Donald preaches from his pulpit
Another episode in what Trump hopes will be a never-ending show, says Declan Lynch
THIS is your reminder that it’s just a television programme. Always, it’s a television programme. The ‘presidency’ of Donald Trump is to him something that happens in a meaningful sense on television, and only on television. So when he saw pictures on television of the White House in darkness for the first time in history, and he heard commentators mocking him for hiding in the bunker, he knew that he needed to put on some kind of a show — a TV show, of course.
Striving to look like a man in control of the situation, rather than a cowering windbag, he and his team put together this scene of him striding out of the White House at the head of a squad of heavy-looking dudes, oozing the kind of machismo that would appeal to his followers — the sort who think it’s cool to be waving a machine gun around on main street in the cause of white supremacy.
In this episode, Trump and his crew were swaggering a bit like John Wayne, arriving in town to shoot the bad guys to smithereens— except in this version there was no enemy waiting for them, no gunmen about to engage them in heroic battle. All opposition had already been removed by force, and it wasn’t even violent opposition. They were coming to save a town with nobody in it.
So even as they made their way like the Wild Bunch to a church near the White House, Trump and his band of brothers were just throwing shapes. They were just poncing around.
But what they were mostly doing was making a piece of television. In the days that followed, you could see many repeats of them walking the walk from a variety of different angles, with perhaps some stirring music on the soundtrack.
It was quite a production, even before Trump got to the house of worship, and held up a bible as a symbol which would appeal to his ‘base’. In fact, this was not just a programme for the day that was in it, there was clearly a lot of material being put in the can for TV commercials to be aired at election time.
And since it was later screened on the White House Twitter account, we can guess they were getting this campaign commercial at a knockdown price — always an important consideration for any serious TV operator.
Likewise, Trump had used the pandemic for a couple of hours’ free television every night, until he went off-script a few times too many. Although that wasn’t really why he stopped doing those shows, it was more that the whole concept was wrong.
There was just no percentage for him in this show with 100,000 dead and rising, and so he just axed it, took it off the air. Even when he was trying to make the format work, despite the interference of virologists and the like, he hardly ever mentioned the deaths — because if he didn’t mention them on TV, effectively they hadn’t happened.
And now that that show is over, for him, coronavirus is over. Dr Fauci remarked the other day that he and other members of the scientific community hardly see the president any more. Trump is vaguely aware that there is another world out there, with other people living and dying of “the Chinese virus” in it, but other people do not concern him.
Certainly black people do not concern him, yet he was left with no choice but to take some sort of an interest when George Floyd was murdered and it was actually on television — all of it, prompting a contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight, George the Poet, to remark that it’s very rare you’ll see someone being murdered, for nine minutes.
It surely is, and it is also rare for TV viewers to be sitting at home during a pandemic, watching an empire falling asunder most nights on CNN. The pandemic bit would be rare in itself, but with the disintegration of the American empire thrown in, it’s a pretty astonishing package all round.
Indeed, Trump will already be pleased that the empire story has made some people forget those pandemic shows almost as much as he’s forgotten them. And if anyone thinks that all the violence and destruction is bad for him, well, the series is only starting.
Already he’s been naming the main characters, declaring that Antifa is a terrorist organisation, though they may not be an organisation at all. They will be whatever he wants them to be. And he will take this wherever he wants to take it, regardless of where it is actually going.
It’s only television.