antitheatricality + politics round-up - first Republican debate / 4th arraignment / the Mug Shot special

Ronald Brownstein at the Atlantic wittily compares the first Republican debate to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - the peripheral characters take centre stage;  the hero upstages them by his pointed absence. 

"For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet. The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama."

"... Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans. But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race"

"Sound and fury" - nice use of Shakespearian soliloquy there (albeit from Macbeth not Hamlet) and moreover it's a meta-theatrical if not quite anti-theatrical figure when you see the full quote:

“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

Brownstein brings it back to his opening conceit in the closing para: 

"The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different."

Incidentally, debate co-moderator Bret Baier is to be commended for the nifty description of Trump as “the elephant not in the room”

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic on "An Inane Spectacle" (aka the first Republican presidential debate)

"When the Beatles were just kids playing in cheap bars in Hamburg, a club owner would push them onstage and yell “Mach Schau!,” meaning something like “Give us a show!” That’s what happened last night: Fox and the audience turned on the lights, hollered “Mach Schau!” and let it rip.

"No one was better suited for this inane spectacle than Ramaswamy, whose campaign has been a fusillade of high-energy babble that has often veered off into conspiracy theories. Ramaswamy has perfected MAGA performance art: the Trumpian stream of noise meant to drown out both questions and answers, the weird Peter Navarro hand gestures, the cheap shots sent as interruptions to other candidates while whining about being interrupted himself, the bizarre and sometimes contradictory positions meant only to provoke mindless anger.

"And the crowd loved it." 

New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang on stand up guy Vivek Ramaswamy:

"Ramaswamy’s insult-comedy show had its desired effect on the press.... Reporters from media outlets like CNN ignored other candidates in the post-debate scrums and beelined for Ramaswamy.... So begins a now familiar sequence of events: Ramaswamy’s gleeful trolling got the most attention, which will, in turn, drive more press coverage, which then will lead to better name recognition and a boost in the polls. As long as he’s willing to entertain—and it must be said that Ramaswamy’s provocations were the only lively part of an otherwise boring show—he will be following the Trump playbook for staying in the headlines."  

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on Trump's mug shot

"Last night, the 45th president became inmate number P01135809 of Georgia’s Fulton County Jail. Trump had his mug shot taken. It was shared with the public. We looked, of course. And he was prepared for our gaze: hair, makeup, angle, pose. In the portrait—it is a portrait, in the end—Trump glares directly into the camera. He seethes. He glowers. He turns in a studied performance. Photos like this are typically exercises in enforced humility. Trump’s is a display of ongoing power. He treats his mug shot as our menace...

"... The typical mug shot, usually taken after the subject’s unexpected arrest, bestows its power on the people on the other end of the camera. The alleged criminal, in it, tends to be disheveled, displaced, small. But Trump, trailed by the news cameras that confer his ubiquity, found a way to turn the moment’s historical meaning—a former president, mug-shotted—into one more opportunity for brand building....

"Hhe looks straight at the viewer, seemingly incandescent with rage, taking the advice he has reportedly given to others: Perform your anger. Turn it into your script. Make it into your threat. His menacing glare gives a similar stage direction to the people who follow him and do his bidding—both in spite of his disrespect for democratic processes and because of it.

"Welcome to the age, then, of mug-shot rule. Trump, evidently pleased with his portrait, broadcast it on social media. (The platforms he used included X, formerly known as Twitter, which had once banned him for spreading violent lies to its users.) The image he shared is doctored, of course. Its background is stripped of the Fulton County seal, as if it were a mere headshot for an actor seeking the role of “autocrat.” 

"....Trump, reportedly, orchestrated the logistics of last night’s surrender so that its melodramas would play out on prime time."

Vinson Cunningham at the New Yorker on the mugshot as Trump's true Presidential portrait (I thought it could be a new US postal stamp!) 

"One thing that the picture makes plain—not for the first time, but in a definitive way that won’t soon be forgotten—is how many of Trump’s cues are cribbed directly and consciously from the cinematic literature of romanticized criminals. Trump’s the kind of guy who thinks Scorsese movies are straightforward celebrations of tough guys on the come-up; here’s how you make it in America if you’ve got enough guff and a high tolerance for trouble. He seems to have styled himself, for a long time now, after the “goodfellas,” let some of their leering rhythms slip into his facial bearing and his speech....  This mug shot’s been a long time coming—it is, perhaps, the point toward which the entire asymptote of Trump’s life has bowed. He might be angry in the mug shot; he may well be scared. But he damn sure doesn’t look surprised. Nobody is.

"Far from surprise: can there be any doubt that, hours before his surrender, before the camera ever flashed, Trump stood in front of some gold-framed mirror and practiced this lipless pout? He knows better than anybody that his supporters—who still make up the formidable majority of the Republican primary electorate—will take this picture and make it a banner....  And so, of course, he must have stood for countless minutes at the sink, perfecting his sourpuss expression, hoping it would convey manly disapproval and unshakable belief. Here I go again, he’s saying to his people through the pose, doing this for you." 

"...Trump knows from symbols, knows that this new one will stand more as a Rorschach than as an automatic indictment, knows that it works as well for him as it does for his adversaries. And let’s face it: he can be perversely funny, and the picture will give him a new, tight five minutes of fascistic standup material."

Mark Leibovitch at Atlantic with yet more analysis of the shot seen around the world 

Clichés are always bad, and sometimes quite wrong, but the conceit that this would be a “split screen” week for the Republican campaign—eight GOP debaters on one screen, Trump’s co-defendants getting processed on the other—was spectacularly amiss from the start. One screen this week would blot out all of the rest. ... Trump’s mug shot, probably the most anticipated in history, seems destined to also be the most analyzed and disseminated....  You can assume that the subject, a figure of uncommon vanity, obsessed like hell over his bureaucratic close-up. How should he pose? For what aura should he strive? Tough guy, defiant, or wounded pup? Would makeup be allowed? Thumbs-ups or no?

"Finally, around 8:40 p.m, the mug shot landed. Trump’s hair and eyebrows were more feathered than usual, like he had brushed them out. Lips were pursed, eyes stern and severe, his brow zig-zagging like lightning. The former president looked like the Grinch—the Grinch Who Stole Georgia (or tried)... ".... Trump’s photo offers a rough visage, formidable and extremely serious—which is what I assume he was going for. He made an effort here. It paid off. He gave his haters nothing in the ballpark of vulnerability. "

Twitter folk on the over the top motorcade

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.

David Remnick at the New Yorker on "The Mobster Cosplay of Donald Trump'

Trump, Daniel Richman added, has “the affect and sometimes the communication style of a mobster. It’s a combination of clear signalling as to who has power and the source of that power with an obliqueness of expression that, intentionally, barely conceals the threat.” Trump used the same tactics, Richman said, during a 2019 phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, in which Trump leaned on him to “look into” the Biden family in exchange for unlocking a weapons sale. Richman said that in many rico cases, the government will display charts that resemble the orderly hierarchy of the Ford Motor Company. But the Oval Office in the Trump years seemed more like a mob social club, in which “people come in and out without clear titles, and access is freely given as long as they pledge fealty. If you say you have a good idea, you’re told to run with it.”

Paul Attanasio, who wrote “Donnie Brasco,” a 1997 Mob film starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, told me that Trump, though he deploys the swagger of a mafia boss, is in no way a wise mafia boss. “It would be highly unusual for the boss to get involved and make a call like the one to Raffensperger,” Attanasio said. “There’s no way Vincent (the Chin) Gigante would make that call. He’d have someone do it for him. But it’s Trump’s arrogance, his belief that he can do it better and successfully intimidate Raffensperger.”... 

Trump, the unwise wise guy... long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by Mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn... [but] has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster’s sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the Cosa Nostra. Before the Mafia’s disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won’t even pay the legal bills of Giuliani, his loyal sidekick. The most lasting image of Giuliani will not be of a valiant public servant inspiring a grieving city but of a cynical mook lying about stolen votes on Trump’s behalf while rivulets of hair dye course down his cheek.

 Hillary Clinton, asked by @maddow about the disconnect between Biden’s record and his approval ratings, says Biden has a tougher time breaking through the info ecosystem because Biden is “not a performer in a political theater sense” but “a producer in a political results sense”

And a couple of stray older-vintage tropes:

"Trump is a truly authentic fake - always acting, always on stage - but that is all he is. He's not introspective, retrospective or prospective. In his mind, he is more a persona than a person, more a primal force than a fully realized human being.”

 - NWU psychologist Dan McAdams

"One great danger of the Trump presidency is that he’s uninterested in performance [meaning here, results]  as long as he can create the image that he’s been successful. Actual success is irrelevant to him. The image of success is what’s important.”

- Max Skidmore

plus

all-purpose trope that fits any Trump&cru situation then, now and forever

Teri Kanefield: 

Of course, Trump is doing what he always does: inventing his own version of reality and expecting people to go along. As Timothy Snyder said, he writes the script and forces everyone to become actors in his reality play.

Just suddenly struck me the theatricalism in the expression "stage a coup"