On Trump's loopy Alcatraz-reopened fantasy:
When pressed on how he came up with the idea, Trump said he “was supposed to be a moviemaker,” alluding to silver screen depictions of the prison, which served as the backdrop for 1979’s “Escape From Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood and 1962’s “Birdman of Alcatraz” with Burt Lancaster.
Gone unmentioned in the Oval Office was a more recent Alcatraz film, a 1996 blockbuster called “The Rock,” which earned some $335 million and was mostly shot on location. David Weisberg, who co-wrote the screenplay, couldn’t believe what he was reading when he saw Trump’s plan.
Weisberg, who attended the premiere of “The Rock” on Alcatraz, said the prison “was a crumbling wreck 30 years ago,” and it was only through Hollywood magic that it was for one night transformed into a movie theater.
Asked if he thought his movie may have inspired the move, Weisberg laughed.
“It beggars my imagination that somebody would think this was a good idea,” he said. “I have no idea who put this idea into his head.”
from Washington Post
No mention of Boorman's incredible Point Blank here - which starts and ends at Alcatraz. Too arty and stylized maybe
Fake news but fit to reprint as it is all too plausible.
Donald Trump’s presidency already feels like a reality show in many ways, but his Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, is reportedly taking it a step further. According to The Daily Mail, Noem is developing a reality TV series where immigrants will compete for a chance to earn US citizenship.
Per a 35-page pitch viewed by The Daily Mail, Noem has been working with writer and producer Rob Worsoff (of Duck Dynasty fame) on a new program called The American. The competition series would feature 12 immigrants arriving in America via Ellis Island before traveling across the country to compete in various challenges. The grand prize winner would be sworn in as a US citizen on the steps of the Capitol.
According to the pitch doc, proposed challenges include mining for gold in San Francisco, balancing logs in Wisconsin, rafting down a river in Colorado, and building a rocket for NASA in Florida.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Beast that the show’s concept is “in the very beginning stages” of the vetting process, and she denied that Noem is directly involved in its development. However, citing sources, The Daily Mail reports that Noem “supports the project and wants to proceed,” and “has been working for weeks to get such a project greenlit from Netflix or another streaming or cable service.”
Tariffic entertainment value
I happened to be in northern Europe—Finland and Estonia—during the days of President Donald Trump’s operatic tariff gambit, from his opening announcement that the days when other nations “raped” and “looted” America were over, thanks to his semi-random assignment of duties to economies around the world, right through to his humiliating climbdown on Wednesday and the attendant relief on Wall Street. Obviously, the drama will continue; drama—as well as cruelty—is the point. But from this nearly Arctic vantage point the whole game looked especially, and painfully, bizarre.
- Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
That's DOGEntertainment
The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.
But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.
Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making. If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order....
McKay Coppins, The Atlantic
Ashley Parker, now at The Atlantic, on Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet and how the president’s appointees often appear to be acting out a made-for-television version of their jobs rather than actually doing them.
In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico.
In Bongino’s case, his run-in with a skilled jiujitsu instructor left him with a swollen right elbow. But such are the risks of Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, in which his underlings perform near-daily tone poems to a certain type of MAGA masculinity, publicly pantomiming their professional responsibilities.
Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fatigues for an ATV tour along the southern border, and posed in cargo pants and an ICE vest. In a social-media video, she wielded a tricked-out automatic rifle, the M4 muzzle disconcertingly pointed at the head of the agent directly to her left.
“I’m old school, but I don’t think our Cabinet Secretaries should cosplay as armed agents,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X above Noem’s video of herself with the poorly placed gun. “You’re a politician, not one of our heroes.”
When I called Erickson this week, he told me Trump’s subordinates understand that the president is “an image guy” who looks to surround himself with people who appear to be out of “central casting.” But, he said, looking the part on TV also serves a useful purpose for Trump—it “distracts the voters from: Is stuff actually going well behind the scenes?”
“It’s like hiring the guy who plays a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy,” Erickson told me. “You don’t actually want that guy to do your heart surgery. He’s an actor. You hire the people who sound competent because they use the polysyllabic words. But can they actually do the job?”
Trump, of course, may be the ultimate cosplayer. His quixotic political rise was fueled, in part, by Americans who knew him as a successful businessman, not through any of his actual business exploits (or bankruptcies), but through the high-flying mogul he played in their living room every Thursday night on The Apprentice.
During his most recent campaign, he sported various working-class costumes to troll his political rivals. In October, mocking then–Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that, as a college student, she had spent a summer working at a McDonald’s, Trump tied on a navy-and-gold apron and served fries through a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s drive-through window. Later that month, in response to mumbled comments then-President Joe Biden made seeming to liken Trump supporters to “garbage,” Trump wore a neon-orange reflective vest and hopped into a white Trump-branded trash hauler in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The ethos seems to have trickled down to his Cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whose public pronouncements and social-media posts sometimes give the impression that they view government work more as a game than as true public service. In 2022, Kash Patel, now the FBI director, shared a post featuring himself—chain saw in hand and “Bad to the Bone” thrumming in the background—lopping off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, a group that included Biden, CNN, “Fake News,” and Representative Nancy Pelosi....
“It looks like a lot of them are sort of showing up at a government costume party in which they get to wear the costume of being the secretary of defense or the costume of being the director of national intelligence, but they don’t have the qualification for those roles,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Democrat, told me. “Part of it is they know the point of entry to the costume party is you have to suck up ferociously to Trump every minute, and to get on his radar, images help. He likes the fake macho imagery, and so that’s just part of the deal.”
Stephen Marche (also at The Atlantic) coins a term: Histriocracy, rule by actors
This is going to be great television,” Trump said at the end of Friday’s stormy session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It may as well be the motto of his administration.
It is a new kind of cultural revolution. Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.
The Trump administration has been consistent in its veneration of show business, if in nothing else. The president has put a WWE executive in charge of education, made a Fox News talking head his secretary of defense, installed a celebrity conspiracy theorist to lead the National Institutes of Health, handed control of Medicare to a TV doctor, and appointed a right-wing podcaster as deputy director of the FBI. Elon Musk is running government reform because he can live-post it. Dr. Phil accompanies ICE on raids. Trump’s Cabinet picks resemble the cast of a reality-television show by design: Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved.
In his farewell address, President Joe Biden described the incoming administration as an oligarchy. He was mistaken. It is rule by performers: a “histriocracy.” Anyone who wants to understand what is happening in American politics needs to understand it on those terms.
Politics has become an offshoot of spectacle...
He won a record percentage of Arab American votes, then appointed an ambassador to Israel who claims that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” He enjoys fervent support among evangelicals despite the fact that his character is a living contradiction of every value they revere. These paradoxes would not be possible in a politics that selects the country’s leadership on the basis of ideas and character. They make sense if brute exposure determines who wins.
As the grand soap opera of this American presidency unfolds, displays of rage and wonder fill every moment: get-rich-quick schemes, rigged games, vengeful punishments. The audience is hurried from one hustle to another. The distinction between a con and a joke has blurred. The great circus showman P. T. Barnum prophesied the rise of Trump when he declared: “Let me furnish the amusements of a nation and there will be need of very few laws.” The connection between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy is more than genetic. Norman Mailer, in his famous essay on the 1960 Democratic Convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” noticed a mysterious sadness that gripped the spectators, which made sense only when he saw the future President Kennedy in the flesh: “The Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” Trump’s Cabinet is the staggering consequence that Mailer could not calculate.
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s made the connection between celebrity and power even more explicit; he rose after a career in which perhaps his most famous role was starring opposite a chimpanzee. The “Great Communicator” told corny jokes and knew that television was everything. The Republican Party “won one for the Gipper,” as Reagan’s campaign slogan had it....
Rule by performers is distinct from autocracy. The ruling performers serve the narrative needs of their fans first and foremost. Policy will always be an addendum to the show....
The reality of rule by performers is profoundly disconcerting to American intellectuals’ self-conception of their government’s dignity. This is the message of the Kennedy Center’s takeover that the D.C. political elite has been so slow to register. If you think it’s a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that’s the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.
.... Reality television and the WWE demand similar distortion-effect gymnastics [to Orwell's doublethink]; their audiences willingly suspend their disbelief and gladly accept events they know are artificial as real. The audiences come to political debate already prepared for the blurring of illusion and reality. “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived,” Barnum understood, which is why they called him the “Prince of Humbugs.” In Trump, they have a king.
As forewarned, America has amused itself to death. Histriocracy is much less stable than traditional autocracy—wilder, more unpredictable. Turbulence is to be expected, as creating drama is the point of the government and the source of power..... Under rule by performers, only one law is inviolable: The show must go on, until the curtain falls.
I like this coinage Histriocracy, and the way Marche lays it out is stark and clear... and the sustained from start to finish theatrical tropes are nicely done.
But, but as his own examples show (Reagan, JFK,), this fusion of television and politics is 65 years old!
In that sense his analysis is lagging - not just behind Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death and Baudrillard.... not just behind Guy Debord ... but behind Daniel Boorstin and his 1961 book The Image, which was partly inspired by JFK's use of television in the 1960 Presidential campaign. Here's the bit on The Image from S+ A:
.... a widely-read analysis of what its author
described as “the menace of unreality” creeping into every area of American
national life and mass culture. Written during the early days of John F.
Kennedy’s administration, the book coolly appraised the new politics of photo
ops and publicity stunts, which Boorstin caustically termed “pseudo-events.”
Teeming with imagery of mist, fog, shadows and phantoms, The Image diagnosed a social-cultural malaise of “nothingness,” in
which “the vacuum of our experience is actually made emptier by our anxious
straining with mechanical devices to fill it artificially.” Celebrities,
which Boorstin famously defined as people “well-known for being well-known,” were
nothing but “receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. ...
ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.” Media - in particular news and
advertising—stoked excessive expectations for life and an insatiable appetite
for stimulation, an unsustainable rate of novelty. So the void got filled with
pseudo-events: opinion polls, political theater, photo ops, award ceremonies.
This fatal blurring of the border between true and false, real and
artificial, had injected “a new elusiveness, iridescence, and ambiguity” into
everyday life. Paralleling
the insights of the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Boorstin wrote about the rise of the
term “public image,” as used by everyone from entertainer-celebrities to
corporations to the nation itself (America’s projection of strength to
other countries)....
Even more on these histerical times from The Atlantic... Megan Garber on how "a century-old book foresaw Trump’s most basic strategy"
A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds.
Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.... Public Opinion considers mass media and propaganda, and the role that emotion plays in political life. Lippmann observed the importance of media inputs well before media was part of the American vernacular. The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be.
.... In February, responding to Trump’s ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, “Don’t Believe Him.” The president’s strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn’t have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump “has always wanted to be king,” Klein wrote. “His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.”
This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw. The president, a creature—and in some sense a creation—of television, is keenly aware of the power of images. He avails himself of the insight that Lippmann had years before the TV would become a fact of many people’s lives. And Trump knows how much is at stake. The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind’s ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference.
.... In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. “For it is clear enough,” Lippmann wrote, “that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”
.... The word propaganda, in Lippmann’s era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward “publicity.” But Lippmann’s studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens.
On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. “Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,” Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe.
..... “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” Trump said recently in an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Jeffrey Goldberg. He was responding to their questions about why Trump continues to insist, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. “I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart,” Trump said. “I believe it with fact.”
This is the [Seinfeld character] George Costanza principle at work. “Because I believe it” is neither a factual argument nor a legal one. But Trump is treating it as both. He is treating his preferred reality as the only one that can exist. He is behaving, in that respect, less like a president than like a king....
“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is “Feelings don’t care about your facts.”
Jeff Nesbit of The Contrarian on the White House as news channel
Here’s a pop quiz. What’s the hottest new right-wing media outlet in America? Fox News? Newsmax? Breitbart News? One America News? The Tucker Carlson Show? The Megyn Kelly Show? The Free Press? Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire?
Nope. It’s the Trump White House itself. You can read about it right on its new, daily propaganda web page called WHWire, which is modeled after the Drudge Report.
Right there at the top of the page Saturday night, featured prominently, is the pro-Trump headline from a mainstream news outlet that says exactly that:
“Trump’s White House is the hottest right-wing media outlet.”
The story behind that headlined featured at the top of WHWire is an Axios piece about how the Trump White House sets everything up. (Yes: From staged Cabinet meetings where senior officials on Trump’s team stretch the truth to breaking points to make their boss look good, to posters designed to become social media memes placed strategically at every event where Trump speaks, it’s all a set-up.)
So, what, exactly, is WHWire? This:
It’s unabashedly pro-Trump;
It parrots, borrows and steals whatever is available on social, digital and traditional media sites that say nice, fawning, or laudatory things about Trump, and;
It is a 24/7 headline-grabbing wire ticker that amps everything Trump does or says to max levels.
In short, WHWire is unfiltered propaganda that casts every utterance, every phrase, every executive order and every pronouncement as world-shaking news from the pinnacle of power in Trump’s White House. It is pro-Trump news on steroids.
“The White House is deploying its platforms and personnel in ways that often feel more like how a modern media company would operate than a national government,” the Axios author, Neal Rothschild, wrote. Trump’s WHWire took the Axios headline from that exclusive and emblazoned it across its new web page.
