With the Happiness

Donald Trump looks on as Bill Bryan introduces his graphic. Photo by Alex Brando/AP via ABC News.

It's pretty clear at this point—it's probably been clearer to most of you than it has to me—that the simplest explanation of Trump's Light-Inside-the-Body disaster was the correct one: he has no idea what's going to happen at any of the Covid briefings, since he hasn't paid any attention to the preparation or read any briefings, and was taken by surprise by a graphic showing the findings of a DHS study according to which the novel coronavirus on surfaces or in aerosol droplets has a shorter half-life in high heat or humidity.

Marcy (whose good work on this I'm just shamelessly scavenging) notes:

The NYT discovered that some of Trump’s advisors claim (anonymously in the NYT version, but named as Mark Meadows and Kayleigh McEnany by CNN) to have realized that allowing acting DHS Undersecretary for Science... William Bryan was going to be a mistake even before it happened. But Mike Pence liked the pretty pictures and good news he offered, so it went into the briefing.

Of course we understand what is meant by "good news": not good news about our ability to deal with the virus, but good news about Trump, evidence that one of his most embarrassingly stupid comments of this whole season, from last February

“And by the way, the virus. … It looks like by April, you know in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away — I hope that’s true,” Trump said at a campaign rally in New Hampshire Feb. 10.

might not be so stupid. Also of course, it really is that stupid (the virus has thrived in Singapore, where it's sunny and humid as August in New York all year round), which may have been what Meadows and McEnany were worried about.

But they should have worried about how Trump would take it: as The Times put it,

As he listened to Mr. Bryan, the president became increasingly excited, and also felt the need to demonstrate his own understanding of science, according to three of the advisers. So Mr. Trump went ahead with his theories about the chemicals.

And since his own understanding of science is approximately nil, disaster ensued.

So I'm not giving up on the amphetamine hypothesis as a part of the story, but I think the fact that there's a somewhat sketchy Colorado company that seems to have been inspired by the Covid crisis to think of retooling its project of shoving ultraviolet up your ass into one for shoving it down a tracheostomy tube is just a coincidence (which the Trumpy legions leapt on in the hope of showing that their god-emperor is really a scientific genius).

The other valuable thing Marcy brings out is the way these briefings have been not merely reality TV, but reality TV produced just the way The Apprentice was, with Trump himself serving less as a leader than as a liability, mercurial, unable to read, and breeding chaos, but providing bits of the "reality" on which the genre lives, as described by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker:

He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.”

[snip]

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.

Obviously you and I have understood from the beginning that he runs his presidency—or interferes with the people who actually try to run it—in exactly the same way, refusing to do any homework but successfully forcing his will on the staff through the impulses he vents on Twitter (watching Fox News) or at on-camera sessions like these briefings (watching the assembled experts), making them constantly restructure everything they do in order to make it seem as if he's in charge. Now, thanks to this crazy Thursday briefing to end all briefings (it may have done that, but I'm betting it's only in the very short term; he needs this kind of outlet more and more), we're getting some really cogent confirmation.

We've talked a lot about Hitler, but I'm more and more struck recently by the analogy between Trump and Mao Zedong, who had a furious hostility to the government he theoretically led and did everything he could to undermine it, in particular the competent professionals within it, sometimes rising to the level of open war, in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966. Trump, too, is always fighting government, denouncing it as if he weren't even a part of it, or on the contrary roughly dominating it, like the gunman in the old westerns who shoots at people's feet to make them "dance".

Both Hitler and Mao, come to think of it, were performing arts producers at heart, each marked for life by some overwhelming experience of musical drama.

For Hitler it was the Wagner operas (which I love too, as you know) that he frequented as an art student in Vienna, and later the films of Fritz Lang (Lang was Jewish on his mother's side, and his Nazi-mocking 1933 Testament des Doktor Mabuse was banned when the Nazis took power, but Goebbels offered to make him head of the UFA studio anyway—Lang fled Germany instead). For Mao it was his meeting with the Shanghai actress Jiang Qing after she wound up in the Communist redoubt in Yan'an in 1938 (she was just 24 but had already had three husbands); she was cast in the lead of an amateur production of the modern-dress jingju (Beijing opera) On Songhua River, the first woman ever to perform in jingju drama, and Mao, then 49 and also on his third marriage, watched every performance and married her two months later. Hitler conducted World War II like a film director, watching newsreels like rushes at night before they went to the theaters; at around the same time, in 1942, Mao delivered the famous Yan'an lectures at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts where Jiang taught, beginning to formulate the concept of drama for propaganda that found its final expression in the eight yangbanxi (model dramas) of the Cultural Revolution.

CBS News was able to come up with six movies of which Donald Trump has spoken (excluding those he claims to like because he appeared in them): Gone With the Wind ("It has stood the test of time,” he supposedly told Movieline. "For me, it’s a love story combined with a time in our country's history that was pivotal in our evolution"), Citizen Kane ("I think you learn in 'Kane' that maybe wealth isn’t everything, because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness," he told Errol Morris), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ("The characters are well-developed and sometimes remind me of some of the types I’ve had to deal with over the years in business," he said to Movieline), The Godfather ("classic"), Bloodsport ("an incredible, fantastic movie"), and Goodfellas ("great entertainment" with a "stellar cast"). Of these, the only ones with comments that sound like something he could have said are Kane ("the wealth" and "the happiness" like "I'll have the soup and the fish") and Bloodsport, and I have the oddest feeling that Kane really means something to him and he isn't kidding when he says it's his favorite—it's older than he is, from 1941, but he might have started watching it as a kid, as a Million Dollar Movie on WOR TV, which owned the RKO catalogue (I'm pretty sure I did, though I lived a long way upstate). Maybe it's his rosebud.

For one thing because he identifies with Orson Welles

“I loved Orson Welles,” Trump told Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien. “He was totally fucked up. He was a total mess. But think of his wives. Think of his hits. He was like this great genius that after 26, never did it. He became totally impossible. He thought everybody was a moron, everybody was this, everybody was that; if he had a budget he’d exceed it by 20 times and destroy everything. He became impossible. I loved that.”

But with Kane, perhaps, even more. And he did say it. Here's the Errol Morris film (very short), first shown at the CineVegas Film Festival 6 March 2008, via Mother Jones:

“If you could give Charles Foster Kane advice, what would you say to him?”

Trump doesn’t have to think about it. “Get yourself a different woman,” he says.

Donsld Trump thinks he's Charles Foster Kane, Man of Media and Welles, being impossible, from his own TV debut in 2004 to the White House. Only, at least aspirationally, with the happiness.