JANUARY 30, 2020 – Soon the U.S. Senate will vote to acquit Trump and legitimize the arguments of Trump’s legal team—that the personal political interest of the president is by definition in the interest of the nation; that abuse of power, no matter how egregious, how destructive, how contrary to our operating principles, is not an impeachable offense because it’s not a statutory crime.
The damage won’t be only theoretical.
Immediately, the president and his base will trumpet acquittal as “a win”—carte blanche to do whatever it takes to win re-election in November, including allowing foreign interference, the Founders’ greatest fear. And if Trump loses the electoral vote, who doesn’t think he and FoxGoebbels will call it “voter fraud” and “fake news”?
How did we let this happen? If the internet made us crazy, television is what made us stupid.
Years ago, “reality TV,” a goldmine for its exploiters, crashed into our real lives and made a mess of our view of reality. Trump the showman, the huckster, the actor, the carnival barker, seized this medium, perfectly suited to his insatiable need for publicity. In the process, he transformed his image into “billionaire businessman,” despite his many financial failures. He then manipulated television to portray himself oxymoronically—but mostly moronically—as a “non-politician politician.”
But a needy man’s neediness never ends. He needs opulence over wealth, celebrity atop publicity, and more on what’s already too much. To feed his need he worked his points of reference: tall buildings among skyscrapers; fame among the famous; and the ultimate lollipop in a nation of suckers—the presidency of the United States of America. But he gorged himself most on what he knew best of all—television.
For Trump, the presidency isn’t the means to cogent policy end nor a position from which to direct national destiny. It’s simply a huckster’s stage, a platform from which he can throw red meat to crazed masses wearing red caps sporting nonsense. Television is what launched this empty vessel. And what keeps it in play is the biggest “reality show” of all TV time—primetime FoxNews.
To be sure, long-standing forces, deliberate and sophisticated in their tactics, have seized the coattails of the Huckster-in-Chief. Hyper-religionists hell-and-heaven bent on imposing their sectarian dogma on secular society, have accomplished their decades-old objective: generational control of the judiciary. These people, for whom the end justifies the means, have brilliantly manipulated to their end, the means that by all measures is antithetical to their dogma.
Proverbially strange bedfellows of the religious zealots are certain, but by no means all, financial interests. “Strange,” because they worship quite a different god—mammon. In the Huckster-in-Chief they find a malleable master of the outrageous, whom they can make their servant.
Which takes us back to Trump’s “base,” his reality TV audience. As ready consumers of raw, red meat, they provide the votes, the raucous, vulgar adulation on which the soulless huckster, the heartless actor, the mindless promoter imbibes and indulges.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
