heroization, and create solidarities built on reciprocity, care, and history in the US and across the globe. White failure will only continue to blind us all and white failure will eventually kill us all if it is still desirable. Let us desire solidarities that make livable worlds for all of us, locally and across the world.
[i] Roediger, David. 1991. Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso. Roediger, David. 2025. An Ordinary White. New York: Fordham University Press.
Stanley Thangaraj is a socio-cultural Anthropologist. His interests are at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. He studies immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S. South to understand how they manage the black-white racial logic through gender and the kinds of horizontal processes of race-making. His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-