Trump vs. Reality
GREAT TELEVISION! (but first, this message from your local Tesla Dealer!)
Trump is the supreme product of an American culture addicted to watching other people suffer. All these shows, The Apprentice, Survivor, et. al., are not premised on who wins, but on who loses, and the various ways in which they lose.
Trump and other, twisted"characters" like him exist only as images in the eyes of his audience. Aside from the silly tie and the orange hair he has no real, identifiable personality of his own. Aside from the childhood neuroses that we all have, he is, more importantly, a malevolent holograph of the mass entertainment mind.
If America stopped watching-him—switched the channel—he'd shrivel up and die, like the wicked witch of the west. So—understanding this, on some level of what passes for consciousness in Trump (and, always, for the sake of "great television," he is compelled to do and say more and more outrageous things all the time; and always, at the heart of his words and actions, there is that primitive imperative to insult and shock. Don’t we all wish he had been toilet trained. Alas, it’s too late now…
Why is Trump constantly driven to offend the rest of the world and treat everybody like shit? BECAUSE IT MAKES GREAT TELEVISION! And what makes this relentless display of adolescent sadism even worse is that he’s not just starring in each show, but he’s writing and directing every episode. And it gets worse: Trump (with the financial backing of his maniac doppelganger, Musk, and his other billionaire accomplices over at the Heritage Foundation) also owns the network!
Yes, folks, there’s only television channel left and it’s Trump TV, 24-7!
So, get out the family-sized bag of Doritos and a couple of gallons of Red-bull, because this series might never end (especially if Trump invokes some phony state of emergency and, as he’s wanted to for a long time, revokes all existing laws and suspends elections).
…A random thought occurs to me while I’m wandering in the off-world of reality entertainment…
So far, the best—and most watched—episode of The Trump TV show is his mugging of Zelensky. This “meeting” was truly a modern mind-bender. Here we have a former actor (Zelensky) who played the President of Ukraine on a hit television show—and who is now the actual President of Ukraine—being bullied by a man who played himself on American Television, who is now the actual President of The United States.
The fundamental difference between the two men is that Zelensky went from acting a part in a TV show to being a real man living in the real world, facing a real enemy. Donald Trump has never evolved from his TV persona, and now our country and the rest of the world are being forced to act out bit parts in his TV-addled fantasies. Trump, in the midst of his personal REVENGE WORLD, want to fire everyone on the planet.
Here's a question for you:
Why are the majority of Americans—almost surely the same ones who voted for Trump—addicted to watching the painful contortions of other people? Why do they want to hear, "You're Fired!”, or "You're Off The Island", or watch some poor sap fall for scripted adolescent pranks, or see a bunch of lost souls parade their physical and mental impairments on one of the other manifold extrusions of Schadenfreudic drivel that pops and jumps off a hundred million screens every waking minute?
Was American culture always contingent upon the suffering of other people?
Maybe it was, and now that the line between scripted entertainment and actual reality has been permanently obscured, we are entering a vast no-man’s-land—devoid of reason, intellect and morality. Ronald Reagan, another creation of television, once made a verbal slip and said, “Facts are stupid things” (he meant to say, “stubborn” things but he probably meant “stupid”). A man, like Trump, who is also a creation of script-writers and make-up artists, is the last person you want in a position of vast power over hundreds of millions of people.
BF—"Before Trump”, there was always the shared pretense that “Well, it’s only a TV show—not real life—I can turn it off anytime I want.” But here’s the tragic point our culture has arrived at: A crazy actor is now the President of our country, and he has appointed incompetent, ignorant and immoral people to the highest levels of government; partially (or primarily) because they are celebrities; because they make “Great Television.”
Now we can’t turn it off because we’ve all become (whether we know it or not, or even want to be part of it or not), expendable extras in Trump’s “reality” show.
Seeing the Federal courts make the right decisions in most of the current lawsuits against Trump and his gang gives me hope. This is only the first level of judicial review; now these cases have to go to the Appeals Courts and then to the Supreme Court—a process that can take time, so it’s a relief to see the “lower” courts stand up for the constitution and issue temporary orders restraining power-hungry men from destroying the government for their own greedy purposes, and ordering Trump’s mob of Goblins and Orcs to reinstate people unlawfully fired…
Now that the DC Reichstag has lined up to kiss Trump’s ass and given him free reign to do whatever he wants to the country, the courts are just about the only hope we have left.
This, now, is real life, not a fake TV show created by Trump and the scriptwriters from Project 2025.