The Performer and the Functionary: Andy Kaufman, Donald Trump, and the Collapse of Political Discourse into Performance Art

Abstract

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Introduction

In January 2026, US President Donald Trump sent a text message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre linking his pursuit of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize. "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize," Trump wrote, "I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America." He added: "The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland" (Financial Times, 2026).

This statement, simultaneously absurd and consequential, exemplifies a fundamental shift in American political discourse: the collapse of the distinction between performance art and executive governance. This article argues that this shift can be understood through the lens of Andy Kaufman's performance art, particularly his Tony Clifton persona—a character that demanded respect while offering only insults, that treated disruption as a service, and that ultimately consumed its creator.

The comparison between Kaufman and Trump is not merely metaphorical. Rather, it reveals structural similarities in how both figures operate within what performance studies scholars call "kayfabe"—the professional wrestling term for staged events presented as real (Jackson, 2018; O'Brien, 2020). The term "kayfabe" (pronounced KAY-fabe) originated in professional wrestling's carnival and vaudeville roots, likely derived from the phrase "be fake" spelled backwards, or possibly from carnival slang meaning "keep it fake." In wrestling, kayfabe refers to the strict code of maintaining the illusion that staged events are real—wrestlers were expected to maintain their characters not just in the ring, but in public appearances, interviews, and even casual encounters. Breaking kayfabe (revealing the staged nature of events) was considered a serious violation of professional ethics. This concept has been adopted by media theorists to describe any situation where staged or scripted events are presented as authentic, and where the maintenance of that illusion becomes more important than the distinction between performance and reality. Both figures have systematically dismantled traditional media as the "umpire" of reality, both operate through what Philip Auslander terms the "post-funny" era where comedy (or politics) stops being about content and starts being about the failure of the form itself (Auslander, 1992). Both create what this article terms an "ironic shield"—a form of protection that works for the primary performer but cannot be delegated to subordinates.

However, a critical divergence emerges: where Kaufman's power derived from what Florian Keller calls the "Theatre of Hysteria"—the ability to force audiences into states where they cannot distinguish reality from artifice through the dexterity of evading presence—Trump's power derives from hyper-presence, from total saturation of the frame (Keller, 2005). While both create an "ironic shield" that protects the performer, the mechanisms differ fundamentally, and this distinction explains why Kaufman could exit his characters while Trump cannot exit "Trump."

This article proceeds in six parts. First, it establishes the theoretical framework through performance studies scholarship, particularly Keller's analysis of Kaufman and Auslander's work on mediatization. Second, it traces the evolution of political discourse from policy-based debate to performance-based provocation. Third, it examines the "underling problem"—how the ironic shield fails when delegated to functionaries. Fourth, it analyzes the fundamental divergence between Kaufman's evasive presence and Trump's hyper-presence. Fifth, it examines Trump as "Kaufman restricted to Clifton"—performance without the relief of alternative personae. Finally, it traces the transformation from intentional performance to internalized identity, demonstrating how the collapse of the boundary between performer and performance creates a dangerous feedback loop in which policy becomes prop for performative ego.

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Theoretical Framework: Performance Studies and the "Post-Funny" Era

The academic analysis of Andy Kaufman's work has largely centered on two foundational texts: Florian Keller's Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream (2005) and Philip Auslander's chapter "Comedy, Mediatization, Resistance: Andy Kaufman and Sandra Bernhard" in Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (1992).

Keller's analysis situates Kaufman not as a comedian but as a figure who used performance to expose the "internal contradictions" of American ideology. Keller argues that Kaufman's performances—particularly his inter-gender wrestling matches—were designed to force audiences into what he terms the "Theatre of Hysteria," a state where they could not distinguish between reality and artifice, effectively "short-circuiting" their expectations (Keller, 2005, p. 87). Central to Keller's thesis is the concept that "the mask is the face"—that there was no "real" Andy behind the characters, that the performer was entirely subsumed by the act (Keller, 2005, p. 134).

Auslander, writing from a postmodern performance studies perspective, argues that Kaufman pioneered what he terms the "post-funny" era, where comedy stops being about jokes and starts being about the failure of comedy itself (Auslander, 1992, p. 139-167). In performance studies, "presence" refers to the sense that the audience perceives the authentic self of the performer—the feeling that one is seeing the "real" person behind the performance rather than merely a character or role. Auslander emphasizes the role of "mediatization"—the idea that Kaufman's work only functions because of the "media frame," that he wasn't just performing for the people in the room but for the camera, using the distance of the screen to create a layer of "un-reality" (Auslander, 1992, p. 152). Most critically for this analysis, Auslander argues that Kaufman's power came from a "refusal of presence"—he never "showed up" as himself, creating what this article terms the "ironic shield" (Auslander, 1992, p. 161).

However, as this article will demonstrate, there is a crucial distinction to be made: while Keller and Auslander both emphasize Kaufman's ability to evade presence, the power of this evasion comes not from being a "void" but from what might be termed "dexterity of evasion"—the ability to make audiences believe there cannot be a void, then stunning them with the skill with which one avoids proof of that belief.

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The Evolution of Political Discourse: From Policy to Performance

By early 2026, the distinction between performance art and executive governance had almost entirely collapsed. This transformation can be understood through four interconnected shifts in public discourse.

The Death of the "Straight Face"

In traditional political discourse, a leader's words were expected to be a literal reflection of intent. The Kaufman style—and by extension, the contemporary administration's rhetoric—operates on irony and ambiguity. When Kaufman famously read The Great Gatsby to a booing audience until they left, he wasn't interested in the book; he was interested in the reaction (Zehme, 1999). Similarly, when President Trump texts the Norwegian Prime Minister that he is "no longer obliged to think of peace" because of a Nobel snub, the statement isn't necessarily a policy directive. It is a provocation designed to force the other side to overreact, thereby exposing what the administration views as the "absurdity" of international institutions.

The Move from "Fact" to "Vibe"

Public discourse has evolved from a battle over facts to a battle over emotional resonance. In the Kaufman model, being "hated" by the establishment is the ultimate proof of being "real." The administration's pursuit of Greenland is often framed as "the weave"—a term Trump himself uses to describe his rhetorical style, in which he blends disparate topics (tariffs, Nobel prizes, Viking boat landings) into a singular narrative through apparent stream-of-consciousness association. Trump has explicitly defended this technique, claiming it demonstrates cognitive flexibility rather than incoherence: "I call it the weave... It all comes together in the end." Critics read it as evidence of disorganization; supporters read it as authentic spontaneity; the effect is that any statement can be retroactively justified as part of a larger pattern that only becomes visible "in the end." For supporters, the accuracy of the historical claim is less important than the feeling of a leader who refuses to follow the "script" of traditional diplomacy. Trump performs rebellion—against elites, against norms, against the "show" of politics—while promising a return to a world in which Boomers were ascendant, central, and unchallenged.

The Generational Performance: A Time Machine Disguised as a Tantrum

Trump's performance functions as nostalgic restoration for the Baby Boomer generation, promising a return to an era when their cultural assumptions were hegemonic rather than contested. This is not simply conservative nostalgia but a specific generational address: the performance restores an imaginary 1970s-1980s America in which broadcast media created shared national narratives, in which manufacturing jobs provided middle-class stability, in which American geopolitical dominance was unquestioned, and—crucially—in which the demographic, cultural, and economic displacement that Boomers would later experience had not yet occurred. The performance promises to reverse not just policy but time itself.

The appeal is legible precisely because Trump himself is a Boomer (born 1946, the first year of the generation) who formed his media persona during the 1980s peak of Boomer cultural power. He speaks the language of that era fluently: the tabloid bravado, the wrestling promo, the talk-radio rant, the reality-TV confessional. To Boomers who came of age in that media environment, this language reads as authentic, as "telling it like it is," as a refusal of the euphemism and complexity that characterize contemporary discourse. It is the language of their ascendancy, deployed against the world that displaced them.

Different generations decode this performance in radically different ways. To Generation X, raised in the shadow of Boomer dominance and now occupying middle management while Boomers retain leadership positions, the performance reads as either exhausting familiarity or dark comedy—the absurdist culmination of patterns they have observed their entire lives. To Millennials and Generation Z, who have no direct experience of the media environment Trump references, the performance reads as alien—grotesque, anachronistic, incomprehensible except as pathology. The tabloid-headline style that signifies authenticity to Boomers signifies vulgarity to younger generations who formed their media literacy in an environment of ironic distance and platform-native aesthetics.

This generational disjunction explains why fact-checking repeatedly fails to damage Trump's standing with his base. The fact-checkers are operating in a discourse of literal accuracy; the performance operates in a discourse of affective restoration. When Trump claims that Greenland must belong to America for "the World" to be "secure," the literal falsity of the claim is irrelevant to its function. The claim performs a world in which American presidents could make such declarations and have them treated as serious diplomacy—a world that existed, for Boomers, in living memory. The fact-check fails because it addresses the denotation while ignoring the connotation; it refutes the claim while leaving the nostalgia intact.

Bypassing the "Middleman"

The evolution of discourse has led to the systematic dismantling of traditional media as the "umpire" of reality. Just as Kaufman would hire his own plants in the audience to heckle him, the current administration uses direct communication platforms to bypass journalists. This creates a fragmented media environment: while the Financial Times analyzes the legal breach of a tariff, the administration's core audience is consuming the "story" as a heroic struggle against a "woke" Europe. In the broadcast imaginary, continuity is irrelevant. Characters can change motivations between episodes. Plotlines can be dropped. The only requirement is that the protagonist remain the protagonist.

The "Post-Outrage" Era

The exhaustion of outrage marks the most significant change. In the 1970s, Kaufman's antics caused genuine confusion and anger. By 2026, the public has become accustomed to the "troll" as a primary mode of governance. While contemporary analyses often attribute this style to internet meme culture and 4chan-style irony posting, this misses the deeper historical roots: the political application of "trolling" has its origins in the 1980s kayfabe and performance art culture that both Kaufman and Trump studied during the same transformative period. Internet irony culture did not invent these techniques; rather, it transmitted and amplified principles that were already being developed in Atlantic City wrestling rings and performance art spaces decades earlier. Subsequently, kayfabe died as a wrestling phenomenon and was reborn as a political one. In professional wrestling, sincere kayfabe collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the industry shifted from maintaining strict character continuity to openly acknowledging scripted storylines—most notably when Vince McMahon testified before the New Jersey State Senate in 1989 that wrestling was "entertainment" rather than competitive sport. The "reality era" of wrestling exposed the mechanics behind the illusion, making naïve belief in kayfabe obsolete within its original domain. Wrestling continued to use kayfabe techniques, and Trump himself appeared at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, but this was kayfabe as knowing performance—both performers and audience understood the fiction while maintaining it for entertainment value. What died was not the technique but the sincerity; what was born was ironic kayfabe, in which everyone knows it's fake but plays along anyway. This is precisely what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the structure of contemporary ideology: not naive belief but cynical participation—"they know very well what they are doing, but they do it anyway" (Žižek, 1989, p. 28). The cynical distance does not exempt the audience from the ideological operation; it is the ideological operation. When Trump's supporters acknowledge that he "trolls" and "triggers" while nonetheless organizing their political identity around his performances, they are not outside the kayfabe—they are performing their assigned role within it. Trump has distilled this cynical structure into its purest political form, drawing on the tabloid headline, the wrestling promo, the talk‑radio rant, the reality‑TV confessional. To younger generations, this style reads as grotesque or anachronistic. To Boomers, it reads as fluency. Public discourse is now defined by a "knowingness"—a false sophistication where people believe they understand the performance and are "in on the joke," treating everything as theater even when real consequences are at stake. Even opponents of policy often ask, "Is he serious, or is this a distraction?" Actual, high-stakes military or economic maneuvers are treated as "performance," making it harder for the public to recognize when a "bit" has become a reality with physical consequences.

Historical Precedents and the Question of Qualitative Difference

The claim that political discourse has collapsed into performance art invites an obvious objection: haven't politicians always performed? What distinguishes Trump from Ronald Reagan, himself a professional actor who brought Hollywood techniques to the presidency? From Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul who transformed Italian politics into entertainment? From historical demagogues like Huey Long or Father Coughlin, who weaponized mass media for populist appeal?

The answer lies in the relationship between performance and governance. Reagan was an actor who became a politician; his training in performance served his political communication, but he retained a clear distinction between performing for the camera and governing through institutions. Reagan's famous quips and delivered lines were in service of policy positions that existed independently of the performance. When Reagan joked, "There you go again" during a debate, the joke advanced a substantive argument; when he spoke of "Morning in America," the imagery served a coherent (if contested) ideological vision. The performance was instrumental to governance, not substitutive of it.

Berlusconi represents a more advanced stage of collapse, in which media ownership and political power merged. Yet even Berlusconi operated within recognizable political constraints: he formed coalitions, negotiated with other parties, and was ultimately constrained by institutional mechanisms (parliamentary votes, judicial proceedings) that retained their force. Berlusconi's performance was powerful, but it existed in tension with institutions that could still hold him accountable. He was eventually removed from office through political processes.

The historical demagogues—Long, Coughlin, McCarthy—weaponized mass media but remained constrained by the limits of broadcast technology. Their performances were powerful but temporally bounded: a radio address ended, a rally dispersed, and the audience returned to a world where institutions operated on non-performative logic. The "ironic shield" could not yet function because the media frame had not yet achieved the totalizing character it would later develop; audiences still expected coherence between performed and non-performed contexts.

The most extreme case illuminates the stakes of political performance itself: Adolf Hitler deployed performance techniques with catastrophic effectiveness, yet even he maintained boundaries that Trump has eliminated. Hitler was certainly a performer—the choreographed rallies, the theatrical oratory, the carefully constructed mythology of the Führer. Yet even Hitler maintained a distinction between his performative public role and his private strategic calculations. Historical accounts reveal a figure who consciously deployed performance as a tool while retaining the capacity for cold political calculation behind closed doors. His inner circle could still distinguish between the performance for the masses and the pragmatic discussions of power. The horror of the Nazi regime emerged not from the collapse of the boundary between performer and performance, but from the systematic application of performance techniques in service of genocidal ideology.

This makes Trump's innovation more unsettling, not less. Where Hitler used performance instrumentally—however catastrophically—Trump has made performance substitutive. The danger is not ideological conviction deployed through performance, but performance that has become its own ideology, its own end. This represents a qualitative shift not just from democratic norms but from the structure of political performance itself.

Trump represents a qualitative shift because the performance has become substitutive rather than instrumental. The tariff threats against Denmark are not in service of a coherent trade policy; they are the policy, functioning as episodes in an ongoing narrative rather than steps toward an external goal. The ironic shield has become so powerful that it no longer protects governance—it replaces governance with performance. Previous performer-politicians used their skills to advance agendas; Trump's agenda is the performance itself, making every policy a prop and every institution a stage.

This distinction matters because it determines what kinds of institutional response are possible. Reagan could be argued with on policy grounds; Berlusconi could be constrained by coalitions and courts; historical demagogues could be challenged by journalists who retained the authority to distinguish truth from performance. When performance becomes substitutive, these responses lose their purchase. There is no policy position to argue against, only a narrative beat to disrupt; there are no institutional constraints that cannot be reframed as persecution; there is no journalism that cannot be dismissed as "fake news." The qualitative shift is not merely that Trump performs more or better than his predecessors—it is that the performance has achieved a self-sufficiency that previous performer-politicians never attained.

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The Ironic Shield and the Underling Problem

This article introduces the concept of the "ironic shield" as a formal theoretical construct: a mode of discursive protection in which statements are rendered immune to conventional accountability because they occupy an ambiguous space between sincerity and performance, where any attempt to hold the speaker accountable can be deflected by claiming the statement was ironic, strategic, or "just a joke." The ironic shield functions as an extension of what Erving Goffman termed the distinction between "front stage" and "back stage" performance (Goffman, 1959), but with a crucial difference: where Goffman's performer maintained separate regions for authentic and performed selves, the ironic shield collapses this distinction entirely, making the "back stage" perpetually inaccessible to observers. The shield also operates within Guy Debord's framework of the "spectacle"—a social relationship mediated by images in which "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation" (Debord, 1967, p. 1). However, Debord's spectacle describes a condition imposed upon passive audiences, while the ironic shield is an active technique wielded by a performer who has learned to exploit the spectacle's logic for personal protection.

The ironic shield is a unique property of the performer themselves; it cannot be delegated. The mechanism of this failure is structural: the shield requires the audience to grant the performer a special interpretive license—a willingness to read statements as potentially ironic, strategic, or performative rather than literal. This license is granted based on the performer's established relationship with the audience, their charisma, and their demonstrated mastery of the performance frame. Subordinates lack this accumulated performative capital; when they repeat the performer's statements, they are read as literal claims subject to conventional standards of truth and accountability. The delegation fails because the ironic shield is not a transferable technique but an emergent property of the performer-audience relationship. This creates what this article terms the "underling problem"—a systematic failure of institutional functionaries who attempt to translate performance into policy.

The Performer vs. The Functionary

For Trump, the Greenland pursuit or the Nobel Prize grievance is a narrative beat. Like Kaufman, Trump thrives on the absurdity. However, subordinates—Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Vice President J.D. Vance—must translate that performance into policy, law, and diplomacy. When these functionaries meet with foreign officials, they are forced to provide "rational" justifications for what is essentially a "bit." Because they lack the performer's charisma and the public's "willing suspension of disbelief," they appear as people lying about, foolishly misunderstanding, or criminally ignoring the reality of international law. They are doing the "straight man" work without the protection of the joke. The performer channels the generational fantasy; the functionaries must translate it into policy. But fantasies do not translate. They only repeat. The functionaries, however, must operate in the real world, where continuity is not optional. They must reconcile the episodic logic of the performance with the linear logic of governance. They fail because the two logics are incompatible.

The Systematic Undermining

One of the most "Kaufmanesque" traits of this dynamic is how Trump uses staff as props to be discarded. While subordinates were attempting to establish a "working group" with Denmark to find a diplomatic middle ground, Trump posted on social media that anything less than "Complete and Total Control" was unacceptable. By doing this, Trump signaled to foreign representatives that his own negotiators have no power. He effectively "pantsed" his subordinates on the world stage, making their previous hours of negotiation look like a farce.

The Collapse of "Plausible Deniability"

The "ironic shield" works for Trump because supporters view statements as "trolling the elites." But for a Cabinet member, there is no irony in a tariff. When a staffer repeats a claim—like the idea that Denmark has no "written documents" proving they own Greenland—it is fact-checked as a falsehood. For Trump, the same statement is viewed as "The Weave." The underling is held to the standard of a civil servant, while the President is held to the standard of an entertainer. This gap is where the "liar, fool, or criminal" label sticks to the staff but slides off the leader.

The Staff of "Straight Men"

The administration is filled with people playing the role of the frustrated audience in a Kaufman skit. They are trying to build a "Board of Peace" or negotiate "Arctic Security Agreements" while Trump is texting foreign leaders about hurt feelings over a trophy. By trying to "sanewash" the rhetoric—interpreting it as "strategic interest" rather than performance—they end up looking more dishonest, foolish, or criminal than the person actually making the outrageous claims.

A Typology of Functionary Failure

The "underling problem" manifests differently depending on the institutional role of the functionary. Each type of subordinate must translate performance into a specific institutional register, and each translation fails in characteristic ways.

Press Secretaries must translate performance into sound bites—coherent, quotable statements that can survive the news cycle. Their failure mode is public humiliation through contradiction. When the performer makes an outrageous statement, the press secretary must either repeat it verbatim (appearing to endorse absurdity), soften it (appearing to contradict their principal), or refuse to comment (appearing evasive). None of these options preserves credibility. The press secretary becomes the visible site where the ironic shield fails to transfer: they are asked direct questions that demand literal answers, but they are representing a principal who operates in ironic mode. They are caught between two incompatible discursive registers.

Diplomats must translate performance into treaties and agreements—binding documents that require specificity, consistency, and good faith. Their failure mode is professional invalidation. When a diplomat negotiates based on one set of statements and the performer subsequently contradicts those statements on social media, the diplomat's counterparts learn that the diplomat has no real mandate. Future negotiations become impossible because foreign officials recognize that the diplomat cannot commit to anything. The Greenland scenario exemplifies this: while diplomats attempted to establish a "working group" with Denmark, Trump's declaration that nothing less than "Complete and Total Control" was acceptable revealed the negotiations as theater.

Legal Counsel must translate performance into defensible positions—arguments that can survive judicial scrutiny. Their failure mode is professional liability. Lawyers are bound by ethical obligations to make truthful representations to courts; when they attempt to provide legal justification for performative statements, they risk sanctions, disbarment, and personal liability. The ironic shield does not extend to courtrooms, where statements are evaluated as literal claims rather than performance. Legal counsel thus face a choice between abandoning their client's position or risking their professional standing.

Cabinet Members must translate performance into policy—implemented programs that affect real resources and real people. Their failure mode is institutional capture. Cabinet members command departments with thousands of employees, established procedures, and legal mandates. When they attempt to implement performative statements as policy, they encounter institutional resistance from career staff, legal challenges from affected parties, and practical impossibilities that performance ignores. They become trapped between the performer's demands and institutional constraints, often resorting to half-measures that satisfy neither.

What unites these failure modes is the fundamental incompatibility between performance logic and institutional logic. The performer operates episodically, without concern for continuity or consistency; institutions operate linearly, requiring that today's actions cohere with yesterday's commitments and tomorrow's consequences. The functionary must serve both masters and inevitably betrays both.

Power Without Authority

The ironic shield enables a form of power that operates without the need for traditional institutional authority. In conventional political systems, power derives from authority: elected office, legal mandate, constitutional process, or institutional hierarchy. A Secretary of State can negotiate treaties because they hold the authority of their office; a diplomat can make commitments because they represent a government with recognized sovereignty. The ironic shield subverts this relationship entirely.

Trump can make policy statements, threaten foreign leaders, and bypass traditional diplomatic channels without needing to justify actions through institutional processes. When he texts a Prime Minister about Nobel Prize grievances, he isn't operating through the authority of the deep state or the diplomatic corps; he's operating through the power of the performance itself—the ability to command attention, create chaos, and force responses without the constraints of institutional legitimacy.

This is why functionaries fail so systematically: they require authority to act. A Cabinet member cannot make a policy statement without institutional backing; a diplomat cannot negotiate without a mandate. But the performer doesn't need authority—they need only the performance frame, the ironic shield, and the audience's suspension of disbelief. The functionary is trapped in a system that demands authority they cannot access, while the performer operates in a parallel system where power flows from performance itself, not from institutional structures.

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Presence and Absence: The Fundamental Divergence

To fully appreciate this divergence, we must first examine the structural parallels that connect their performance strategies.

Building Masks: Characters and Aliases

The structural similarities between Kaufman and Trump are not merely coincidental but reflect a concurrent development during the same transformative period. Between 1982 and 1984, both figures were actively studying and applying the principles of kayfabe and performance art, operating in overlapping cultural spaces and developing techniques that would define their later public personas.

Kaufman's peak wrestling period—his legendary feud with Jerry "The King" Lawler and his infamous appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982—occurred simultaneously with Trump's expansion into Atlantic City and his study of professional wrestling and boxing promotion. During this period, Trump was opening Trump Plaza (1984), promoting major boxing matches featuring Mike Tyson, and observing how wrestling promoters like Vince McMahon and Don King maintained fictional personas as reality. It was also during this period that Tony Clifton appeared as a performance act in Atlantic City, creating a direct geographic and cultural connection between Kaufman's most abrasive persona and Trump's business operations. Both men were operating in Atlantic City during these years, swimming in the same cultural waters of 1980s high-gloss entertainment. Because of these stylistic similarities, a popular (though clearly satirical) conspiracy theory emerged during the 2016 election suggesting that Donald Trump was actually Andy Kaufman in disguise, having faked his death to pull off the ultimate "long-form" performance art piece. The argument: Proponents of the gag point to Tony Clifton's abrasive personality, the "magic realist" hair, and the way both men reveled in hostile crowds.

Trump's adoption of character names as part of his performance strategy marks the most significant parallel. Kaufman created distinct personas: Tony Clifton, the Foreign Man, and Latka Gravas. Trump, during the same period, used aliases to call into radio shows and speak with reporters, most notably "John Barron" and "John Miller," through which he would act as his own publicist, bragging about his wealth, romantic conquests, and business acumen. Just as Kaufman used Tony Clifton to say things he couldn't say as himself, Trump used these aliases to control the narrative while maintaining plausible deniability. Both understood the "work"—the wrestling term for scripted events presented as real—and both used characters to test how much they could get away with before audiences realized they were being "worked."

This concurrent development during the early 1980s demonstrates that the parallels between Kaufman and Trump are structural rather than coincidental. Both were students of kayfabe during the same transformative window when professional wrestling was transitioning from regional entertainment to national spectacle. Both understood that characters and aliases could be used to manipulate narrative and test the boundaries of what audiences would accept as "real." That they developed these techniques simultaneously, in the same cultural space, indicates they were responding to the same underlying shift in American media and entertainment culture—a moment when the distinction between performance and reality was becoming increasingly fluid.

While the structural similarities between Kaufman and Trump are significant, a critical divergence emerges in how they treat presence. This divergence has profound implications for how performance functions when it becomes institutionalized.

The Void vs. The Ego

Kaufman's power came from removing presence. According to Keller, Kaufman was a "void." He didn't want you to see Andy; he wanted you to see the effect of Tony Clifton or the Foreign Man. He would even have other people (like Bob Zmuda) play his characters while he sat in the audience, literally removing himself from his own performance (Zehme, 1999).

Trump, conversely, is "Hyper-Present." His style isn't about disappearing; it's about total saturation. Every tweet, text to a Prime Minister, and rally is an assertion of a singular, massive identity. Where Kaufman was Protean (constantly changing), Trump is Monolithic. He doesn't want to hide behind the mask; he wants the mask to be so big that it's the only thing you can see.

The Ironic Shield: Evasive vs. Narcissistic Mechanisms

The "underling" failure is so acute because of how this distinction operates. Both Kaufman and Trump possess an "ironic shield"—both are protected from accountability because their statements are viewed as performance rather than literal policy. However, the mechanism differs fundamentally. Kaufman's shield worked through evasion: he was protected because he wasn't there. You couldn't hurt him because you couldn't find him. Trump's shield works through narcissistic saturation: he is protected because he is everything, because his presence is so total that it becomes its own justification. In the context of the 2026 Greenland crisis, his message to Norway isn't a Kaufmanesque "bit" intended to disappear the self; it's a self-mythologizing act. It centers his personal feelings as the primary driver of global geopolitics. Both shields protect the performer, but where Kaufman's protection came from absence, Trump's comes from overwhelming presence.

Mediatization and the Demand for Loyalty

Auslander emphasizes that Kaufman's work only functions because of the "media frame"—he wasn't just performing for the people in the room but for the camera, using the distance of the screen to create a layer of "un-reality" (Auslander, 1992, p. 152). Kaufman used mediatization to resist being "known": the camera's distance allowed him to disappear, to create characters that existed only in the mediated space between screen and audience. Trump uses mediatization differently: rather than using the media frame to create distance and evade presence, he uses it to achieve omnipresence. Every tweet, rally broadcast, and cable news appearance extends his presence across all media channels simultaneously. The media frame doesn't create distance for Trump; it multiplies his presence.

This difference shapes how underlings function in each system. For an underling to work for Kaufman, they had to be in on the "prank" (like Zmuda), understanding that the performance was designed to resist being known. For an underling to work for Trump in 2026, they have to worship the presence—not just serve it, but amplify it across all media channels. When staffers repeat the "Greenland is ours" line, they aren't helping a performer disappear; they are serving a "presence" that demands absolute loyalty and constant amplification through the media frame. This is why they come off as liars, fools, or criminals—they are trying to provide "logical cover" for a person who refuses to be bound by logic, yet insists on being the center of every media frame.

From Broadcast to Platform: The Transformation of the Media Frame

Auslander's analysis of mediatization was developed in the context of broadcast media—a one-to-many architecture characterized by scheduled programming, editorial gatekeeping, and temporal delay between production and reception. The "media frame" that enabled Kaufman's performances was fundamentally shaped by these characteristics: he could plan elaborate hoaxes knowing that the broadcast would occur at a specific moment, that editors would make decisions about what to include, and that the audience would receive the performance as a finished product with clear boundaries.

The platform era has fundamentally altered this media frame in ways that both intensify and destabilize the ironic shield. Social media operates on a many-to-many architecture characterized by real-time posting, algorithmic curation rather than editorial gatekeeping, and the collapse of temporal boundaries between production and reception. When Trump texts the Norwegian Prime Minister about the Nobel Prize and then posts about it on social media, there is no editorial intermediary, no scheduled broadcast time, no opportunity for the performance to be framed or contextualized before it reaches the audience. The performance is raw, immediate, and infinitely replicable.

This transformation has contradictory effects on the ironic shield. On one hand, the removal of editorial gatekeeping strengthens the shield: there is no journalist to ask follow-up questions, no editor to cut the most outrageous claims, no broadcast delay during which the performer might be forced to clarify. The platform allows the performer to deliver provocation directly to the audience without mediation. On the other hand, the collapse of temporal boundaries creates a permanent archive that can be cross-referenced, fact-checked, and used as evidence of contradiction. Kaufman's performances existed in discrete broadcast moments; Trump's exist in a continuous, searchable stream where every statement can be juxtaposed against every other statement.

The platform era also eliminates the "distance" that Auslander identified as essential to Kaufman's technique. Broadcast media created a clear separation between the performer and the audience—the screen was a barrier that established the performance as occurring "elsewhere." Social media creates an illusion of intimacy and direct address; the performer appears to be speaking directly to each individual user, without the distancing frame of the broadcast. This intimacy intensifies the parasocial relationship between performer and audience, making the audience more likely to grant the interpretive license that the ironic shield requires—but it also raises the stakes when the "bit" is revealed to have real-world consequences.

For functionaries, the platform era is catastrophic. In the broadcast era, a staffer's statements would be filtered through journalists who might contextualize or challenge them; in the platform era, those statements exist in the same unmediated space as the performer's provocations, but without the performer's accumulated parasocial capital. The staffer's attempt to "sanewash" the rhetoric is immediately juxtaposed against the performer's raw statement, making the sanitization visible and therefore more damaging.

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The Clifton Persona: Performance Without Relief

If Andy Kaufman was the "Foreign Man" (vulnerable, sweet, asking for pity), Tony Clifton was the shadow—the washed-up, abusive lounge singer who demanded respect while offering nothing but insults. By viewing Trump as Kaufman "restricted to Clifton," we can see why the diplomatic and internal dynamics are so volatile.

The Clifton Traits: Disruption as a Service

Tony Clifton's entire act was built on being the "unprofessional professional." He would show up late, demand rewrites of scripts he didn't understand, and insult the people paying him. This revenge operates through what might be termed "weaponized incompetence"—the strategic use of professional failure as a form of aggression. Clifton's disruption wasn't random chaos; it was calculated hostility disguised as entertainment.

Trump's message to Norway regarding the Nobel Peace Prize is classic Clifton: it centers a personal slight (not getting a trophy) as a valid reason to upend international trade. It is the political equivalent of Clifton breaking eggs over a talk-show host's head because he didn't like the segment. Both figures transform their resentment at being excluded from elite recognition into a performance that punishes the very institutions they claim to want to join. As Keller notes, "Clifton is an incarnation of the recurrent failure of the American Dream, and now he seems to take revenge on his audience by acting as a public nuisance." Clifton believed he was "bigger than Elvis and the Beatles combined." Trump's insistence that "The World is not secure" without his "Complete and Total Control of Greenland" mirrors that same grandiosity—a demand for absolute power based on a self-created myth of indispensability.

Trump Meets Clifton

The comparison between Trump and Clifton is not merely theoretical. According to an interview with Tony Clifton (Bob Zmuda, in character), Trump and Clifton actually met at Trump Tower during a fundraiser in the early 1990s at the invitation of Marla Maples, who was on the organizing committee (Welch, 2025). Clifton recounts that Trump "gave me the old 'once over,' surmised me as a threat and unwelcomely shook my hand." Marla Maples subsequently apologized for Trump's behavior—a detail that suggests Trump's reaction to Clifton may have revealed something fundamental about his character that even his then-wife found troubling. (A note on sourcing: Zmuda is an inherently unreliable narrator—he spent decades impersonating Clifton and blurring the line between character and self, which is precisely what makes his account valuable for this analysis. Whether the encounter occurred exactly as described, or is itself another layer of performance, the account reveals how the Clifton persona understood its relationship to Trump, which is analytically significant regardless of strict factual accuracy.)

What makes this encounter particularly significant is Clifton's claim that Trump has been "stealing his entire act"—not just the political incorrectness, but even specific facial expressions, including what Clifton describes as his "signature" protruding lower lip, which Clifton himself claims to have "lifted from Mussolini" (Welch, 2025). The parallels between Trump and Clifton are not coincidental but may represent a form of unconscious appropriation—or, more disturbingly, a recognition of kindred spirits. When Trump encountered Clifton, he may have seen in that character something he recognized in himself: the entitled, abusive persona that demands respect while offering only insults. That Trump perceived Clifton as a "threat" is telling—not because Clifton was actually dangerous, but because Trump may have recognized in him a competitor for the same performative space, someone who had already perfected the act that Trump would later adopt.

The Abuse of the "Band"

One of the most telling insights into the Clifton persona is how he treated his staff and backup singers. Clifton would famously abuse his band members, sometimes screaming at them to be fired the moment they were offstage, while claiming "onstage" that they were the best in the business. Trump's underlings are treated like Clifton's backup band. He uses them for the "show" (sending J.D. Vance to negotiate), then publicly undermines them ("rewriting the script" via social media). They are forced to participate in a "bit" that ruins their professional reputations, while he remains protected by the outrageousness of the persona.

The Lack of the "Foreign Man" Pivot

The reason Kaufman was a celebrated artist was the contrast. He could be the sweet, bumbling Latka and then "turn" into Clifton. The audience felt a strange tension because they knew the "sweet" Andy was still in there somewhere. If Trump is "restricted to Clifton," the sweet "Foreign Man" who asks for the audience's love is gone. There is no relief from the aggression. In international discourse, this means there is no "off" switch for the provocation. For Kaufman, the "Foreign Man" was the shield. People forgave Clifton because they loved Andy. If the "Andy" persona is removed, the "Clifton" behavior is no longer an art experiment—it's just a hostile environment.

A potential counterargument emerges: Trump does perform victimhood extensively. The "witch hunt" rhetoric, the rallying cry of "they're coming after me, but they're really coming after you," the faux-vulnerable moments at rallies where he performs sacrifice ("I'm doing this for you")—these might appear to constitute a "Foreign Man" relief valve. However, this objection misunderstands the function of Kaufman's vulnerable persona. The Foreign Man's vulnerability was disarming—it invited sympathy, created space for the audience to feel protective, and established an emotional bond that preceded the aggression. Trump's victimhood, by contrast, is weaponized—it is vulnerability deployed as accusation, softness as a form of attack. When Trump performs being persecuted, the performance immediately pivots to aggression against the persecutors; the vulnerability never exists as a resting state but only as a staging ground for counterattack. This is Clifton claiming he's been mistreated by the club owners while simultaneously berating the waitstaff. The form resembles vulnerability, but the function is pure aggression. Kaufman's Foreign Man asked for pity and received it, creating genuine emotional relief. Trump's victimhood demands vengeance and receives applause, which is simply another mode of Clifton. The "relief valve" requires that the performer become genuinely less threatening for a period; Trump's victimhood makes him more threatening by providing justification for escalation.

The Perpetual "Taxi" Set

In 1977, Kaufman-as-Clifton was famously fired from the sitcom Taxi for causing total chaos. He brought hookers to the set, demanded rewrites, and got into physical altercations with the cast. In early 2026, the White House is essentially the Taxi set. The President is playing the role of the "difficult guest star" who refuses to follow the script of the deep state. On Taxi, they eventually threw Clifton out. In geopolitics, there is no security guard to escort a nuclear-armed "Clifton" off the stage when the "prank" of 25% tariffs becomes a reality.

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From Method Acting to Identity Fusion: The Transformation

The most profound aspect of this comparison moves the theory from performance art (which is intentional) to a tragedy of identity (which is psychological). If Trump began as a businessman playing a "character" to win a media game, he has fallen into what method acting practitioners describe as the danger of character possession—the state in which an actor who has fully inhabited a role begins to lose access to their pre-character self.

The Method Acting Trap

In academic studies on method acting, there is a well-documented phenomenon where the "mask" eventually fuses with the "face." Lee Strasberg, the primary theorist of method acting, warned his students about the psychological dangers of deep character work, noting cases where actors lost the ability to "break" from their roles (Carnicke, 2008). The technique requires actors to draw on their own emotional memories to inhabit characters, which can create feedback loops in which the character's emotions begin to feel more authentic than the actor's "original" emotional repertoire. Kaufman was always in control of the bit. Even when he was Clifton, he had Bob Zmuda or his brother Michael stand by to prove it was a trick. He never let the mask swallow him. By January 2026, there is no one left to "unmask" Trump. By alienating the "straight men" of the GOP and the traditional deep state, he has removed the guardrails that kept the Clifton persona a "bit." He is now in a feedback loop where his most aggressive Clifton-esque impulses—like the Greenland-Nobel grievance—are treated as literal state policy.

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) offers a literary anatomy of this structure. The novel's narrator, Charles Kinbote, writes an extensive "commentary" on a poem by John Shade—but the commentary systematically hijacks the poem, transforming every line into a pretext for Kinbote's fantasy of being the exiled King of Zembla. Shade's verse becomes raw material for Kinbote's self-mythology. The parallel to Trump's "weave" is exact: just as Kinbote's commentary appears to serve the poem while actually subordinating it to his obsessions, the weave appears to connect policy topics while actually subordinating them to the performer's grievances. Tariffs, Nobel prizes, and Arctic territories become what Shade's poem is to Kinbote—not subjects to be addressed but pretexts for self-performance. Scholars have long debated whether Kinbote knows his royal identity is invention or whether he has lost the capacity to distinguish persona from self. The question may be unanswerable, and that unanswerability is the point: at a certain depth of performance, the distinction between "deliberately pretending" and "genuinely believing" ceases to be meaningful. The mask has eaten the face, and asking what lies beneath is like asking what Kinbote would be without Zembla—a question the novel suggests may have no referent.

Lacan's observation applies here: "The madman is not only the beggar who believes he is king, but the king who believes he is king" (Lacan, 2006, p. 139). Sanity, in Lacan's framework, requires maintaining a gap between oneself and one's symbolic position—the functional king knows that "king" is a role he occupies, a mask he wears, not an essence he possesses. Kaufman maintained this gap; he knew Andy was not Clifton. Trump has collapsed it. The danger is not that he falsely believes himself to be president; it is that he believes "Trump"—the brand, the persona, the performance—is what he actually is. There is no gap left to maintain. The beggar who believes he is king can, in principle, be disabused; the king who believes he is king—who has fused entirely with his symbolic function—cannot be separated from his delusion without annihilating him.

The Internalization of the "Heel"

In professional wrestling (Kayfabe), a "Heel" who starts to believe their own hype is a liability. Trump's performance relies on the premise that he is "the greatest negotiator, and the world owes me a prize." When the Norwegian Prime Minister doesn't give him the prize, he doesn't see it as a failure of the performance; he sees it as a betrayal of his true self. The tariffs and the Greenland threats aren't "tactics" anymore; they are emotional outbursts from a persona that has no other way to interact with the world.

Kaufman's power was that he knew where the audience ended and he began. If the analysis is correct, Trump has lost that boundary. His performance is now reactive rather than intentional: Because his base responds most to the Clifton persona (the insults, the "winning," the bravado), he is forced to be Clifton to get the "applause." Eventually, if you only ever receive love while wearing a specific mask, you start to believe you are the mask. This is why he "undermines" his staff; the Clifton persona cannot share the stage. Tony Clifton didn't want a "Board of Peace"; he wanted the spotlight.

This adds a new layer to why staff comes off as liars, fools, or criminals. They are trying to work for a Politician (the bit Trump used to do). They are actually working for Tony Clifton (the person Trump has become). They are providing "policy papers" to a man who is currently living in a lounge-singer's melodrama. They look like liars, fools, or criminals because they are trying to find rationality in a situation that has become purely performative ego.

The Timeline

• 2015-2020: The Kaufman Phase (Testing the boundaries, "trolling" for effect).
• 2021-2024: The Method Phase (The persona becomes the only path to power).
• 2025-2026: The Clifton Phase (The persona is now the primary identity; policy is merely a prop for the ego's grievances).

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Dexterity and Evasion: Beyond the Void

A crucial correction to the postmodern reading of Kaufman: his power wasn't in being a "void"—it was in the dexterity at eluding capture. He didn't want the audience to think he was "nothing"; he wanted them to be desperate to find the "real him," only to have him slip away at the last millisecond. Understanding this distinction illuminates both the power and the failure of political performance.

The audience needs to believe there is a core. Kaufman's genius was providing "proofs" that were actually decoys. He would "break character" to apologize, then reveal the apology was also a bit. Trump employs a similar strategy through "The Weave." When Trump sends an outrageous text to Norway about the Nobel Prize, the "dexterity" lies in the fact that he stays just within the realm of possibility. His followers and the media are stunned because they keep waiting for him to hit a boundary of "seriousness" that he simply dodges. He avoids the "proof" of being a standard politician by never letting the mask settle.

If the power comes from the audience's belief that a void is impossible, then the audience is actually doing the work of creating the "meaning." With Kaufman, the audience at Carnegie Hall wanted to believe he was a nice guy, so they felt relief when he took them for milk and cookies—only for him to keep the "bit" going until his death (and beyond). With Trump, his base wants to believe there is a master plan behind the 25% tariffs in the Greenland scenario. Their belief fills the void. His dexterity is in providing just enough "Clifton" (the aggression) and "Foreign Man" (the victimhood of being snubbed for a prize) to keep them engaged in the search for a deeper strategy that may not exist.

Here is where dexterity becomes prison. Kaufman was a master of the exit—he could dodge proof of his "self" because he always knew exactly where that self was hiding. He kept the key. Trump has lost his. He has dodged the "proof" of his older, pre-Clifton self for so long that he can no longer find the door. He isn't evading anymore. He has erased the evidence of anything to evade from.

This is the cruelest irony of the performance: the staff members believe there must be a "Real Trump" somewhere—a rational actor who will appear behind closed doors and give them actual orders on Greenland. They keep waiting for the mask to drop. They search for the void, the truth, the strategy. They find only more Clifton. More grievance. More performance. They are the audience members who stayed after the lights went down, certain the performer would emerge from the wings to explain that it was all a joke. Instead, the theater is empty. The performer never left the stage because the performer no longer exists apart from it.

Kaufman's power was active evasion—the thrill of the chase, the tantalizing almost-reveal. Trump's tragedy is that he won the game too completely. He evaded so successfully, for so long, that he evaded himself. The mask ate the face. Tony Clifton consumed Andy Kaufman, and there is no Bob Zmuda waiting in the wings to prove it was all a bit.

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Conclusion

This article has argued that the structural parallels between Andy Kaufman's performance art and Donald Trump's political rhetoric reveal a fundamental transformation in American political discourse: the collapse of the distinction between performance and governance. Through the lens of performance studies scholarship, particularly the work of Florian Keller and Philip Auslander, we have seen how both figures operate within "kayfabe"—staged performance presented as reality—and how both create an "ironic shield" that protects the primary performer but cannot be delegated to subordinates.

However, a critical divergence emerges: where Kaufman's power derived from the dexterity of evading presence, Trump's derives from hyper-presence. Kaufman could walk away from Tony Clifton; Trump cannot walk away from "Trump." This makes the performance far more dangerous than anything Kaufman ever staged.

The "underling problem" demonstrates the institutional consequences of this shift. When functionaries attempt to translate performance into policy, they are trapped in a "Straight Man" dilemma: they lack the performer's license and are held to the standard of civil servants rather than entertainers. This produces a systematic failure of institutional governance, where staff members look like liars, fools, or criminals because they are trying to find rationality in a situation that has become purely performative ego.

The transformation from intentional performance to internalized identity—from "doing Clifton" to "being Clifton"—represents the most dangerous aspect of this dynamic. When the boundary between performer and performance collapses, policy becomes a prop for performative ego, and the feedback loop between audience response and performative identity creates a situation where there is no "off" switch for provocation.

The comparison to Kaufman's Tony Clifton persona is particularly illuminating because it reveals what happens when performance loses its relief valve. Without the "Foreign Man" to provide contrast, without the ability to exit the character, the performance becomes a hostile environment rather than an art experiment. In geopolitics, unlike on the Taxi set, there is no security guard to escort the performer off the stage.

This analysis suggests that the evolution of political discourse into performance art has created a fundamental crisis in democratic governance. When the ironic shield works only for the primary performer, when functionaries cannot translate performance into policy, and when the boundary between performer and performance collapses, the "bit" has become reality, with all the physical and economic consequences that entails.

How does democratic governance function under these conditions? The answer, this article suggests, is that it doesn't—at least not in any recognizable form. The difficult guest star refuses to follow the script, and there is no one with the authority to throw him out.

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Appendix: A Note on Authorship, or Another Mask

In the interest of scholarly transparency, a disclosure: this article was produced through collaboration between a human author and a large language model (LLM). The human provided direction, editorial judgment, and the initial conceptual framework; the AI contributed drafting, synthesis of sources, and stylistic execution. This arrangement reflects an increasingly common mode of academic and creative production in the mid-2020s, and it seems appropriate—perhaps obligatory—to acknowledge it directly.

But notice what has just happened. This disclosure performs the role of the "Foreign Man"—the vulnerable, honest persona that invites the reader's trust. By acknowledging the AI's involvement, the text positions itself as transparent, as willing to show you what's behind the curtain. The disclosure functions as a kind of interpretive license: now that we've been honest with you, you can trust the analysis that preceded it. The mask has dropped. Or has it?

Consider: is this appendix the moment when the "real" author appears, or is it another character? The disclosure of AI involvement could itself be an ironic shield—a preemptive defense against accusations of inauthenticity that paradoxically reinforces the text's authority. After all, who is more trustworthy than the performer who admits to performing? The confession becomes its own form of kayfabe.

The reader now occupies a familiar position: searching for the "real" author behind the collaborative mask. Who actually wrote this? Was the human the author and the AI the tool, or was the AI the author and the human the editor? Is the "voice" of this essay human, artificial, or some third thing that emerged from the collaboration—a Tony Clifton of academic prose, belonging fully to neither party? The question assumes that "authorship" names something stable, that there is a presence behind the text that could, in principle, be located and verified. But this essay has argued that such presence may be impossible to locate—that the search for the "real" Trump behind the performance is the wrong question, and that the mask may have eaten the face.

Perhaps the same applies here. Perhaps the question "who wrote this?" is as misguided as the staffer's search for the "Real Trump" behind closed doors. Perhaps there is no back stage, only an infinite regress of front stages. Perhaps this appendix—with its apparent vulnerability, its confession of collaborative production—is itself performing authenticity in precisely the way the essay has analyzed.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is genuine scholarly disclosure, and the preceding paragraph is simply the kind of recursive cleverness that academic writing about performance cannot resist. The reader must decide, but the reader should know: whatever you decide, your interpretation completes the circuit. If you read this as sincere, the essay has earned your trust through transparency. If you read this as performance, the essay has demonstrated its thesis on your readerly body. Either way, the text wins. Either way, you are now the audience member wondering whether to applaud or walk out.

One final observation. Kaufman had Bob Zmuda to prove, when necessary, that Tony Clifton was a character. He kept the key. This essay offers no such proof. The human author could appear to verify the collaboration, but that appearance would itself be a performance—another mask that may or may not correspond to a face beneath it. The AI could disclaim authorship, but AIs have no legal standing to make such claims, and besides, who would believe a performer who says "I'm not performing"?

The theater may be empty. The performer may never have left the stage. The question is whether that matters—whether the analysis stands regardless of who or what produced it, or whether authorship is precisely the kind of presence that cannot be evaded.

This appendix will not answer that question. To answer it would be to drop a mask that may not exist. Instead, it ends here, with the reader in the same position as everyone else who has tried to find the real Andy behind the characters: certain that someone must be there, uncertain whether certainty is the point.