Lack of self awareness is a disease in this country and it especially afflicts Republicans, or those people who are novices to politics and who believe that they should be politicians, despite no qualifications whatsoever beyond an innate hunger for power and money. Those types invariably run as Republicans.
We see the Queen of Zero Self-Awareness, Marjorie Taylor Greene, make headlines daily, and the King is Madison Cawthorn, with Herschel Walker coming up strong from behind to give him some strong competition. These are people who paint themselves into corners from which there is no extrication and they do it on a regular basis.
Jerry Springer is very familiar with the type. He ought to be. He hosted them on his TV show for 27 years. The tabloid and the sensational were big ratings fodder then and that held true when Donald Trump took the concept into presidential politics and made America the laughing stock of the world.
Here’s what Jerry Springer had to say about the unhinged and the 45th POTUS. MSN:
The one-time mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, whose self-named talk show ran for 27 years, was questioned by SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah on Friday if he thought there was a connection between “The Jerry Springer Show” and “what people let people get away with,” Trump’s behavior and, ultimately, his acceptance.
“Yes, there’s no question. The behavior of some of the people on the show is exactly Donald Trump,” Springer said. “The reason, though, there’s more respect given to the people who were on my show, is they have enough sense not to run for president.”
When “Jerry Springer” debuted in 1991, it was developed to go the route of other popular talk shows of the time, include those hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, but traveling in a more political direction with guests like Jesse Jackson and Oliver North.
Three years into it, though, Springer and the show’s new producer Richard Dominick, revamped the series to draw more viewers and it made a turn towards tabloid sensationalism. Rather than segments about homelessness or gun control, the show began to focus on more controversial topics like paternity, prostitution and adultery. It wasn’t unusual for scripted shouting matches or violence to erupt on stage. And the shift worked – in 1998, 6.7 million people turned in, beating “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in many cities.
“They’re on the show letting their emotions out, their feelings out, they don’t speak the Queen’s English, they don’t have money, they don’t live in palaces they aren’t rich and famous. But they have feelings like everybody else and when they get angry, they probably curse and they yell and sometimes fight ’cause they don’t have the skills to settle things in different ways. That’s Trump,” Springer told Obeidallah.
“But what made Trump unique-the only thing that separates him from the guests on my show-is the fact that he had this delusion of he knew how to run the world and run the country. When in fact he knows, he knows nothing about how you run a country and we paid the price for that. But yeah of course there’s similarities except for the issue of ‘Gee, I don’t think I ought to be president.'”
The GOP has created a unique space in politics these days. There are people with zero political acumen in both chambers of Congress right now, although the House seems more accursed than the Senate at present. The qualifications for office are seen as 1) Looks; 2) Glibness; 3) Flippancy; 4) A world class ability to troll.
That’s it. Nowhere in that list did you see anything about education, comprehension of issues, empathy, a desire to make the world a better place and/or to be of service to mankind. And you won’t. Politics is the new Hip High Paid Job, like television newscasting was decades ago. It, too, required looks and glibness, and flippancy in measure was considered good as well. Trolling was not an art form yet. Donald Trump raised trolling to that level when he went from the front pages of the tabloids and into public life.
Harry Reid stated that politics always “had a feral quality” about it, but that quality was hidden for the most part. John McCain was quoted as saying, “It’s not a nice business we’re in.” They both knew that politics concealed the worst angels of our nature and only just barely.
Along came Donald Trump and ripped away any pretense at decency in politics and you see his disciples and clones in Congress, dragging the national discourse through the mud daily.
Jerry Springer was right. In 2016 he said, “Hillary Clinton belongs in the White House. Donald Trump belongs on my show.”
I recall an episode of West Wing where the fictional President Bartlett was laid up for some reason in the residence for a few days. At one point the Press Secretary comes in to update him on something and he was bored & watching TV and had Jerry Sringer tuned in and of course people on the show were engaged in the classic antics that show is known for. Bartlett asks her “do these people vote?” and sadly we know the answer is yes and that they vote for Republicans. Oh, and don’t go thinking that barely literate or even illiterate people can’t read a ballot so we don’t have to worry much about them. ALL they have to be taught and to remember is the difference between a D and and R and to ONLY vote for candidates that have an R, or some fancy schmancy word that starts with the letter R in front of their name.
Credit due to Springer for owning his part of the mess. Does nothing to undo the damage but…it’s a step in the right direction.