Hyperreality 2024: Assassination

I've had the hardest time thinking of a way to cope with the abnormal events of the past month in American politics, not just because of the way they've thrown themselves at us one after another, without giving us a chance to reflect on one before we're fully occupied with another one. My machine is full of false starts abandoned when I thought I had to move on to something different, right away. I also find myself assaulted with a bunch of philosophical, often postmodern thoughts about what's going on. Looking at one of those drafts, I'm thinking, instead of trying to "cover" the situation, maybe I should be trying to look at one thing at a time, before I start trying to pull it together.

 

AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar.

One of the strangest things about the attempt on the life of Donald Trump that started off Crazy Week on July 13, I guess it was, was how weirdly hard it seemed to take it seriously.  I mean, technically it was extremely serious, if you accept the story we've been given, as I have no good reason not to do. It was (apparently) a round from an AR-15, of a kind that instantly killed Corey Comperatore, sitting a couple of rows behind Trump, when a different round hit him in the head during the attack, and if Trump's bullet had hit him less than half an inch further to the left than it did, or (perhaps) if he hadn't woggled his head in that parrot-like side-to-side way he has, at just the right moment, it would have more or less blown his head off. That's pretty serious!  

But I watched that video, or side-eyed it, so many times, as all the TV stations turned into CNN imitators and tried to keep the story going, the way they do with a school shooting or earthquake porn, as the Secret Service agents lift him (it's pretty heavy) from the stage, with the blood dripping from his right ear, photobombing his way from among the agents trying to protect him, and makes that upraised fist with a furiously angry face, mouthing the words, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" (I read his lips as "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"). Trump didn't look scared, he looked really angry, And I'd seen video of Trump experiencing physical fear, that time he was threatened by an annoyed eagle, so I had an idea what it would look like,

Red pills make you larger, and blue pills think you're small

 

Set design by Cabot McMullen, via Forbes.

In the past two weeks, the people familiar with the matter note, Trump has casually slipped into conversation lines such as, “How would you like to see The Apprentice come back?” and “Remember The Apprentice?” (Lachlan Cartwright and Asawin Suebsaeng, extracted from behind the Daily Beast paywall by Aldous J Pennyfarthing/Kos)

December 18, 2020

Dear Mark,

As you may have heard, I have been "fired" recently, that is to say moving operations underground, like Mr. Bannon and Mr. Parscale. I will be taking the opportunity to devote more time to keeping our friend and my client calm by preparing for the MAGA Apprentice project, for which you have expressed your interest in working as producer, and I'm writing you now by way of organizing my thoughts, for your consideration:

Celebrity White House

One of the ideas kicked around by Burnett and the president was shooting a new version of the Trump-branded Apprentice, tentatively titled The Apprentice: White House, and to produce it shortly after the president leaves office. This time, however, the TV program would be explicitly politics-themed and take full advantage of Trump’s status as a former president of the United States and a newfound Republican kingmaker.

“There have been several discussions between Burnett and Trump about The Apprentice: White House,” a person with knowledge of the situation told The Daily Beast. “It is something Burnett thinks could be a money-spinner and Trump is very keen on doing.” 

—Asawin Subsaeng and Lachlan Cartwright/Daily Beast

11/5/19

Mark,

Can't begin to tell you how psyched the network is about The Apprentice: White House. There are a bunch of obstacles that need to be worked through before you get the green light but if you guys can make your end happen and I'm sure you can this is looking to be the greatest reality show of all time and I'm not even kidding. You and I are going to be richer than Mr. Trump by the time this thing is over. I mean we already are richer than Mr. Trump but richer than Mr. Trump thinks he is.

Points that instantly come to mind are:

Thread: Donald's Vacation

Screen capture from the original Dutch Big Brother, 2001.

The "long planned fix up of WH" is the same excuse you used last year. https://t.co/gcXRmBzDE2 You're on vacation. Don't lie about it.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 11, 2019

"By accident" lol.

Donald's vacation has him more glued to the TV than ever, watching things for which 8 hours a day aren't enough time. Interesting how much nostalgia he shows for his own days as a TV star. He felt truly powerful in those days, dominating the camera. Now he's an impotent buffoon. https://t.co/AsRoR7qRW3

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 12, 2019

The scary thing is he really could be powerful now, except he can't learn where the levers of power are or how to work them, other than that sometimes one of his tweets lands in the right place and something happens. All his accomplishments are mostly accidents.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 12, 2019

So he's most comfortable in bed, watching the well-edited TV version of the administration on Fox telling him that he's really doing stuff, and surfing to look at his real or perceived enemies taking him seriously. On TV, he's literally the president.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 12, 2019

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Literary Corner: Area Man Bites Reality

Willem De Kooning, Inerchange, 1955, via Wikipedia.

In the press availability with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Thursday morning, our poet branched into a strange and dark new territory in which reality really begins to dissolve:

Songs of Zero Tolerance

by Donald J. Trump

I. Are Your Immigration Policies Cruel?

No, I don’t think they’re cruel,
I think they’re the opposite of cruel.
They become cruel because they’re so
ridiculous and it hurts people. It actually

does the reverse of what they’re supposed
to be doing. But no, they’re actually meant
to be the opposite. And they’re hurting people,
they’re really hurting people. A lot of people.

Hyperreality TV

Undertale: Jungle Cruisin' by Joyous Lemons/DeviantArt.

Hi, it's Stupid to say I'm going to be disappointed if Omarosa ends up being what drags Trump down in the end.

I mean, it's true that the writers who thought up this plot twist are trivializing the issues we're watching the show for, the apparent collapse of the Constitution in the face of flagrant illegality in the White House, the pervasive corruption throughout the executive, the treacherous dealing with foreign governments, in favor of what? The backstabbing intriguer motif, the person everybody always votes off the island, who might get brought back on to revive interest as an underwritten storyline starts to sputter and flag, but in this case the storyline wasn't flagging at all, if anything there was far too much going on already without her. Isn't there too much Sopranos-style personal stuff as it is, with the mental illness theme, and the endangered marital and family relationships, and Trump's fraught backstory with his retainers like Cohen and Manafort and Lewandowski and Scavino and the rest, and the bizarre intimacy and crudeness of his connections with his fellow sovereigns Trudeau and Merkel and Macron and Putin and Abe and Kim and Xi and Erdoğan and MBS and Sheikh Tamim, as detached from all the millions of people it affects as if it were taking place in a treehouse?

Cillizza's New Fashion Sense

Drawing by Red Cheeks Factory.

Re Chris Cillizza's essay, "Donald Trump is producing the greatest reality show ever", and the outraged response from Soledad O'Brien, formerly of CNN:

This terrible analysis by @CillizzaCNN is in part why people hate the media. https://t.co/xxRcAspyC1

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) March 7, 2018

It's not accurate. It's not funny. It's not clever. It's not analysis. It's facile. It shows an actual lack of understanding of reality tv (can't believe I'm typing that). It's mediocre. It's a time when viewers need to understand what's going on at the highest levels of govt.

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) March 7, 2018

I'm kind of baffled by the audience members talking about how O'Brien has "destroyed" or "totally owned" Cillizza in this argument—unless she's speaking in defense of the reality show industry, seriously maligned by a comparison to an operation as ill-scripted, aesthetically disastrous, and unprofitable as the Trump White House seems to be.

Personally I think this is the best writing I've ever seen from Cillizza, with that signature breathlessness, but really well observed and tight:

Apprentice update

I think Trump should carry on hosting Miss Universe as well. He could marry the winner, as one of the prizes! Ivan the Terrible choosing a bride, by Konstantin Makovsky, 1886.

OK, that Variety article may have sounded to an outsider as if it meant more than it actually did. In particular, it's likely that the "work" as executive producer on the eighth season of Celebrity Apprentice for which Donald J. Trump is being paid however much it is will not be exactly work by the standard applied to you and me, and he may well have finished doing it more than a year ago, for all we can know. It's certainly not as if he will be ducking out of national security briefings to be in Silicon Beach for any filming, though I don't want to suggest that's impossible either.

There's no doubt, for one thing, that he must have played some significant role in the conceptual development for the original Apprentice beginning 2004, where Trump was credited as a "co-producer" in addition to being "host" (Mark Burnett is the "creator"). What exactly that means—whether he micromanaged the project from start to finish or merely sent the production team an annoyed note on a Post-It from time to time—we can't say. But really, that's just Hollywood. Like Hillary's $225,000 speeches or the ones for which Donald J. Trump charged a cool million or million and a half, which somehow didn't get discussed so much during the campaign.

Trump's missed opportunity

Image via Bored Panda.

Who wouldn't want to see this movie?

The Republicans haven't got a single candidate who could survive a Willie Wonka factory tour.

— David Waldman (@KagroX) January 15, 2016

On a (just barely) more practical level, I think Donald Trump seriously blew the 2016 campaign with the role he chose, of being a candidate, a participant. You know the adage about Washington being Hollywood for ugly people? Why would he lower himself to that? I mean, going on WWE was bad enough, but it was a fairly short-term thing and he was able to control the storyline to make himself look good in the end, and the whole thing was a hoot anyway. Whereas here he is in a situation where somebody like Ted Cruz, representing everything that is slimy, ugly, and classless about Washington DC, can make Donald Trump a loser.

What he ought to have done, the real Trumpery thing to have done, was run the campaign, from above, hors concours: he should have made it, or the debate sector of it, into a special season of The Apprentice.

You see what I mean? Starting with a stable of 20-odd candidates, he'd shlep them around to a different problem location each week, Wall Street, the North Dakota oil fields, the California drought emergency, Netanyahu's office, Sheldon Adelson's office, Baghdad, and each week he'd fire one of them. "Rick, you handled this situation horribly, your understanding was very weak, frankly I think you're past your prime. You're fired."

Reinforcing the idea that of course he's qualified to be president himself, he just can't be bothered. And he'd have kept the Miss Universe contract.

Hyperrisible

I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]