Star of the show
The danger of getting hooked on the Trump Show is that we forget or cease to care that we’re watching the degradation of democracy.
The danger of getting hooked on the Trump Show is that we forget we’re watching the degradation of democracy. by Paul Thomas
For some of us, the Trump Show is a guilty pleasure. Every morning, we rush to our news source of choice, aflutter with anticipation: what has he done now? What new depths of absurdity, recklessness or vileness has he plumbed? Will it prompt outrage, hilarity or chin-on-chest stupefaction? We got a nasty shock the morning after his speech to Congress. The archvillain had turned over a new leaf and the critics were swooning: Trump had been controlled and optimistic as opposed to unhinged and dystopian; he’d reached across the aisle; he’d been – groan – “presidential”. It was like tuning in to the premiere of the next season
It defies belief that these claims aren’t undermining public trust in America’s political institutions and the democratic process.
of Game of Thrones to find Cersei Lannister had renounced her evil ways and turned into the Mother Teresa of Westeros.
In fact, far from being the bravura performance of the media’s imagination, the speech was mostly blue sky and bromides. Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s expression as Trump intoned “the time for trivial fights is behind us” said it all: Ryan didn’t even try to keep a straight face. And there were the usual barefaced lies, including the thoroughly debunked claim that 94 million Americans are out of work.
Suspicions that it was nothing more than a feint were quickly confirmed. Holed up in Mar-a-Lago like Charles Foster Kane in Xanadu, two unscrupulously power-hungry tycoons in their fairytale Florida lairs, Trump let fly with an early morning tweet accusing his predecessor, “bad (or sick) guy” Barack Obama, of wiretapping his New York headquarters during the election campaign. The worldwide outbreak of heavy breathing was both a collective gasp of disbelief and Trump Show devotees heaving sighs of relief: the character we love to hate was back; the show would go on.
The danger of getting hooked on the Trump Show is that we forget or cease to care that we’re watching the degradation of democracy. And if the paradigm emerging in the US comes to be viewed as the new normal, it will be duplicated elsewhere.
The speech and the reaction to it illuminate both the process and the problem. It’s one thing for a candidate to tell the rubes in Nowheresville, North Dakota, that 94 million of their fellow citizens can’t find work, but quite another for the President to insert it into his annual address to the legislature, where elected representatives know full well that most of those 94 million aren’t in the job market because they’re retired, at high school or university, running households and raising families, or sick/ disabled.
But the showman knows his audience. The Democrats will squawk, but they haven’t got the numbers to do much about it, and the Republicans – with a few honourable exceptions – are complicit. The big-business wing used to believe in free trade; the Tea Partiers used to believe in fiscal integrity; the fundamentalist Christians used to believe in personal morality. Then along came Trump saying none of that stuff mattered, and they rolled over.
As did much of the punditry: Trump’s Rasputin, Steve Bannon, may have labelled the media the “opposition party”, but the giddy response to a speech that would have been deemed unremarkable if not underwhelming if delivered by a career politician suggests that status is, in some cases, undeserved.
REIN IN THE BRAZENNESS
The brazenness and cynicism are breathtaking. Flourishing the latest monthly federal jobs report – the last 70-odd issues of which, all positive, Trump dismissed as fake – White House press spokesman Sean Spicer smirkingly declared that “they may have been phoney in the past, but it’s very real now”. Why should Trump rein in the brazenness? During the campaign, he boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Ave and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Allowing for hyperbole, he was right: there he was on tape boasting of being a compulsive, unapologetic sexual assailant, yet the condemnation that rained down on him was like water off a duck’s back.
His defenders say “the people” admire Trump’s refusal to kowtow to political correctness and don’t care about this stuff, as if that’s a good thing. The people should care. They should be repelled by gross and criminal behaviour on the part of their leaders. The fact that some aren’t should be a warning light for what purports to be a civilised society. We’re also told Trump is shaking up the stuffy, complacent political Establishment. To what end? Thus far the trashing of conventions and proprieties seems to be driven purely by ego and self-indulgence and serves no other purpose than to lay the groundwork for the coming wave of Trump imitators.
Trump launched himself into politics via Birtherism, the spurious campaign to delegitimise Obama. Since becoming President, he has floated more conspiracy theories – that there was voter fraud on a huge scale in last November’s election and that Obama is co-ordinating bureaucratic resistance to and sabotage of the new administration – and the specific charge of wiretapping. It defies belief that these claims – for which he hasn’t provided a shred of evidence – aren’t undermining public trust in America’s political institutions and the democratic process. That’s sinister enough, but the conspiracism is part of a wider assault on reality, on facts and on objective truth. Once truth is beaten into submission, the brashest conman with the most Twitter followers gets to impose his narrative.
To get hooked on the Trump Show is to play into his hands. After 14 years at the helm of a reality TV show, he understands how the media works and what it delivers.
As reality TV show creator Tom Forman told Vanity Fair: “The engine that powers reality television is conflict and I think Trump just knows that in his DNA and reframes the conversation in those terms. The entire narrative of [reality] shows is an argument over what happened and how it’s going to be perceived. The person who can make their point of view the point of view wins and becomes the star of that show. [Trump] is doing that on the largest scale imaginable.”