Review: The Trump Reality Show, Season 2, Episode 1
Beware outrage overload! #S2E1
Will BFF Apartheid Elon last the entire season? Or does he get eliminated by the Tribal Council in Episode 2? If so, does Trump transactionally pivot to another billionaire by Ep3? Does Maggie Haberman, affectionally known around Mar-a-Lago as “maggot,” retain access to POTUS? Do Trump’s “shitcoins” create fissures in the muscular crypto-bro alliance?
Further, How will Trump, purveyor of what can only be properly construed as “bizarre-chitecture,” do at promoting a classical federal architecture? Will Melania ever express human warmth in public towards her husband, an alleged “alpha”? Will Stephen Miller ever get revenge on all immigrants ever for the indignity of the swirly he (probably) suffered in grade school, as per his supervillain origin story? These are the questions that were left hanging, treacherously, in the season closer of the Trump Reality Show, 1.0, back in 2020, before it went on an abrupt hiatus (Averted Gaze).
Even as unscripted television is sick, Trump, 2.0 is thriving. Reality shows are slashing costs, even as the Trump administration is on a hiring blitz — except, of course, for anything remotely DEI. The Trump Reality Show, Season 2, Episode 1 opened to a lot of the same chaos as the last, but with a more — how does one say this? — discipline in the arrangement of footage in creating emotionally powerful scenes. POTUS is, to paraphrase Steve Bannon, “flooding to zone” with 26 Executive Orders on Day 1— but what a compelling narrative arc, no? On the sinister, to be sure, but still …
Such a staged event defies the pseudo-gravity of unscripted television. Executive Orders evade the deliberative process altogether, making Trump look more like a strongman, while still captivating his base in the dramatic manner of his name, the same one, by the way, that appeared on stimulus checks (which were sent to 35 million Americans). As someone that has made a study of Trump for more than two decades I can say with confidence that the man loves to make a big show of his penmanship. Not his tiny, baby-like fingers, mind you, but rather a show of his his rightward constant velocity and measured horizontal sweeps!
Trump rescinded 78 of former President Biden’s executive actions, even after receiving an inappropriately nice letter from his increasingly historically irrelevant predecessor. Our participation in The Paris Accords is kaput! BIFF! The $2 price cap on certain generic drugs evaporates! POW!! Over 1500 insurrectionists were pardoned! Nutrition assistance for low-income children, apparently, is too “woke.” BAMM! The Trump Reality Show is, as always, a Rorschach test: House of Villains to its detractors, This Old House to its fellow travelers. How did we get here?
The 2024 Black Swan Election was ultimately decided in the final two weeks. Around that time (10/21/24) Harris campaign senior strategist David Plouffe told John Heilmann that the race was a dead heat. And for all intents and purposes, it was. Things moved quickly after that, however. As Chris LaCivita told Jonathan Martin of Politico of the overall strategy leading into the last 14 days:
We’re focusing on the group of persuadable voters and a group of low propensity voters. It’s two different tacks. Low propensity: Get them to vote. Persuadable: Try to get them over. The Harris campaign was convinced [persuadables were] around 4 to 6 percent. We knew it was probably closer to 10 to 12 percent. We focused the entire campaign built around the issues that matter to the persuadable voters early. Tony modeled them, and we tracked what the electorate, based on the persuadables, was thinking. And that drove all of our decision making. All of our decision making. We spent millions in mail in the summer, which we were roundly criticized for doing. All of this stuff was something that we started in June.
The $1.5 billion that the Harris campaign raised notwithstanding. By contrast, the Trump campaign ads zeroed in on Crime (about 4 weeks worth), Economics as well as tens of millions in anti-trans bigotry sprinkled throughout. Just a soupçon of loaded pronoun ads to accompany the Tomato Confit Bruschetta. Border Security and Immigration was already baked into the Trump pie with voters. "(Trump) won a higher share of women who identified as pro-choice in 2024 after ( Dobbs v Jackson) than he did in 2020 before Dobbs, okay ... let that sink in," Ron Brownstein told The Bullwark podcast. The strategy worked: the Trump Reality Show was picked up for a second season by the American electorate on those issues, largely. One wonders, however, what LaCivita, who has been publicly critical of the January 6th insurrectionists, thought about the S1E1 pardons.
So here we are — one episode in. As I have written before, Trump is the first digital media President. My argument is: “… Trump, the first Presidential candidate to own a social media platform, used his television celebrity to colonize America’s favorite addiction — the cellphone screen.” As is the case with all Reality TV programming, the reasons most people return again and again to the genre involves heightened drama, conflict and the glimpse into a world that would otherwise be unavailable to the viewer. There is also the very real and very human aspect of “hot mess,” where the Venn diagrams of Reality TV and social media overlap, lasciviously.
It is not so much that people want to drink a beer with Trump (he does not drink; although that didn’t stop him from slapping his brand on some seriously mid-vodka). It’s that the narrative arc, the character development and key moments of the Trump campaign (the pre-season sneak peak, if you will) were all edited with such a tight focus on Toughness on Crime (grr), Broder Security and the perception of a mismanaged economy, as well as the general hot-messiness of Trump. Biden’s jaw-dropping debate performance and the botched assassination attempt were the two of the hottest messes of Election 2024 — hereafter, the “pre-season” — which can only be properly construed as a reality program that has run its due course in and of itself.
Finally, the cable counterprogramming is, quite frankly, dismal on the Progressive side. Does the left need an alternative ecosystem? SNL’s cold-open lampooned some of the biggest mistakes of MSNBC made in covering Season 1 of the Trump Reality Show with a view towards How-Not-To-Do-It-Again. The forward-facing talking heads of MSNBC primetime featured in the satire were: Stephanie Ruele (Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse), Chris Hayes (Brown), Ari Melber (Cornell Law), Joy Reid (Harvard) and Rachel Maddow (Stanford, Oxford). I do not doubt the political integrity of any of these fine people — even Melber, at his most obnoxious, quoting Jay Z lyrics — but their criticisms of Trump come across as stiff valedictorians snitching on the popular jock for cheating on an exam. As detestable as is Trump’s shamelessness and lawlessness, most people as have seen would rather throw in their lot behind the athlete than the valedictorian — or, for that matter, the lawyer thrown in in the final inning with a $1.5 billion war chest. And Trump — more outer-borough Fordham than Wharton — rode the anti-elitist wave. For now the Republican party is the party for working class voters making less than 100K. While MSNBC, the Fox News of the Left, faces an uncertain future; even more so after the election of Trump.
What can we further expect for the rest of Season2? Harrowing images of brown people put into prisons awaiting deportation? Tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, which will result in a steroidal boost to America’s already surreal inequality? Higher grocery prices as a result of misbegotten, ill-considered tariffs? The social progress of African-Americans precipitously falling? A hyper-masculinized coarsening of American discourse? A diminishing of women’s health care options? Stop-and-friskiness in urban cities as the blood of brown young men shot by cops trickles down the hills?
Deep, cleansing breaths, dear readers. Things will be moving rather quickly from here on out.
“There they were at the First Felon’s inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, four years after it was ransacked in service of The Big Lie. All reeking of black Lexus SUV air freshener and the Axe Body spray their phalanx of security rubbed off on them. Mark Zuckerberg with his wife, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook. Somewhere off camera, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, maybe Marc Andreesen. Most were in better seats than the clown car of Trump cabinet nominees placed just behind them. BroLord Musk soon distinguished himself with an enthusiastic Sig Heil salute in front of Trump and an audience of untold tens of millions who tuned in to watch the indoor inaugural parade. The night before, he stuttered his way through a short speech at the pre-inauguration MAGA rally, introducing Trump. Nothing he said made much sense, and he kept looking down and behind the podium, where, it turns out, the son that one of his baby mamas, Grimes, has said she was rarely allowed to see, was jumping around after ‘just following’ his dad up on stage. Musk (anyone notice this still autocorrects to Muck?) was the last warmup act before the appearance of the dumpy oaf the stadium was waiting for, the Oz whose Second Reich the tech bros have bought and paid for.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Davos is sure to have a strange vibe this week given its clash with the inauguration. (Trump will still show up via video to take a victory lap.) There is nothing more at odds with the zeitgeist than this annual high-net-worth circus of virtue signaling at the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded by the German economist Klaus Schwab—a tumescent toad reminiscent of Ernst Blofeld, the criminal mastermind in the James Bond pantheon—who has figured out a way to monetize social mountaineering to the point that, for seven days in this unpretentious Swiss resort, even a snowball has WEF branding on it. For ten years, I cohosted a Davos Women of Impact dinner with Credit Suisse —until this swank people’s bank imploded—in the high street pavilion CS created out of a storefront furniture shop. The dinners were my revenge for having attended innumerable smug ‘fireside chats’ with Wall Street CEOs banging on about all the future women leaders they had in the ‘pipeline’ (those same women, no doubt, who were shoved into dire Davos silos like a GE ‘Power and Purpose’ snoozefest at the Hotel Seehof). One year, a young woman stuck her hand up and asked, ‘If your company has so many female leaders, why are you on the platform?’ A beautiful moment straight out of a New Yorker cartoon. The fun thing about Davos is that no one cares about the portentous official programming but the competition for top guests at the social sidebars is a lethal blood sport. Charlize Theron is doing a flyby at the Bank of America glühwein toast at the Hotel Belvédère? GET HER.” (Tina Brown)
“The way Trump sees it, ‘he didn't only defeat the Democrats in the 2024 campaign; he also vanquished the remnants of Republican opposition, the mainstream media and a justice system that he saw as a force weaponized against him,’ this new NYT piece points out. You could hear this attitude in his Q&A with the press pool yesterday. Trump tried to shut down a sharp line of questioning by NBC's Peter Alexander by citing the election results. ‘Stop interrupting,’ Trump said when Alexander pushed him about the January 6 pardons. ‘Take a look at the election. Just look at the numbers on the election. We won this election in a landslide, because the American public is tired of people like you that are just one-sided, horrible people, in terms of crime.’ Whether he's sidelining DEI employees or stigmatizing trans Americans, he and his favorite Fox hosts are going to keep citing his win while claiming journalists just don't understand it...” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)