21 April 20
FOCUS: Rebecca Gordon | Strange Attractors: On Being Addicted to Trump and His Press Conferences
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.)"
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.)"
EXCERPT:
He hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice and its successor, The Celebrity Apprentice, and in all those years I probably spent seven minutes watching the show, or flipping past it as I looked for something else -- and, as far as I was concerned, that was seven minutes too many. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t watch my share of junk on TV. I did. But a blowhard New York real-estate (self-)promoter whose most memorable line was “You’re fired!” judging the business skills of a group of sycophantic contestants? I preferred Law and Order reruns any day of the decade.
And here’s the thing: now, I get to watch the “You’re fired!” show (“nasty!”) whether I want to or not. In fact, just about the only thing Donald Trump has proven good at is firing people in his administration, which has a turnover rate the likes of which is surely historically unprecedented. In fact, the Brookings Institution estimates that 85% of his “A team” has turned over in these years, sometimes many times. After all, he's had four chiefs of staff, five deputy chiefs of staff, five communications directors, four press secretaries, four national security advisors, at least six deputy national security advisors, three secretaries of defense (one “acting”), and so on.
Unfortunately, just about the only ones who haven’t been fired are the rest of us and, in our coronaviral moment, we have little choice (if we aren’t front-line workers) but to sit idly and watch, or force ourselves not to watch, you-know-who.
Once upon a time, if you had predicted such a future for me, I would have thought you mad. No longer. How appropriate, then, that today TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, facing the slings and arrows of outrageous press conferences, focuses on Hamlet’s famous query, modernized for the era of The Donald: to watch or not to watch, that is the question, and it's one hard not to ask nightly in the Covid-19 era.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
EXCERPTS:
For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been watching each live broadcast of the Trump Follies, otherwise known as the White House daily coronavirus task force briefings. Readers who, like me, remember the Vietnam War may also recall the infamous “Five O’Clock Follies,” the U.S. military’s mendacious daily briefings from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, during that endless conflict. There, its spokesmen regularly offered evidence, including grimly inflated “body counts” of enemy dead, that allowed them to claim they were winning a losing war. The question today, of course, is whether the present pandemic version of those follies offers at least a small glimmer of hope that the president may now be mired in his own Covid-19 version of Vietnam.
After I’ve spent a couple of irretrievable hours of my life gaping at the muddled mind of Donald Trump, I always feel a sickening sensation, as if I’d kept eating Oreo cookies long after they stopped tasting good. But it doesn’t matter. The next day, I just turn it on again. I wonder if it’s people like me who are responsible for that TV ratings bump of his?
Why am I fascinated by the way just about everyone on the podium fawns all over him, starting with Vice President Mike Pence, the titular head of “the president’s” Coronavirus Task Force (unless, this week, it’s Jared Kushner)? Why do I keep listening to Pence intoning, “The president has directed that...” or referring to “President Trump’s 15-day coronavirus guidelines,” as if Trump himself had written them and designed the oversized postcard outlining them, which arrived in people's mail at the end of March? Why am I mesmerized as assorted business “leaders” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell trip over themselves outdoing each another in praising the president? Lindell, in fact, used his minute and a half of fame to tell the world that God had essentially elected Donald Trump in 2016. (I guess that explains it! I knew I hadn’t voted for him.)
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