The Spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord
The essential truth of long-form television is that even the best series – Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos – can only end, effectively, with mass death and unanticipated disaster, as events turn evilly against their own makers. They rarely achieve even the dignity of tragedy. Does even the most addicted viewer really believe that the Trump series will be blessed with a better ending?
Karma comes for everyone.
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One thing you have to acknowledge about Trump is that he understands the press so much better than the press understands him. He structures his presidential wins on the two-week theory – that’s the amount of time he knows that the news cycle, and the screen-addled attention of the American public, can be bothered to pay attention to any given topic. He learned this from his 14 seasons on The Apprentice, deep in the world of reality show producer Mark Burnett. The show, the episode, the season has to keep moving with new reveals and by lobbing bombs of surprise—or you lose the audience. In the first six months of his second term, American politics have become an unending season of Orange Lotus.
After the flash-bang pilot episode of Trump wrecking ball Elon Musk indiscriminately dismantling swathes of the federal government, we knew the narrative seeds were planted for a scene-chewing flameout later in the season.
Tariffs consumed more episodes than they should have, given the innate boredom with and incomprehension of the topic by most tuned-out Americans. Branded as Liberation Day, the plotline had to be rushed out of the writers’ room prematurely after Signalgate, starring elite smart-ass and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, derailed the Trumpian narrative about a hand-picked cabinet of slick, camera-ready, lethally focused national security operatives. There wasn’t even time to get the usual flashy marketing touches in place as Trump held aloft what looked like a mid-management marketing board listing “reciprocal” tariff rates by country.
The hasty list was so riddled with errors that it featured not just bad math, but islands inhabited only by penguins and seals, including what sounds like a MAGA destination for fast food tourists, McDonald Island. Trump wants to put the tariff turkey to bed this week, when he sends out a flurry of shakedown letters to all the penny-ante foreign powers who should now put up and shut up before the whole storyline jumps the shark.
Fight Club
Back in late February, roughing up Zelensky in the Oval Office offered a ground-and-pound takedown, worthy of a UFC pay-per-view special, that Trump acknowledged (on camera) “made for great television.” But nothing plays better than beating up on Ivy League academia, white-shoe law firms — and California, that liberal sneer terrain of hair-tossing Governor Gavin Newsom. If you watched any other channel but Fox, what looked on TV like a raucous melee of several hundred mostly peaceful protesters waving anti-ICE signs was recast by Trump as an American city under “invasion” and “conquered by a foreign enemy” of, uh, undocumented house painters and home health aides. Btw, after the “emergency” fell off our screens, whatever happened to the 700 Marines rushed into the made-for-TV crisis? Still sleeping on the floors of federal buildings? Or back in San Diego and other bases, knocking back brewskis and asking each other, what the hell was that all about? The show moved on….
https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/orange-lotus-how-the-trump-show-outwits
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Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
The Billionaire Frenzy Over Zohran Mamdani
The violent new world being born is going to horrify you
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
After the truth-shower 