THE PRICE OF GOOD TV

 

It cannot be said enough: Donald J. Trump is good television... arguably, over the long haul, the best long-running TV series maybe ever. Americans like their TV, and that fact, more than anything, accounts for why this Olympic level TV athlete has gotten his totally unqualified self twice into the office of the Presidency of these United States.

I totally get it. I predicted it in a column I wrote after the first Republican Presidential Debate in 2015. I may not like reality TV but I find averting my eyes from a train wreck to be every bit as difficult as advertised. What I don't get is what has only now come to the fore. Trump, a TV star of the first magnitude, has somehow lost his touch... gone tone deaf... and America just may... as a result... be saved. The country’s masses probably do not deserve it, but I am awfully glad it has happened.

The "it" of course is the streets of Minneapolis... note, not LA or San Francisco... not even Chicago... but middle America... Minneapolis of all places. Chicanos in LA didn't even know Minnesota had Mexicans. Now, on TV, they see a taco stand in St. Paul and are amazed. Then, in broad daylight, regular folks are dragged from their cars and homes, a young Montessori teacher is shot by some goon, followed by the assassinations in the street of not only another American-born mother but also an American born nurse… not only a nurse... but a nurse from a Veterans’ hospital. I mean, c'mon... you can't make this stuff up.

And while Minneapolis burns, what is Nero doing? Building a ballroom at a cost of 400 million dollars, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself and then closing it down to show who's the boss when artists cancel shows in protest of his ego move. He hosts a Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago for fellow billionaires for cripes sake… and does so merely hours before the government allows funding to expire for the largest food assistance program in the nation! How tone deaf is that? And how do you get that way after playing a nearly perfect TV hand for over a decade?

The Jeffrey Epstien thing may have taken him a bit off stride, although I am none too sure of even that debacle causing him a real setback. And the latest racist trope is not gonna matter. Everyone knows he has been a bigot his entire life and nobody seems to care.

And it’s not the accumulation of all the years of lies. Our commander in chief has always been a liar. Nobody cared. It did not matter how many times the Washington Post published a running tab on his untruths or how many fact checks the NY Times ran. Trump just flat out got away with it. The grifts? The self-dealing with family businesses and the doubling, if not quadrupling of his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term? I am not so sure most folks even gave a damn about that.

You know what I will hang my hat on? Health care. I am not casting Minneapolis aside. I mean, c’mon, you just cannot send masked, unidentified and unidentifiable, semi-trained (or completely untrained) stooges into an American city and start throwing everyone from moms to five-year-old kids, teachers, and nurses and other caregivers face down to the ground and then into gulag-like detention centers, claiming… indeed celebrating… in national and international declarations, that they are all domestic terrorists, threatening the nation when ... even on FOX .... we can see for ourselves that while they may be domestics... they threaten no one and indeed are not terrorists but are the ones being terrorized!

The Melania movie might have moved the dial a bit. Talk about domestic terrorism. Have you seen that movie? Of course not. No one outside of Florida and Texas has. That immigrant makes $28 million on a documentary... more money than Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly and me combined in over seven years of Cagney and Lacey? Do not let me digress.

It is health care. James Carville said it when he ran Clinton's campaign: "it's the economy, stupid." Stupid us thought the economy was the price of eggs, the cost of bacon... even gasoline. None of it really hurt The Donald. Americans kinda know that grocery store items aren't something politicians can do much about. If meat costs too much, they buy chicken. Can't afford bacon? That's why they make SPAM. The cost of housing? It has been astronomical for years. College tuition? Crazy making, but not something Trump did badly.... or even did. But health care: everybody needs it, and almost no one can afford it… and the government... like governments all over the world... can do something about it. Trump, however, is oblivious.

For too long… years, really… he has talked about having a "concept of a plan," just before he shows us the latest gold filigree at the White House, or the Trump Arch that will dwarf the Lincoln Monument... tone deaf.

Minneapolis and health care. Defund ICE and pay for health care and I personally will lead the campaign for that damned arch. I may even go to the Melania movie.

Back to the question of tone deafness: how come Trump doesn't know this? He's a better showman than me. I had only one hit series.... and, if I must say so, delivered the goods with that one pretty well. Trump has had one hit after another without really delivering very much at all… except bullshit.

How did he lose his mojo? What happened to that magic touch? I don’t know. Maybe the good fairy who has perpetually made America great just entered his room one night and took it back.

However it has all come to pass, I am looking forward to the cancellation of this TV series, and in the meanwhile, God bless America.... someone has to.

 

Barney Rosenzweig