Scrap over Trump tapes waste of time
Tom Arnold is on a gonzo mission to save the world from Donald Trump.
On Sunday night, this twoyear odyssey took a violent turn when Arnold got into a scrap with Mark Burnett, the TV mogul and longtime friend of the U.S. president.
As Arnold tweeted just after midnight: “Mark Burnett just went apes--t & choked me at this huge Emmy party then he ran away with his torn Pink shirt & missing gold chain. I’m waiting for LAPD.”
According to Variety, the scuffle happened as both men entered the Evening Before Emmy party.
Although details remain fuzzy, Arnold’s lawyer, Marty Singer, told the Hollywood Reporter that Burnett “attacked” his client. Meanwhile, Burnett’s wife, Roma Downey, accused Arnold of starting the altercation.
“Got this bruise tonight when Tom Arnold tried to ambush my husband Mark and me at a charity event,” she tweeted, with a photo of her injured hand. “Is your TV show worth it Tom? Please stop.”
That seems unlikely. Much like an angry bull in Pamplona or a meteor crashing through the atmosphere, there is no stopping Arnold.
Not now. Convinced there are secret tapes in which Trump uses racist and misogynistic language during outtakes from Burnett’s The Apprentice, Arnold is on a quest to unearth and share the footage.
That’s all you really need to know about his new show, The Hunt for the Trump Tapes With Tom Arnold.
After weeks of hype, the eight-part Viceland series premiered on Tuesday and is likely to prove as anticlimactic as Hunting Hitler or Killing Bigfoot.
Arnold plays the role of investigative journalist, albeit with self-deprecating irony and an emphasis on absurdist comedy.
In one scene, he meets with a potential informant who is dressed as the Easter Bunny. In another, Judd Apatow appears to tell Arnold, “You’re clearly mentally ill.”
This possibility creates an intriguing dynamic.
Unlike other documentary series that heap scorn on Trump from the moral high ground, Arnold is coming at this from inside a muddy bubble of generational and personal similarity.
As he notes in the trailer: “I’m Tom Arnold. And I’ve known Donald Trump for 30 years. He’s the same kind of oldschool dumbass that I am. But I don’t think a guy like me should be president!”
With that as the guiding philosophy, Arnold has spent the past few weeks doing interviews and torquing interest in a show that is at once goofy and deadly serious. In addition to ridiculing Trump on a neardaily basis, he has savaged Burnett, which might explain Sunday’s fight.
One thing is clear: Arnold believes Burnett is protecting the president from an ugly past that, if revealed, might shape what people believe in the present and future.
To Arnold, even the most devoted Trump fan will see the light if he or she hears the president using the N-word or engaging in a new round of “locker-room talk.”
And this is where Arnold is setting himself up for a loselose situation.
The tapes he is “hunting” for have existed for years, in rumour form. If they actually existed in the real world, wouldn’t they have turned up already? Some participants from the Apprentice franchise, including Omarosa and Penn Jillette, have already publicly stated they heard Trump say sickening things during filming. What difference would hard evidence make?
One of the mistakes that continues to torpedo anti-Trump celebrities — and it’s not just celebrities, I’m guilty of this all the time — is assuming “decency” has any sway with a certain percentage of pro-Trump loyalists. Clearly, this is not the case. If anything, Trump’s lack of decorum and ongoing demolition of social and presidential mores is a point in his favour among the hardcore.
He tells it like it is, they keep telling themselves, unaware that what he’s actually doing is telling it like they want to hear.
You want to know the brutal truth? If Tom Arnold ever did obtain a tape in which Trump uses the N-word, some of his supporters would love him even more.
That would be an explicit validation of his often-implicit xenophobia. It would give the daily dog whistles real bark.
No, if Hollywood has any chance of turning Trump supporters against him, they need a new approach. I don’t know, find tapes in which he’s sucking up to immigrants, not attacking them. Provide evidence that Trump will say or do anything to anyone that helps him in that moment. If this guy thought he could make a fortune building mosques around the world, do you know how quickly he would have converted to Islam? If he thought there was any material upside in biracial marriage, his wife would now be Oprah, not Melania.
Well-meaning stars like Arnold believe Trump is a charlatan and a fraud. It drives them crazy.
But instead of zeroing in on the myriad reasons he’s bound to hurt his supporters in the long run with his hasty policies, they get sidetracked by the social flaws without realizing his lack of character was always the chief selling point.
Arnold should remember all the lousy things people have said about him over the years. And how all of it just made him stronger.