An older article by Andrew O'Hehir on framing the Trump Presidency in Baudrillard's 2001 vison of suicidal world order at war with itself:
"Like the 9/11 attacks, Trump has provoked “prodigious jubilation” in some quarters, along with an unwholesome, libidinal fascination among both the media and the worldwide public."
" ... a new phase of what Baudrillard identified in 2002 as a global conflict within the Western world, reflecting a deep crisis in its dominant political and economic order. To put this in the most provocative terms possible, has Donald Trump succeeded Osama bin Laden as the central figure of World War IV?"
"There are premonitions of a certain reality-show celebrity turned politician who subverted an entire campaign cycle here as well, in the observation that the terrorists exploited the media economy and its “instantaneous worldwide transmission” of spectacle, but that none of us could resist its power: “There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.” "
" Were the shocking attacks of September 2001 and the shocking election result of November 2016 — 9/11 and 11/9, the palindrome that defines our age — fluke occurrences amid the general upward trajectory of Western civilization? Or do they represent, as Baudrillard argued in the first instance, Western civilization’s innate yearning toward its own destruction? "
That is the world we live in now: the world of World War IV. The scale of the self-inflicted defeat in that first battle — which was more like an abject surrender — was greater than Baudrillard or anyone else could have imagined in 2002. It paved the way for many other defeats, large and small, including the spectacular and improbable rise of a clownish would-be dictator who barely pretends to care about the supposedly sacred traditions of democracy and who embodies the grossest possible caricature of the “ideology of freedom.” "
https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-911-to-president-donald-trump-a-short-history-of-world-war-iv/Baudrillard's essay can befound, among other places, at:
http://insomnia.ac/essays/the_spirit_of_terrorism/It is very much worth reading, perhaps more so than O'Hehir.
sidd