How Trump Turns News Media into Political Theatre

US president Donald Trump may be facing perilous declines in public opinion, precipitated in large part by the conflict with Iran, but he continues to completely play western news media outlets, using them to stage his politics with the dressing of reality TV theatrics that he so depends on. 

He is conducting politics at the sharp end of things in the international arena like they are a reality TV show, designed to keep his viewers hooked. And news media’s constant reproduction of the things he says and does serves only to orchestrate the theatrics and synthetic narratives for the public to consume. And this for free; he has to persuade no network beancounters of the merits of ‘The Trump Show’.  

Events are stage managed – or at least attempted – to play to his core domestic audience through regular twists and turns, false peril, contrived tension, and carefully inserted shock-factor ‘watercooler’ moments. It is all designed for beneficial effect on Trump’s public opinion amongst a checked-out-upstairs viewership. 

To take but one recent example of this, during the negotiations with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, the US negotiating position was one that the Iranians would not bring themselves to, and Iran requested an extension to an arbitrary deadline imposed by the US government for coming to the negotiating table. Trump acquiesced, and according to Trump himself, “I gave them a 10-day period. They asked for seven.” 

The Trump administration gave an additional three days than Iran requested for coming to the table, and what happened in those three days? Trump ratcheted up the tension and jeopardy with widely-publicised threats and intimidation rarely seen in public view, deliberately increasing the belligerence of his rhetoric to the point of global indignation - thus ensuring it would receive massive widespread attention. He was (figuratively) thumping his chest hardest during the time period he engineered for there to be a sense of counting down to doom, and thus fascinated attention drawn to the issue. 

When Iran acceded to new diplomatic measures after ten days, the image of Trump that he would have hoped reached many was of the man who was running out of time, but delved into his inner alpha and went berserk in a way that bullied his opposition into conceding; such is the righteous and superior spirit of the American – perhaps specifically the American ‘Christian’.

Even now, the shift of the US administration from demanding the Strait of Hormuz be opened, to immediately then blockading it, may have very little to do with strategy. Air strikes, blockades, amphibious landings – these are all just generic ingredients, for many Americans, in the big pot of American Domination Stew. 

For the Trumpian rank and file, they know not what such things are in detail, or how they matter. They are buzzwords designed to trigger a Pavlovian drooling over their great leader. When one strategy or threat is exhausted or exposed as less potent than first presumed, simply move to the next rehearsed scene, involving threatening and using something else from the classic canon of American domination to give the audience what they want. No matter the true realities such things entail.   

Such politics have a distinctly American whiff about them; as an anthem for America today, we might do far worse than adopt Gil-Scott Heron’s ‘B movie’. Though written in 1981 as a response to the election of Reagan as president, it was a sardonic howl about the obsession with a media personality politician who approached his politics with the same tactics to deceive and exploit as used when on the screen:

When America found itself having hard time facing the future 

they looked for people like John Wayne

But since John Wayne was no longer available

They settled for Ronald Reagan

And it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a B movie 

Reagan’s medium was the ‘B’ Movie; today we can simply change the references to Trump’s preferred medium of reality TV and this bizarre new variant of nonconsensual twenty-four-hour public participatory livestreamed reality viewing, broadcast directly by demagogic politicians through social media and – crucially – news media. 

Heron’s frequent refrain of “this ain’t really your life, ain’t nothin’ but a movie” does a fantastic job of recreating both the hamster wheel psyche of the indoctrinated Trumpian (or Reaganite at the time) who views world events fully surrendered to the repetitive stage management of their mental captor, and also the horrified wishes of despair by the innocent and knowledgeable watching it unfold in front of them, trying to convince themselves they are not really experiencing what they are experiencing: 

You don’t need to check on how you feel

Just keep repeating that none of this is real 

And if you’re sensing that something’s wrong 

Well just remember that it won’t be too long

Before the director cuts the scene

Heron’s words, apposite for our times, leave the question of whether in all this Trump realises that the show he is forcing us to watch when we view the news today is a poor quality ‘Apprentice’ spinoff, where a comically inept businessperson is inexplicably given the chance to win a fortune if they can recreate the conduct of a syphilitic mad old king from the bad old pre-enlightenment days?  

Image: The White House/Flickr Licence: public domain.

No image changes made.