After the spectacle that was the 2016 US presidential election, Shaheed Nick Mohammed, associate professor of communications at Penn State Altoona, started to write an article about what he saw as the “carnivalesque” in that election. As he was writing, he was also looking for a collaborator. He approached some political science faculty with an early draft but there was no interest. So, as he says, “I continued working on my own.”
At some point, though, Mohammed realized he had overlooked a potential collaborator within his office building—Robert Trumpbour, professor of communications. “I didn’t think of Bob because it [the subject matter] was so political and he doesn’t do ‘political,’” but once they joined forces, Mohammed says, “it came together surprisingly quickly. It was a tremendous experience working with my colleague for the first time in 10 years.”
“Carnivalesque” doesn’t usually bring to mind the idea of the political—it conjures images of festive gatherings, celebration, in some cases excess and debauchery before the fasting and atonement of the Lenten season. Granted, a political campaign could be considered “festive,” but the end goal is winning an election, not atoning for one’s sins. In “The Carnivalesque in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign” (Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2020), Mohammed and Trumpbour discuss the 2016 Clinton-Trump election as well as other campaigns throughout the world and their turn to the carnivalesque.
“We actually traced the historic on the carnivalesque,” Trumpbour says, listing a number of 20th– and 21st-century events such as Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton and his saxophone on Arsenio, George W. Bush replete with flight jacket and banner touting “Mission Accomplished.” But even after all that, there was a seismic shift when “Trump changed the dynamic by using reality show tactics to campaign.” Referencing a comment made by Les Moonves in February 2016 about Trump’s campaign, Trumpbour adds, “What scares me is when the CEO of CBS says at a meeting, ‘It may not be good for America but it’s damn good for CBS.’ The media models privileges what brings eyeballs to the screen.”
One might think two professors of communications would approach a subject in the same way, but that is not the case for Mohammed and Trumpbour. “We worked with a combination of methodologies—cultural analysis and empirical evidence,” Mohammed says. “While both cultural analysis and empirical investigations are important methods of investigation, it is somewhat uncommon for these approaches to be combined. In this study of the carnivalesque, we used the quantitative content analysis approach along with cultural studies to advance our understanding of the issues.”
“The cultural studies methodology employed in this research leaned heavily on James W. Carey’s ritual model. This research strategy is predicated on detailed historical analysis of how communication is maintained and transformed over time,” Trumpbour explains. “I tried to do the cultural foundation as much as possible. Nick has insight on the international aspects that I don’t based on his childhood experiences in Trinidad and Tobago. He also knew other cultures that had the carnivalesque embedded in it. We bounced off each other, which made it a stronger effort.”
When we think about the carnival, Mohammed explains, “it is a bizarre world where you can pretend, where the king is overthrown and the jester takes his place. When that bizarre world has become real, that is when we are most scared.” Trumpbour continues, “[The carnival] is supposed to be a sideshow. We’re worried about this becoming entrenched in the political leadership.” With less than two months to go until the 2020 election, the carnivalesque is definitely present. The question is whether it’s here to stay.
—Therese Boyd, ’79