Utterly surreal. It was like watching TV’s The Survivor
HE IS the ‘reality TV President’, but even by his standards it was a remarkable performance.
Surreally billed as ‘a must-see on-air medical evaluation’, millions of Americans tuned in to watch Donald Trump’s first interview on camera since he contracted coronavirus.
And the ‘ultimate showman’ didn’t disappoint. He boasted he was feeling ‘really, really strong’ after going down with ‘the China virus’ and would ‘love’ to donate his antibody-packed blood plasma ‘if asked’.
He said he had to go to hospital because ‘I didn’t feel like the President of the US should feel’.
It was classic Trump: a man whose political career has been built around the audience-manipulating skills he learned as star of the US version of The Apprentice – spectacle, drama, outrage and now the inevitable ‘comeback’. Or, as one wag put it: ‘We wanted a reality show host as President and now we’re watching Survivor: The White House edition.’
This was Trump’s prime-time chance to present his rose-tinted version of events. And it was playacting at its finest as The Patient in the White House Rose Garden spoke to pro-Trump Fox News. As Fox drove a coach and horses through the concept of patient confidentiality, viewers were told about oxygen levels, medicines, lung congestion and CT scans.
Of course, American presidents’ bodies have been the subject of prying eyes ever since the White House hid the extent of JFK’s illnesses from the public. As Friday night’s interview progressed, it felt increasingly like the type of propaganda that dictators churn out on state-controlled TV.
I was reminded of Saddam Hussein’s absurd spokesman ‘Comical Ali’ during the Iraq War, who denied the presence of US tanks in Baghdad even as journalists watched them a few hundred yards away. America is agog with this soap opera – a 2020 version of the film The Truman Show (in which Jim Carrey’s character discovers his life is a reality TV show). There are still 23 days to go until the election. And that’s a long time in Trump TV-land.