Megan Garber at the Atlantic on the AI-generated deep-fake images of Trump being arrested:
"The AI renderings, meant to capture him at the moment of accountability, instead serve as reminders of his ongoing power. Attention is the one currency that Donald Trump has never squandered. The images of his “comeuppance” have now been viewed more than 5 million times. The crucial element of the images is not the fact that they are misleading. It is that they are melodramatic. They present Trump’s imagined arrest in maximally cinematic terms: the fight, the flight, the fall. They lie with such swagger that, even after you realize the fakery, it becomes difficult to look away. The images channel one of the showman’s abiding insights: that spectacle, wielded well, will not merely complement reality. It will compete against it. The deepfakes, those hyperreal renderings of a thing that hasn’t happened, are arguably harmless fun, obvious jokes that bide time until real news breaks. But attention being what it is, the images put a dent in any events to come. They are agents of preemptive—and false—catharsis. Trump’s arrest hasn’t happened. Nonetheless, we’ve already seen it.
“Behind closed doors at Mar-a-Lago,” The New York Times reported this week, “the former president has told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters and news cameras.” He has wondered how he should play the scene—should he smile for the cameras?—and how the audience of the American public might take in the show.
"... And when cinematic images are pitted against dutiful, uncertain realities, you can usually predict the victor. The pictures are very obviously fake; to see them at all, though, is to have an emotional reaction to them. If you’re one of those millions who have seen the fake arrest, the real one, if it happens, may seem like a letdown—a matter of been-there-done-that, already experienced, felt, filed away....
"The hype cycle is a fickle thing. And now, as the fake images remind us, its movements can be shaped not only by human spectacles, but also by AI-generated ones. Donald Trump, wielder of fakeries, is broadly akin to AI in the threats he both poses and represents. And the images that claim to depict him in his moment of humble humanity hint at those commonalities. The savvy marketer and the savvy algorithm both eviscerate long-standing, and load-bearing, norms. They are both shocks to the system, in the near term and the long. They treat reality as merely the opening bid in an endless negotiation."
Michael Tomasky at the New Republic on Trump's rally and its pitch to his base as an offer of retribution and apocalypse:
"The apocalypse part was even worse. Get this: “Our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and break our will. But they’ve failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle. That’s gonna be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over, and America will be a free nation once again.”
"The final battle. What? So now the Dark Lord is dragging us into his science fiction movie. Except this isn’t fiction. He means it. A man who wanted a mob to kill his own vice president also wants—hungers for, lusts for—a Book of Revelations–level battle, fought, of course, in his name and for his greater glory."
And from one lying liar to another - Boris as box office
A recent thought of David Stubbs:
"When schoolkids do mock "elections", Labour/Green always win hands down because it's so obvious what needs to be done. Only with "grown ups" comes the idea of politics as theatre, narrative, back stories, "characters", presentation. We could do without that "sophistication"."
Back to the endless movie known as The Trum(pm)an Show
John Hendrickson at The Atlantic explains "How Wrestling Explains America" aka Trumpian kayfabe redux - via ex-Executive chief of the WWE, Vince McMahon, and a new book about him called Ringmaster by Abraham Josephine Riesman
"Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him. Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home. It’s just before 9 o’clock on a frigid Monday in March—we haven’t even reached Act II of the three-hour pageant. RAW debuted 30 years ago and remains the top-rated cable program nearly every week, trouncing Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, whose fiery monologues are—knowingly or not—greatly influenced by those of professional wrestlers....
"You may recognize McMahon as the eye-bulging star of the internet’s go-to reaction meme. He also happens to be a close personal friend of former President Donald Trump. (His wife, Linda, served in Trump’s Cabinet as small-business secretary after two failed Senate bids in Connecticut.)...
"Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view match.... By the time the match was over, Foley had a badly injured shoulder and a broken tooth shoved up his nose. Professional wrestling delivers sensory overload that’s almost impossible to capture with mere description....
"Eight years ago, a pervasive idea took hold in what passes for our “national political conversation.” During the summer and fall of 2015, with each new rally, interview, and debate, we were told that the outsider candidate Donald Trump was transforming American politics into wrestling. It was a convenient, if ahistorical, conceit. Politics and wrestling were entangled long before Trump descended the golden escalator and villainized imagined adversaries to the delight of hooting fans and cable-TV cameras. Around the turn of the millennium, Jesse “The Body” Ventura made televised wrestling cameos while serving as the governor of Minnesota. Teddy Roosevelt brought his love of wrestling into the White House. “George Washington wrestled,” Riesman writes in Ringmaster, “as did Abraham Lincoln, who fought in roughly three hundred matches—indeed, a famous one in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 made Honest Abe a local celebrity and was a key factor in putting him on the path to politics.”
"... Although the symbiotic relationship between politics and wrestling goes back centuries, it is fair to say that Trump exploited WWE tools and tricks better than anyone who had come before him...
"In Boston, while watching Seth Rollins and Logan Paul provoke, then pummel, each other, Riesman predicted—with a distressingly low level of irony—that Paul would be president of the United States someday. Paul is a skilled trash-talker and, despite his youth, a veteran self-promoter, two qualities that would serve him well in politics. One of the WWE’s greatest orators, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, spoke at the Republican National Convention during the peak of his wrestling career. Johnson, a household name even without his wrestling moniker, has been hinting at his own presidential run for the better part of a decade....
"I kept going over Riesman’s subtitle—The Unmaking of America—in my head while watching RAW a few weeks after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. During that speech, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a white, fur-collared coat suitable for the WWE legend Ric Flair, shouted, “Liar!” at Biden. Her congressional colleague Lauren Boebert has released scores of short, taped monologues that look and sound more than a little like wrestling promos....
"“Wrestling is a carnival, and the carnival is a great leveler—there are people who came into wrestling as kids and came out as diehard Trump supporters or Second Amendment thumpers, but then you have people like me who came out as queer, weirdo anarchists,” [says Riesman, who is a transgender woman]. I watched wrestling as a kid with a lot of people who came at wrestling from having been sports fans, but I was the one who came at it from the entertainment side.” Specifically, Riesman told me, she loved the wrestlers’ knack for elocution. “I had been doing musical theater, and it felt like musical theater to me. I found it thrilling; I didn't care about the matches,” she said. “I love the drama.”
Washington Post readers comments on Trump's Apocalyptic Turn
A comical appropriation of an already comical and archaic narrative. The Christian Book of Revelations is just eastern Medterranean and eastern apocalypse mythology from over 2000 years ago veneered with some 1st and 2nd century CE Christian verbiage. The majority of the modern electorate will listen to this claptrap and either chuckle, eye-roll, or be slightly disturbed by the blatant nihilism of a former President. Very dramatic, but ignorable. Like a teenager going through a goth phase.
But the End is Nigh for Trump. DeSantis is too weak to pull it off so we have go to the GE to watch this embarrassment and watch a party that allowed him to take them over for the final death throes, like an actor using up the whole stage wasting time that has nothing to do with a plot.
Adam Kinzinger wheels out a variation on the old chesnut:
DC is Hollywood for ugly people.
A New Yorker column:
