Another Way Trump Has Poisoned Our Politics

He's said it himself, it's all about the ratings...

In many ways, one can easily relate the round robin, circle jerk of “Biden’s too old” to a growing force in American Politics, which I would refer to as the “half hour TV fake reality show instant gratification trope”.

We were conditioned to it by more than four years of Trump. Day one, Trump makes a wildly impossible (and quiet possibly illegal) claim of something he will do. For the next week or two, everyone tries to explain, both to Trump himself, and to the electorate, that what he’s proposing is impossible and possibly illegal. After a suitable time period, Trump claims he did whatever it was, despite the simple fact that he never did a damned thing. When he’s called out on the lie, he simply ignores the facts and continues claiming he succeeded.

He was going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. He built less than 1/3 of the entire distance of the border. It wasn’t even a wall, but more of a very high fence. It wasn’t and never will be “impenetrable” as he claimed… in fact, Mexicans held an impromptu competition to see who could climb over the “impenetrable, unclimbable wall” the fastest (I believe the record was 45 seconds?) The “big beautiful wall” began to rust and fall down almost as soon as it was built, and Mexico never paid a damned cent. Does any of this bother Trump? Nope, not in the least, he continues to claim he built the entire wall and solved all our problems (at least until he lost, then suddenly the border became ‘open’ again, overnight I might add). The media tries to call him out, he ignores it, doubles down, he built a big, beautiful wall, and because he’s telling even more lies about everything else, nobody really has time to actually prove him wrong about the wall, and so they move on to the next thing.

It’s exactly like your favorite TV serial. Terrible problems arise, there are struggles, but at the end of the half hour (or hour) the hero solves it and everything returns to normal until the next episode. (Which simply repeats the same formula.) (Every week.)

That’s what Donald did to our political discourse. There’s a problem, Donnie Tiny Hands says he can fix it (I alone can fix it, because I know more about XXX than all the experts who actually work in XXX) and then he does, basically nothing, or whatever he does do, only makes matters worse, but he claims victory anyway, and we’re all too concerned with the next piece of chaos he’s ignited to deal with the fact that he never fixed the last one, no matter what he claims.

And now, we’re all conditioned to expect this from all our pols. Biden had a bad debate. It’s not enough to give a great speech the next day, and explain why he did badly in the debate, oh no! He’s got to fucking do magic to prove he can do what he’s been doing quietly for the past three and half years. If he can’t walk on water, remove a diseased gall bladder from a suffering octogenarian, cure world hunger, and balance the budget all while standing on one leg and singing Yankee Doodle Dandy, then he’s “ineffective’ and “needs to be replaced”!

He’s got to “fix it” and he damned well better do so in the half hour the TV show allows for it. If not, then he’s simply no damned good. He isn’t getting the “ratings”. He is not giving you “Instant Gratification”. And by now, that’s exactly what we’ve been trained to expect. He could come out and lie like a cheap carpet, the way Trump does, and probably, the NYT and the rest of the circular firing squad would ease up a bit on him then, despite the fact that whatever he claims would be false… as long as it shows how “tough” he is.

You folks need to pull your heads out of the sand (or maybe some other dark place you’ve shoved them) and realize that the world’s problems don’t get cured by a sneaky MacGyver trick that wraps everything up in a neat little bow at the end of each episode.