anti-theatricality and politics (McJobsworth / That's Angertainment)

Perhaps no stunt in the history of U.S. politics deserves more ridicule than the grotesquely embarrassing mummery Trump put on at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s today. 

- Seth Abramson (bonus anti-theatricality points for use of the archaic term "mummery")

Donald Trump - a 78-year-old who’s spent his life screwing over workers, who's never earned a real paycheck in his life -  was putting on a show today playing dress-up at McDonald’s to act like he’s one of us. 

Kamala Harris doesn’t have to put on a show. She actually wore the uniform

- Shawn Fain, UAW

So the place wasn’t even open. It was all staged and fake. He didn’t work for real at a McDonalds. It was a staged fraud just like every other event.

- Ron Filipowski

The Trump McDonalds thing was choreographed and staged. The restaurant was closed down, covered in Secret Service, the people going through the drive through were handpicked, careful and intentional camera placement. All staged.

- source unknown

A reminder that the whole Trump McDonald's thing yesterday was fake. Just like him. Store was closed. "Customers" were Trump Cult Members. They had scripts. They had rehearsed. There is NOTHING Trump won't lie about.

- Keith Olberman

So in an effort to highlight his claim that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, Trump pretended to work at a closed McDonald’s where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers

-  New York magazine

If it weren’t fake it wouldn’t be authentically Trump

- Philip Gourevitch

Donald Trump, born on Easy Street, dreamed of more, insisted. And got it all. Palaces, women, minions, power, supreme fame. Everything...but real pride, or friendship, or love. And at 78 realizes he can’t quite distinguish between a dream and a nightmare…in the Twilight Zone

 - Kurt Andersen

The Yelp reviews:

Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves. Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club? 

Free lies with every shake. You just don’t want to see who’s shaking. 

I asked for an Arnold Palmer. Old man told me I couldn’t handle it.

“The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour.

The person who was at the drive through vaguely resembled someone who I saw on the news for being a convicted felon.

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

Job performance versus the job of performance

Biden was been outstanding at the job of being President. Where he fell short was meeting the media's demands for the performative parts of the job, which they value exponentially more b/c they think it's all just a TV show and not real life

- Scarylawyerguy

Neologism of the month

"If you don’t like how things are going in Washington, he’s responsible for it. He’s introduced this type of angertainment where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it and write a book about it and make some money on it"

Colin Allred on Ted Cruz

Kamala CNN Town Hall versus No Show Trump the Final Debate That Wasn't 

"CNN doing theater criticism while the other guy threatens to round up tens of millions of people and sic the military on his domestic foes (including journalists) is surreal to watch. They can't let go of the idea that this is a normal campaign."

- Aaron Rupar

Rally sizes 

Some people will argue that Harris only outdrew Trump because Harris had so many cool special guests at her rally. But that just underscores the point. If Trump were able to attract any cool special guests to his rallies, he’d be doing it. Instead he’s out there limping along almost on his own. He’s the only star of his own show, and it’s not a show that anyone wants to watch anymore.

- Bill Palmer

Waltz Time

 Chap at the Atlantic wakes up to fact that politics is performance and never more so when it is a performance of authenticity (Mark Leibovitch on Tim Walz)

"Tim Walz is trying very hard to make it look like he’s not trying too hard....

"When Harris picked Walz, she knew that this would be an abbreviated race, with limited time to make an impression. The campaign clearly saw Walz as embodying an archetype of American masculinity that would stand in contrast with the noisy grievance guys in the red MAGA hats and creepy venture-capitalist types like Vance, who can’t order a damn doughnut without breaking into hives..... 

"Several people in Walz’s crowds held signs reading coach, a reference to Walz’s former career as an assistant football coach at Mankato West High School before he ran for Congress in 2006. So what if it’s been nearly two decades since Walz has worn a whistle around his neck? The coach thing has been a key component of the regular-guy shtick, one that he does tend to lay on a bit thick....

"In a video that the campaign released last week, Walz can be seen popping his head up from under the hood of the figurative turnip truck in his driveway. The vehicle is in fact his 1979 International Harvester Scout, which has served as a recurring prop in Walz’s stage set—just as Harris has deployed Walz himself as a kind of prop.

"In the ad, Walz is schooling his online audience in the finer points of keeping a dirt-free carburetor. “You can always tell something about somebody’s maintenance by how clean their air filter is,” Walz said, picking up the truck’s filter and then putting it back down again (for the record, his hands are also immaculate). He is like a midwestern version of the Car Talk guys—except that Click and Clack could never pivot as seamlessly as Walz can into a discussion of, say, the evils of Project 2025.

".... Let me pause now to remind everyone that Tim Walz is a politician. He is a former six-term congressman and two-term governor who until recently served as chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association. He can hustle, grandstand, “misspeak,” and be opportunistic, just like the rest of them. When Biden dropped out in July, Walz saw an opening. He seized it.

"... Having a good shtick is part of being a good politician,” Brendan Buck, a Republican communications strategist...

"Walz has benefited from the frenetic pace of contemporary politics: the fact that people tend to experience candidates as impressionistic blurs and pay little attention to anything that lies below the surface. Being able to cultivate a persona and ace a role can get you a long way. Olson said that Walz has unquestionably proved himself a talented political performer throughout his career. But veteran Walz watchers can also grow weary of his practiced yokel act. “Oh, he is totally full of shit,” Olson said of Walz. “And he’s also really good at being full of shit.” Olson seemed to mean this as a compliment.

In a crass sense, being “really good at being full of shit” distills a certain essence of what it means to be a good politician.

.... Oddly, since Harris picked him, Walz has been largely hidden away from the national media. The campaign has been content to deploy Walz as more of a cartoon than a multidimensional character: dress Coach up in camouflage, pop in the Bob Seger eight-track, juice him up on Diet Mountain Dew, and send him onto the stage. His rallies are loud, boisterous, and well attended, usually more so than Vance’s.

"Perhaps this will change after Tuesday. The debate—between two midwestern populists of very different backgrounds, styles, and sensibilities—will be fascinating. Walz can detonate a line with the best, packs a lot of words and umbrage into tight sound bites, and has proved adept on TV. But how will this translate against the cool, cerebral vitriol of Vance? Will Walz’s default nonchalance survive the high stakes of the event?

"What’s clear from watching Walz these past few weeks is that he can land a speech. He is honing his lines as he goes and trying out new ones that he’ll likely reprise against Vance. And he projects a particular relish on the stump when attacking his opposite number.

"... Walz is a winning retail politician, a prodigious hugger who laughs easily and is always passing out little pins imprinted with loons—the Minnesota state bird—to the kids he meets. At every stop, he is endlessly deferential to Harris and careful to portray himself foremost as a servant to her success....  Walz.... carries himself as a charmed political lottery winner, plucked from the prairie.

“Look, I just want to help,” I kept hearing Walz tell people. He cuts a convincing beta figure, content to play the ultimate assistant coach. Minnesota has a proud and winning tradition of vice-presidential candidates: Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s and Walter Mondale in the ’70s. (Both fared less well when they tried to run as alpha nominees, Humphrey losing to Richard Nixon in 1968 and Mondale to Ronald Reagan in 1984.)

"Walz takes the stage to “Small Town,” the rollicking hayseed homage by John Mellencamp, released in 1985. The tune is fun, familiar, and apt for Walz’s rural upbringing in Butte, Nebraska, where he says there were 25 students in his high-school graduating class, 12 of them his cousins.

"But for what it’s worth, every time I hear “Small Town,” I think of a previous Democratic running mate, another self-styled fighter for the little guy with a small-town rap: John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, a two-time presidential candidate, and John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Edwards was a dazzling political performer in his own right, and he, too, used to wear out “Small Town” at his rallies. The lesson here is that shticks don’t always age well, and neither did the story of Edwards. His sweet-talking country-lawyer routine—righteous champion of justice and handsome family man—would eventually vaporize in a swirl of $400-haircuts, extramarital liaisons, legal woes, a lovechild, and other tabloid unpleasantness.

Yes, Walz, like Edwards, was born in a small town (and he could breathe in a small town). But no, Walz is not John Edwards. He’s much more accomplished and less slick than Edwards ever was. These are very different political times, and just because he and Edwards have the same campaign song doesn’t mean that Tim Walz is also destined to come crumbling down.

"The comparison, however, does ring with a cautionary echo. Very little in politics is truly authentic. And nothing is as simple as it seems—in a small town or on a big stage.