The grotesque in power

From Ubu Roi to Trump and Milei: the “Ubu-esque” as a technology of rule

More and more, even within liberal democracies, politics is being re-coded as spectacle: a shabby circus where institutional decorum is treated as a useless accessory—or worse, as the badge of a technocratic elite “enemy of the people.” It’s a widespread drift, one that feels almost inevitable, and today its most visible champions are Donald Trump and Javier Milei. Analyzing how Trump and Milei exercise presidential power is not a matter of style or political folklore: it goes to the heart of the issue. Because in politics, the grotesque is not a slip-up; it is a technology of power.

Back to Alfred Jarry and Ubu Roi

To understand this, we need to go back to Paris in 1896, on the opening night of Ubu Roi. On stage, a bloated, childish, greedy, scatological tyrant appears: Father Ubu. His very first word is “Merdre!”—a mangled obscenity that detonates the audience. In barely an hour of theater, Alfred Jarry demolishes royal majesty, reducing it to a blood-soaked farce of grotesque intrigues, gloryless massacres, and a greed that becomes reason of state.

Who was Jarry? A young provincial writer, born in 1873, an alchemist of language, a forerunner of many twentieth-century ruptures—and yes, also an alcoholic and a proto-performance artist. In Ubu Roi, he fuses Shakespeare and comic strips, Rabelais and schoolboy farce, inventing a lexicon that deforms French, drags it down, and mangles it. Not as a gratuitous game, but to show that power, once stripped of decorum, is crude and rapacious, infantile in its drives and theatrical in its gestures. This is where the adjective “Ubu-esque” is born: something that is at once authoritarian and ridiculous, savage and grotesque, capable of violence even in its buffoonery.

Ubu embodies monstrous ambition joined to the pettiness of its object: he wants everything, immediately, at any cost. His greed is childish, blind, and without a plan. Jarry stages it through transparent symbols: the enormous belly stands for an irrational appetite that devours without transforming; the hook with which he snatches nobles and officials signals his hatred for any intermediate power that might stand between him and his urges; the “tax cudgel” elevates the right to possess and accumulate into a natural claim; the “staff of science” mimics a “scientific” superiority Ubu does not have—a parody of knowledge whose very basics escape him.

His formula is shameless: “Bad law is just as good as good law.” What matters is not what is right, but what wins. An arbitrary rule becomes a method. When Ubu seizes the throne of Poland, his first act is to confiscate the wealth of the rich, then of the “fairly rich,” then of the barely rich, and finally of those who have nothing—because every condition becomes a pretext for stripping. When magistrates resist his reform, Ubu doesn’t argue: he cuts their pay.

This predatory energy lasts only as long as there is something left to devour; then it collapses inward. Ubu’s defeat comes not only from the intervention of the Tsar, but from the desertion of the troops and the disaffection of the people: the machinery hollows out, the state crumbles. Ubu and his wife flee, leaving behind the wreckage of a country consumed by the grotesque belly of a child-tyrant.

Beneath the farce, Jarry hints at a deeper myth: the human being as an animal archetype. Strip away the garments of social respectability and a primordial hunger re-emerges—one that, once locked into institutions, becomes government. This is where Ubu Roi stops being a theatrical curiosity and becomes our grammar. When power dissolves mediation and rules, the infantile becomes politics, arbitrariness becomes public administration, and the ridiculous turns into both norm and instrument.

Jarry profanes the idea that sovereignty is naturally noble. Ubu does not rule despite his ridiculousness; he rules through it. His obscenity is part of the mechanics of domination: it intimidates, excites, and legitimizes arbitrariness. This is a theatrical sovereignty, made of rituals and shock effects, and it works because occupying the stage is already half of power.

Decades later, in his 1975 lecture The Grotesque in the Mechanisms of Power, Michel Foucault would use the term “grotesque/Ubu-esque” to name precisely this: a power that is unworthy in its qualities yet effective in its effects, because it is shielded by status—office, investiture, apparatuses, rituals.

The real question, then, is not “How is it possible that someone like this is in charge?” but “What dispositifs make his command effective?” The grotesque works when there are frames that legitimize it: Ubu’s throne, the court that laughs, the orders that are carried out.

Ubu Roi is not an avant-garde oddity; it is an anatomy of the present. Performer-leaders like Trump and Milei operate along that same ridge: crude language, hyperbole, shock gestures—paired with investiture (the Oval Office, executive orders, appointments) and media rituals that turn the gag into norm, the provocation into protocol. Like Ubu, they do not hide their voracity or their infantilized vision of the world: they flaunt it, because display creates affective resonance and disciplines audiences. Obscenity becomes a marker of authenticity, excess becomes a brand identity, and mockery and insult become social glue.

That is why speaking of the “Ubu-esque” today is not an academic affectation but a concrete analytical lens. When the ridiculous is embedded in apparatuses—parties, bureaucracies, media, courts—it produces real effects on laws, bodies, and incomes. Jarry saw it and staged it; Foucault theorized it; we see it happening when spectacle-politics turns the rally into an identity factory (slogans and enemies are forged there), translates the catchphrase into administrative protocol (decrees and restructurings), and turns the meme into a political agenda.

This is where we begin: with the Ubu-esque vocabulary as a way to read Trump and Milei—two different styles of the same grammar. To understand why the clown truly governs, not in spite of his theater, but thanks to it.

Theoretical framework: from the “Ubu-esque” to power as performance.

To understand why the ridiculous is not an obstacle but a technology of power, it’s enough to look at how Jarry builds Ubu Roi. Where we would expect reason of state, we find raw impulse. Authority springs from hunger, resentment, and revenge: a kind of infantilism that presents itself as unfiltered authenticity (“I just say what I think, the way people think it”) and turns into moral credit (“finally someone speaks plainly”), which then converts into a mandate to act: to strike, to tax, to purge. This is where the Ubu-esque begins: when whim, disguised as sincerity, hardens into rule.

But impulse alone is not enough; it needs a stage. Jarry shows this with brutal clarity: in its Ubu version, politics organizes itself as permanent theater. Catchphrases, recurring gags, ritual humiliations—the repetition creates anticipation, synchronizes the audience, and produces an emotional soundtrack that mobilizes supporters. This is not aesthetic decoration; it is a method of governing. The stage prepares the decision, makes it imaginable, and then acceptable.

Bound to this theatricality is the lowering of language. Malapropisms, vulgarity, hyperbole, and lies are not tics or slips; they are weapons. They serve to normalize arbitrariness (“if anything can be said, even more can be done”), and above all to draw a line: those who laugh and applaud are “one of us,” those who are scandalized belong to “the caste.” Low language works both as a loyalty test and as a lubricant for action: it shifts the threshold of what can be said and lowers the cost of moving to action.

The decisive step, however, comes when the farce enters the machinery. In Ubu Roi, administrative predation is the non-heroic reverse side of force. Arbitrary taxes, purges, and rewards for loyalists show how the grotesque becomes bureaucracy: the stage supplies the energy, the apparatus translates it into practice. This is where the Ubu-esque stops being a costume and becomes a structure.

It is precisely this shift—from character to structure—that Foucault theorizes. For him, grotesque power works not because the one who wields it has exceptional qualities, but because it is embedded.

In this context, status matters more than merit: investiture in a role becomes an exoskeleton for the poverty of intrinsic qualities. The best argument does not win; the winner is whoever controls the channels—microphones, documents to sign, bodies to deploy. What sustains the whole is not rational argument but ritual: rallies, tweets, memes, merchandising, press-conference-as-show are liturgies that do not seek—indeed must not seek—to prove or explain, but to inscribe and to incorporate. Familiarity produced by repetition replaces verification; participation in the rite replaces democratic deliberation.

Finally, the apparatus prevails over the individual. The leader does not rule alone: staff, party, media, and judges—strictly loyal and aligned—turn the sketch into an executive act (from slogan to draft, from draft to decree, from decree to law, from law to circular, and so on).

This is why it is crucial to map the points of transition—where the stage becomes practice—and to avoid moralism (“they’re ridiculous, they’ll collapse on their own”). The practical question is not “who are these people?” but “who provides them with stages, stamps, and cover? Which media amplify without context? Which offices package the sketch as law? Which networks of loyalty extract material advantage from the noise?” And, positively: where can friction be reintroduced between performance and decision—at the procedural nodes (transparency, reviews, timelines), the communicative nodes (formats that do not reward hyperbole, mandatory context), the professional nodes (independent standards, codes of ethics, technical assessments that impose real costs on the grotesque)?

In short, Jarry gives us the anatomy of ridiculous power; Foucault, its mechanics. Seen this way, spectacle-politics is not a veil over reality—it is the reality of certain forms of rule. And it is with this compass—impulse, stage, low language, administrative predation; status, ritual, apparatus—that we can read, without moralism and without illusions, the “performances” of Trump and Milei.

Trump: from the set to the rule

The Oval Office functions like a format—the sequel to The Apprentice, the show that made Trump. It’s not just the place where decisions are made: it’s the set that marks the day’s “episode.” Press conferences follow the grammar of reality TV: the teaser announcement (“I’m about to tell you something nobody’s ever said before”), the loyalty test (friendly journalists, cabinet members lined up for backup), the public humiliation of the enemy of the day—from Ukraine’s President Zelensky to South Africa’s Ramaphosa. Once the show is over, the real negotiation can begin: in private, away from the spotlight, which switches back on only to celebrate the president’s glory and power.

Rallies, meanwhile, are a multi-season series. The rituals repeat unchanged (the entrance, the music, the call-and-response), the cast changes—because the enemy of the moment shifts—but the plot stays the same and always peaks at the same climax: the leader as the sole guarantor of a threatened order. Insult provides the programming schedule: nicknames, hyperbole, obscenities, lies, conspiratorial hints. None of this is folklore. It is an institution. The raw energy radiating from the leader flows through channels that translate it into executive orders, appointments, and administrative directives. The stage, in other words, doesn’t cover up the action: it prepares it and plugs it in.

Three pivots structure this mechanism.First: Status = effectiveness. A private citizen’s tweet is noise; the leader’s tweet is a signal to the machine: it sets priorities, names friends and enemies, draws the line. Downstream come signatures, seals, and offices. The same sentence, backed by status, changes its specific gravity: it becomes an operational message that can unlock resources, tighten controls, steer agencies and departments. It is the institutional skeleton that turns buffoonery into operative power.Second: Media ritual = legitimation. Public speech becomes a secular sacrament. Hats, slogans, coordinated signs: repetition creates belonging, and belonging creates legitimacy. Proof is unnecessary; mutual recognition between stage and audience is enough. Liturgy replaces verification and generates a credibility field in which controversial measures feel “right” because they are “ours.” This is how the leader accumulates emotional credit that can later be spent on decisions that would otherwise meet far greater resistance.Third: Apparatus = implementation. No showperson governs alone. A whole assembly line is required: staff who draft and redraft, a captive party that covers and rubber-stamps, bureaucracies that implement, and friendly courts that consolidate. The outcome is durable decisions: appointments that extend a style into rulings and regulations, selective enforcement that makes the targets named at rallies materially real, and administrative interpretations that reshape people’s lives even without new laws. The stage generates the impulse; the apparatus serializes it.Hence the Ubu-esque chain: buffoonery → belonging → license → act. Excess signals authenticity (“he talks like us”), authenticity is mistaken for truth (“finally someone who tells it like it is”), emotional truth becomes a mandate (“he has the right to clean house”), and the mandate becomes action—appointments, orders, spending priorities, guidelines. If we stop at the first link, we see the clown; if we follow the chain, we know the government. The point, then, is not to separate stage and institution, but to recognize that in this model the stage is the form of command: it builds the audience, defines shared reality, assigns roles, and authorizes the technical steps that follow. Here, the Foucauldian lens is exact: status gives the obscene a body, ritual gives it credit, and the apparatus turns it into law.

Milei: from the stage to the decree

Milei’s concert at the Movistar Arena on October 6 was not a folkloric sideshow: it was brand and method. In a hybrid event—a rock recital for about 15,000 people combined with the launch of his latest book—Milei turned the stage into an identity factory. He entered singing Panic Show (“I’m the king of a lost world, I’m the king and I will destroy you; accomplices are all prey to my appetite”), performed covers of national rock classics with a “presidential band” made up of allies and loyalists, and wove political messages and enemy naming between the songs. The format doesn’t merely “accompany” politics: it institutes and legitimizes it in real time, in front of both the crowd and the online audience.Here too, the three keystones of the mechanism are easy to spot.First: Performance = agenda. The refrain (“cut,” “destroy,” “blow up the status quo”) is not just aesthetic: it fixes a moral frame that renders harsh measures “necessary” (mergers, suspensions, cuts). The very next day, executive acts appear as the coherent continuation of the rite celebrated onstage.Second: Provocation and reaction. Calibrated insults, mockery of institutions, economic hyperbole: the outraged response is part of the script, both as identity fuel (“if they’re scandalized, we’re hitting privileges”) and as justification for procedural acceleration (urgency, decree, delegations).Third: Affective simplification. Clean tracks—people vs. caste, producers vs. parasites—lower the cognitive cost of adherence and raise the price of dissent: anyone who objects appears to be “defending the parasites.” This is how operative consent is built for drastic measures, presented as restorative justice in the middle of a political and economic storm. The result is the Ubu-esque chain: semiotic shock → institutional shock. First, the strong signs (concert, chant, images), then the administrative acts that travel that emotional map as if along a cleared road. Caricature does not contradict government; it accelerates it, because it supplies meaning, alibis, and rhythm to the decisionist exception.

Shared mechanics and key divergences

For all their differences, Trump and Milei operate with the same basic toolkit. Media rituals, serialized rallies, call-and-response slogans (Make America Great Again, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo!), easy symbols (the MAGA cap, the chainsaw) manufacture belonging and function as a shield: inside the rite, fact-checking loses its grip, because what matters is not verification but mutual recognition between leader and base. Second: institutional faith. A blend of conviction and convenience aligns staff, party, bureaucracies, friendly media, and segments of the judiciary. This is where performance is translated into policy—through appointments, administrative interpretations, and selective enforcement. Third: affective polarization. The comic and the obscene degrade the enemy into a caricature (think of Trump’s barrage of insults against Biden). Ridicule cements the group, lowers the cost of symbolic aggression, and makes it easier to push through controversial measures under the moral banner of “reckoning.” Fourth: the attention economy. Platforms and formats reward conflict and hyperbole: the algorithm becomes a multiplier of the Ubu-esque device, guaranteeing constant visibility to whatever scandalizes or excites.On this shared base, however, contextual differences matter because they determine where friction emerges and how acceleration happens. The institutional architecture is not the same, and economic recipes also diverge: Trump’s nationalist protectionism and Milei’s libertarian shock therapy point in opposite directions, yet follow the same dramaturgy—apocalyptic diagnosis, a named enemy, a painful cure presented as proof of sincerity. Finally, there is the Ubu-esque style itself: Trump is a showrunner—formats, casting, catchphrases—and he organizes power as a serialized production; Milei is a rock-prophet—iconoclasm, pathos, mission—and he organizes power as a moral crusade. The staging changes, not the grammar: in both cases, the stage generates the mandate and the apparatus turns it into law.

Disarming Ubu Roi: friction and sobriety

Ubu hates judges because he hates friction. He knows that the only absolute limit to grotesque power is whoever can say no, slow things down, and demand accountability. When the major brakes start to fail—the courts, regulatory authorities, the media system—ritualized outrage is not enough; in fact, it feeds the very provocation–reaction circuit on which the Ubu-esque thrives. The answer is not a moral flare-up, but a dense web of everyday frictions.

On the institutional level, the goal is to raise the costs of the grotesque. That means practicing militant legality: launching test cases, promoting collective lawsuits, working on minor but repeated abuses—the ones that normalize the exception. It means imposing binding transparency: using freedom-of-information laws, building civic watchdogs, cultivating local data journalism that tracks acts, contracts, and appointments, and making them legible. It means activating micro-counterweights wherever the significant counterweight falters: professional associations, unions, universities, and chambers of commerce that set standards and impose reputational sanctions. And above all, it means building cross-cutting coalitions around a few non-negotiable values: electoral integrity, judicial independence, and administrative integrity.

On the civic-media level, the task is to break the Ubu-esque ritual. An attention diet does not mean silence; it means amplification only with context and numbers—no disposable quotas of outrage. It is not enough to denounce the clown: the theater that turns him into a sovereign must be dismantled. In parallel, we need counter-rituals: short, regular assemblies; verifiable newsletters; deliberative tools that reward evidence and merit rather than hyperbole. Here, intermediary bodies are decisive: organized professional groups that draw standard red lines and defend them with codes, signatures, and targeted strikes. Finally, algorithmic literacy matters: understanding how feeds work, using community moderation, shifting debates to formats that do not reward extremity. This is called information hygiene—and it takes courage and competence to practice it.

The ridiculous will not disappear, but its power depends on the frictions it encounters. If the big brake weakens, many small brakes must be built: lawsuits, codes, data, coalitions, and professional ethics that refuse to serve the right. In Italy, the landscape is less extreme. Still, the mechanisms are recognizable: personalization of command, media rituals that replace verification, an overstretched spoils system, the marginalization of intermediary bodies, omnibus decrees, and meme-driven communication. Here too, the response is not heroism—it is seriality. And this is precisely what Ubu-esque power fears most: the clown may reign, but it is not yet written that his reign must become our normality.

The grotesque in power