anti-theatricality round up

A fresh burst of theatrical and showbiz tropes in the political discourse, with all these indictments, arraignments, appeals, etc (the law being itself a form of theatre as much as politics)

Legal expert Teri Kanefield breaking down the nitty gritty of the indictments: 

Paragraph 90 we get details from private phone calls. 

What comes through is this: Trump creates a false narrative, acts as if it is true, and expects everyone to go along.

Timothy Snyder said it years ago: Trump writes the script and forces everyone to become actors in his show.

It's good to see Trump front and center. 

Basically the indictment gives four counts and a ton of facts.  

Here is an example of how Trump writes the script and expects everyone to play their parts:

January 5: Trump met alone with Pence. Pence refused to go along. Trump, frustrated, said he’d have to “publicly criticize him.”

January 5 (night): Trump had his campaign release a statement that “The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”

Christopher R. Browning at the Atlantic on "A New Kind of Fascism"

Thankfully, also, Trump himself was too lazy, inexperienced, and unprepared to set about systematically constructing a true dictatorship. The main focus of the Trump presidency was less plans and programs and more the theatrics of satisfying his constant, insatiable need for attention and adulation. Everything—whether the state of the economy or the chocolate cake served to China’s Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago—had to be extolled as “the greatest ever.”

George Will at the Washington Post on the struggling DeSantis campaign and his attempts to copy Trump's theatrical and stunt-oriented anti-politics 

DeSantis’s pratfalls are, however, useful in illustrating how politics has sunk waist-deep in the quicksand of “the emotive presidency.” In a National Affairs essay with that title, Mikael Good, a Georgetown University political theory student, and Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argue that “Trump’s masterstroke” was to realize that, for his core supporters, his governing is of secondary importance.

Primarily important is his “affect,” his rhetorical carousing that enables supporters to “feel complicit in defying the hated establishment.” An entertainer with the “Seinfeldian cadences” (say Good and Wallach) of a stand-up comedian, Trump is, for his cohort, fun, a word that does not spring to mind when watching the dour DeSantis.

Although portions of Trump’s base have, Good and Wallach say, legitimate grievances that should be articulated, “a great deal of his rhetoric and showmanship merely channeled the emotion behind those grievances. The reward for his followers was catharsis, not better political representation in a process geared toward meeting real challenges.”

Good and Wallach argue that “Trump found a way to reinvent the president’s representational role for an emotive age.” He defined, and is defined by, this age:

“Employing cadences borrowed from stand-up comics and radio shock jocks, Trump transformed populist rage into a positive emotion: gleeful shared mockery of the politicians and elites who had betrayed the true Americans. . . . This is the age of offense-taking, not position-taking — let alone policymaking.”

DeSantis, scourge of Disney, understands what Good and Wallach call “news-cycle combat,” which is “all about displaying bravado by throwing punches” because “the point is to help your supporters feel something right now.” DeSantis might be one of those whose talent, say Good and Wallach, “lies in meeting their base’s emotional needs and fueling the news cycle with entertaining spectacles.”

Hence Ronald Reagan’s irrelevance, as trumpeted by the “new right,” many of whose members are attracted by DeSantis’s gloweringly un-Reaganesque affect. A rhetorical president can be a unifier. An emotive president must be divisive.

An MSNBC piece by Jen Psaki on how a Trump photo op highlight his reality TV skills

If you caught only a tiny glimpse of the news Tuesday afternoon, you probably saw former President Donald Trump making a surprise — and seemingly triumphant — visit to a cafe in Miami. Trump followed up that fawning photo-op with a speech at a fundraising event for his presidential campaign, committing to courageously keep fighting his many persecutors.... The video from Versailles played on loop, on some networks, because it was the only video available — the courthouse where Trump surrendered and pleaded not guilty allowed no cameras inside....  Without courthouse cameras... Trump is making a clear play to control the narrative. And he’s putting his old reality TV production skills to effective use... 

But ultimately, Trump’s impromptu reality TV reboot cuts both ways. First of all, and not to begrudge the power of public relations... , a PR strategy isn’t a legal strategy. The bizarre arguments outside the courthouse made by Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer and seemingly chief Miami mouthpiece, wouldn’t fly in an actual courtroom. And for all of Trump’s bluster, veteran prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told Lawrence O'Donnell that Trump's Bedminster, New Jersey speech was a “straight-out confession” and confirmed that what Trump says on the campaign trail can be admissible in court.  

Second of all, quantity of public engagement doesn’t equal quality. Nor does it win elections. If it did, Trump would still be president. He dominated the media coverage back in 2020, to the point that prominent Democrats were wringing their hands about Joe Biden’s so-called pandemic basement strategy.

Indeed, my former White House colleagues see it differently. From their perspective, Biden won in part because he didn’t dive into the fray of the PR war in 2020. 

... Don’t freak out about Trump’s finding new ways to dominate the headlines. He’s very good at sucking up all the oxygen, but outside of Hollywood, that talent could end up a curse.

Peter Wehner at the Atlantic on Trump's imaginal hold on his base: 

 A significant number of Trump supporters see themselves as embattled but heroic figures, involved in a great drama, standing against the demise of almost everything they cherish

David Von Drehle on Trump's chances of getting a hung jury:

"Only one juror, from a country in which roughly 35 percent of adults still like the Trump Show. Such folks are real, and they must be factored into any discussion of Trump’s future and our own. Borrowing a line from the seismic sensation Taylor Swift, I would say to them: It must be exhausting always rooting for the antihero. But I think they would reply: Nope. Not tired.

"I don’t think most Trump supporters actually want to live in a world where an elderly sociopath has unfettered power. But they do want to live in a world where those currently in power are cowed and cautious rather than smug. Trump delivers on that. He frightens the insiders, unnerves them, knocks them off-guard. As long as he performs that function, his supporters will stick with him."

Thomas Lecaque at The Bulwark on Jason Aldean's "Try That in A Small Town' , Q Anon, and the murderous fantasies of MAGAs at a Trump rally as caught in a video

One way to think about the video, where at least some of the people in line say they are ready for the murders to start, is as at least partially a performance. So much of what surrounds Trump is performative—the idea that he’s a successful businessman is a TV show, not a reality. The notion that he’s ultramasculine is made for 8kun memes, not reality. The idea that he’s a God-touched avatar of the presidency is a subject of fantasy artwork (or whatever one calls the work of Jon McNaughton). And the rhetoric of violence that suffuses the contemporary far right is at least partially performative in that way....

It’s always just rhetoric until the murders become real, not performative....

... the heart of QAnon’s fictional eschatology is a murder fantasy, too, the fantasy that all of their opponents will be rounded up and killed by the government.

This is the grotesque vision that unites these things—a Jason Aldean song, a Trump rally, and QAnon: What they want is a different world, a purified world in which all of the people unlike them are gone. And gone with violence. Each of them invites or at least imagines violence done to their opponents to drive them out of their utopian future....

What if the rhetoric keeps spreading, keeps moving into mainstream spaces and conversations and political discourse?

And what if Trump’s supporters lose in 2024?

And what if, as on January 6th, some of them take the violent vision seriously enough to act on it?

And what if, one bloody day, it isn’t just rhetoric anymore?

Charles M. Blow at New York Times on "why  Trump's indictments don't feel like the finale"

Trump achieved this by capitalizing, to an almost unprecedented degree, on Americans’ addiction to celebrity culture. He’s not the first president to accrue and employ celebrity: John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did so, too.

But each of those men married his celebrity to our politics; Trump has used his celebrity to pervert our politics. He sensed the fragility of our political system, its overreliance on precedent, norms and decorum and its inability to anticipate chaos — chaos that he was able to weaponize.

Trump recognized that for many Americans, celebrity was more powerful than character or civics. That celebrity allowed for a curated reality, one that acknowledged the flower but hid the thorns.

In this environment, some people’s desire to belong and be affirmed and validated transcended truth and reality. And in that space, he could be the captain of their team, the leader of their band and the minister of their church. 

For them, Trumpism became a form of identity entertainment, a carnival for the like-minded guided by an impresario who mixes amusement with anger, fear and grievance.

In this environment, it’s also easy for Trump to fend off challengers who appeal more to the mind than to the soul.

His closest rival for the Republican nomination is Ron DeSantis, whose campaign is struggling as Republicans continue to rally around Trump. DeSantis possesses no magic. Never has. He’s dull and boring, a beta male cosplaying bravado.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bonus non-political anti-theatricality tropism: 

Atlantic piece by Rhian Sasseen on Nicole Flattery's novel Nothing Special 

Copies can be so much more appealing than their originals: Think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong and Jacqueline Kennedy, his hand-painted reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans. The title of Nothing Special, the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s new novel, is itself a copy, derived, as Flattery has said, from an idea that Warhol once dreamed up for an unproduced talk show called The Nothing Special, which he envisioned to be about, well, nothing in particular.

We follow Mae, the working-class daughter of a waitress, first as a high schooler in 1967 and then as a middle-aged woman during the Internet-flush world of the new millennium, as she recalls the period she spent as a teenager transcribing a series of tape recordings made by Warhol at his Factory.

As a conceit, it’s one rooted in fact. Warhol used the unedited transcriptions—mostly monologues given by his friends and compatriots—to create his 1968 amphetamine-fueled a: A Novel. In his 1980 memoir, Popism, he remembered “two little high school girls” in charge of the project, their names since lost to history. “I’d never been around typists before so I didn’t know how fast these little girls should be going,” he recalled. “But when I think back on it, I realize that they probably worked slow on purpose so that they could hang around the Factory more.” Much in the same way that conversations, recorded and then transcribed, can be transformed into a novel, social media helps us take the raw material of our life and shape it into a narrative for others’ consumption, whether through images, videos, or text. Flattery takes an inspired approach to showing how the stuff of our daily existence can, when mediated through technology, be made into a fiction. By writing of a pre-digital past that was so preoccupied with replicating and documenting itself, turning life into a performance, Flattery shows us that what’s changed isn’t human nature, just our technologies.

... Like the teenage girls who fuel today’s social-media trends, Mae and her colleague, the awkward and mysterious Shelley...  create a performance in their own right through the simple act of transcribing other people’s lives. “It felt like committing to a fiction,” Mae thinks of her hours spent typing in a corner of the Factory, as Warhol and members of his coterie walk past and watch them. “A performance I took part in every day. I always changed before I went inside and started typing … It was the only thing worth doing. It was going to transport me.” It is addictive, this performance: “I got everything I needed from the tapes … What kind of work would we find after this? It must have crossed Shelley’s mind too that when the last tape ended, so would our lives.” This is a line, frenetic in its relationship to the machine, that would not be out of place in a novel set in 2023, with people’s identities and daily lives so wrapped up in their phones.

When writing about the machinery itself, Flattery is visceral. There is the “constant metal-on-metal sound of the typewriters”; a camera is described as “still, like an animal getting ready to pounce.” Her descriptions recall the way we interact with our screens, the perpetual typing, texting, photographing, recording, uploading. Mae might have found a sense of purpose, but no one in her world—desperate as they all are for fame—is having much fun. Though she may think of herself as a writer, her mother’s boyfriend, Mikey, quickly deflates that notion with one on-the-nose line: “That doesn’t sound like writing, Mae. It’s eavesdropping. It’s surveillance.”

Today, the surveillance is ubiquitous—the quotidian swipe-through of Instagram Stories, the experience of filming and being filmed within a public place. That sense of performance that Flattery captures has leaked out of the silver walls, the speedy gallery parties, the jaded 1960s art world into our every day....

 Today, we’re all living a performance, in a modern-day Factory, whether we like it or not.