Captive audience tunes in for daily dose of dictatorship

Like football fans, Trump can’t conceal his desperation for a bit of action, and all that matters is that it’s on TV, writes Declan Lynch I

T seems that my television is taunting me. I pressed the wrong button last Sunday, and found myself in some section called ‘Favourites’, and there they were reminding me about the Masters golf tournament — which of course was not being played this year.

But it was played last year, and I watched many, many hours of it. So I presume that this being the anniversary, the ‘Favourites’ were programmed to notify me of this year’s renewal.

Thanks for that, mate, I said to the television. Because talking to the television is becoming quite common these days. Indeed, I have discovered that you can talk into the remote control, and it talks in turn to the television, to tell it what I want to see.

And I noted too that on RTE2, they were showing goals from the 2018 World Cup.

Thanks for that, mate, I said again, to this television which will show me everything except what I want to see — which is, basically, a few football matches that I haven’t seen already.

I have written that “you should never not watch a football match”, but by this dictum I mean football matches the result of which is as yet unknown.

I mean, I can watch the old ones too, the classics, as long as they are part of an overall regime involving plenty of new material too; otherwise it is not easy, even for me.

And it is a sign of how desperate we are becoming that great hope is being invested in stories of some kind of a World Cup-style format which may solve the terrible problem of how to finish the Premier League season and just give the damn trophy to Liverpool as God intended.

The ‘World Cup’ bit derives from the notion that all the teams will gather in a particular location, perhaps in the midlands of England. There they will be quarantined, as such, and they will proceed to play whatever games are left in the 2019/20 season, ideally bringing us a few games a day, perhaps a month of top Premier League action.

Behind closed doors, of course. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it would be on TV.

And a serious argument can be made that if this were to come to pass, perhaps in June, it could bring about a great improvement in the mental health of a significant part of the population.

But we are probably only fooling ourselves, which is not recommended in general, though at least most of us are not the president of the United States, who is fooling himself, and fooling about 44 per cent of the people, with his obvious desperation for a bit of action.

We have already noted in these pages that this virus thing just doesn’t suit the Trumper at all: he can’t just make it go away with bullshit, like it was some little technicality with the planning permission.

But that hasn’t stopped him from trying, by doing what he does, which is to put on a TV show every day — like that distant dream of the Premier League, the only thing that matters is that it’s on television.

And during his biggest performance last week, he let us know again that he now sees himself as a dictator, that he has “total authority” over the states.

Still you have some commentators who will convince themselves that the ambitions of Trump are not quite as totalitarian as they seem. Frankly, if a president declares on live TV that his authority is “total”, even though the constitution says something else, I think it’s safe to assume that there’s nothing else in the constitution that will be holding him back, when the time comes.

But as a creature who is only truly alive on TV, and for TV, Trump also knows that the one TV show that everyone in the world needs to see at this time is his daily “briefing”. The following day, after he had apparently found out that he doesn’t have total authority after all, he announced that he would “authorise” the governors to do what they have the power to do anyway.

You’re not going to be getting that kind of thing on Netflix, but then part of the reason for his claim of authority over everything is his resentment of governors and other leaders who have been doing the necessary things, while Trump does television.

The Masters itself was called off before Trump declared a national emergency; I guess at that point, he realised it might be serious.