We have lived to see politics turn into infotainment and Fox News become the mouthpiece for the White House and vice versa. Every day is a new spin on the hamster wheel of Truth Social posts and news conferences where Donald Trump performs for the cameras — except the performance is getting less and less structured and coherent all the time. We don’t have a leader in the White House, we have a performer.
“It’s really more helpful to think of him in terms of being an actor than in terms of being a politician,” author Michael Wolff explained to the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles. “In his courtship of the audience, in his own egomania, in his desire for attention.”
Referring to the first interview he conducted with Trump in 2016 for what would eventually become Fire & Fury, Wolff recalled asking the then-presidential candidate why he was running for office.
“He said, without missing a beat, and as though this was a perfectly normal goal, ‘To become the most famous man in the world,’” Wolff said.
Once Trump entered the White House, Wolff explained, “he didn’t read, he didn’t listen, but you could talk to him through the television.”
Fox News capitalized on that most effectively, Wolff continued, meaning that suddenly, “everybody had to have a relationship with the people at Fox News.”
“The people at Fox News would then echo what the White House wanted them to say so that Trump would hear this and, and he would he would listen and appreciate and understand, because it was on television,” Wolff said.
This is the crazy loop. Television was an amazing medium when it came out because it could take you to warzones or Broadway plays or anyplace in the world. You Are There, was a documentary series in the 1950’s. Now television doesn’t reflect reality, it creates reality. That’s our problem. That’s why we are where we are today with Trump in the White House. Again.
Wolff added that Roger Ailes, the Fox News founder who was a close friend of Trump, once described Trump as “that kid whose parents never pulled him away from the television.”
“So he grew up just glued to the television at all times, not doing anything else, not paying attention to his schoolwork, not doing his homework, not really having friends, just glued to the television,” Wolff noted.
Citing the New York trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Wolff explained that the president’s entire frame of reference for how he wanted his legal team to defend him was television.
Trump is the ultimate television dummy and he’s talking to television dummies in this nation. And look at how many of them there are. That is the horror we deal with. People aren’t taking politics seriously, they want their bread and circus and that’s what Trump promises them. And they believe him, fools that they are.
Too bad this is the tv show we can’t turn off. I tune away from it as much as possible, but it’s still there in the background.
It means that we can use TV against him, too. We’ve seen how angry he gets at late-show comedians who poke fun at him. He watches even channels which criticise him, much as he hates it, because he can’t help himself; it’s the only gateway into any form of reality for him. The network formerly known as MSNBC does a terrific job of criticism, thanks to its roster of excellent journalists, but both ABC and CBS have capitulated, and have thereby blunted one serious popular weapon against Trump.
You know who sees themself as a TV god. A god that in reality is living in a fiction, based on a self-authored TV script of sorts. A god that is both a paid channel flop and a free-to-air gaff. A god that projects, grifts, and grafts, wrapped in a thin-skinned attention seeking persona – one that’s never understood just how pathological and demonic they are. You know who, is no god, but evil personified. They’re trapped within their own version of a self-scripted TV reality shite-show – based on a never ending and repetitive loop of evil and self-indulgent madness – with no means of escape.As the scripts author and maintainer ages, they rerun and get worse. They openly exhibit how much they’ve pathologically declining, in their dementing years – with no insightful self-awareness, or any means of self-review, self-control, or self-censorship. You see, it’s always all about their ‘me and my laughable and most offensive TV shite-show, I’ll have you all believe’.
Right in the middle of reading this article I suddenly realized the reality show we’re trapped in with no escape is Being There (the one about the TV-raised idiot all the normal people think is profound) meets The Truman Show meets WWE as the sadistic horror comedy that never ends…