And that’s exactly what’s happening. The Trump Show is now broadcasting live from the Oval Office. And from Mar-a-Lago, which is even more like a TV show because its well-heeled members provide a built-in live studio audience. And it’s clear that this is precisely how Trump sees his presidency too, as the executive producer of a country, always with an eye on the ratings. Responding to the suggestion that he might fire his gaffe-machine of a press secretary, he reportedly said, “I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”
It’s with the same brash showmanship that Trump is now navigating—or failing to navigate—the promises he made to bring back the bygone days of booming factories and blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages, promises that he would impose a “Buy American, Hire American” policy (never mind that his own empire is built on outsourcing and exploited labor).
This posture is as authentic as the violence he enacted when he appeared to take on a WWE wrestler in the ring, or when he was choosing from among contestants on Celebrity Apprentice. Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many US companies are no longer manufacturers at all, but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors. He may be able to bring back a few factories, or claim that he did, but the numbers will be minuscule compared with the need. (There is a real way to create a great many well-paying jobs—but it looks nothing like the Trump approach. It requires looking to the future, not the past, as we’ll see in the final chapter.)
Trump’s game plan, which is already under way, is to approach the unemployment and underemployment crisis in the same way he approaches everything—as a spectacle. He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs—most of which would have been created anyway—and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the job numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative, just as he learned to do on The Apprentice, and just as he did on his very first day as president, insisting, against all objective evidence, that his inauguration crowds had been historic.
This is what Trump does, and has always done. In 1992, when his empire was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy thanks to a series of bad investment decisions, he didn’t deal with the situation by getting his finances in order. Instead, he threw an elaborate “comeback party” for his investors and financiers at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which culminated in Trump—wearing satin boxing shorts and red boxing gloves—punching through a paper wall to the theme song from Rocky. This is a man who thinks he can solve anything with the right stage-managed performance, and very often in the past he’s been proven right. So just as he spun and performed his way out of bankruptcy, he is convinced he can do the same with the country’s economy.
Fake News, Alternative Facts, and the Big Lie
If we know anything for certain, it’s that hard facts don’t matter in Donald Trump’s world. With Trump, it’s not so much the Big Lie as the Constant Lies. Yes, he tells big ones, like the time he implied Ted Cruz’s dad had a role in assassinating JFK, and his years of lies about Obama’s place of birth. But it’s the continuous stream of lies—notoriously offered to us as “alternative facts”—that is most dizzying. According to a Politico investigation, this is quite deliberate: “White House staffers do much of their lying for sport, rather than to further any larger agenda,” even competing over who can “smuggle the biggest whoppers into print.” Though these claims are based on anonymous sources, and so may themselves be lies, the story fits with what we know about Trump: what good is reaching the pinnacle of power if you can’t bend reality to your will? In Trump’s world, and according to the internal logic of his brand, lying with impunity is all part of being the big boss. Being tethered to fixed, boring facts is for losers.
And so far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized upon this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created—the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing first family free of major scandals for eight years. And these were all good things. But, too often, these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians, or the deportations of roughly 2.5 million immigrants without documents during Obama’s term, or his broken promises to close Guantanamo or shut down George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”
In Canada, many liberals are displaying the same kind of selective blindness. Dazzled by the progressive messaging of our handsome prime minister, they are letting him hang on to many of his predecessor’s disastrous policies, from the indefinite detention of many immigrants to ramming through tar sands pipelines (more on that later). Politically, Justin Trudeau is very different from Donald Trump, but for his staunchest supporters—who often behave a lot like fans—his celebrity has a similarly distorting effect. This new “Trudeaumania” reminds us that conservatives aren’t the only ones capable of confusing engaged citizenship with brand loyalty.
Of course, Trump’s successful attempt to sell his white working class voters on the dream of a manufacturing comeback will eventually come crashing down to earth. But what is most worrying is what Trump will do then, once it’s no longer possible to hide the fact that coal jobs aren’t coming back, and neither are the factory jobs that paid workers enough to provide their families with a middle-class life. In all likelihood, Trump will then fall back on the only other tools he has: he’ll double down on pitting white workers against immigrant workers, do more to rile up fears about Black crime, more to whip up an absurd frenzy about transgendered people and bathrooms, and launch fiercer attacks on reproductive rights and on the press.
And then, of course, there’s always war.
The Apocalypse Show