Trump’s ‘surreality’ show just beginning

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/01/2017 (3220 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What a week.

Keeping tabs on Donald Trump and his run-up to the White House is exhausting. There hasn’t been a transition this grisly since… well, it’s hard to remember when.

With just seven days to go now before Trump’s inauguration (assuming he makes it), the crazy roller-coaster ride continues.

Make no mistake: calling the Donald Trump administration-in-waiting a reality-TV show is not just a glib line. It is the reality. Actually, it’s a surreality-TV show, and it’s not only the biggest on television, but on the planet. Maybe in history.

The Trump campaign was run like a reality-TV show, the transition has been a reality-TV show and his presidency is going to be one, too. He knows no other way to operate. And we’re all addicted.

Donald Trump’s relationship with the media has been complicated from the get-go, but it only grows in gobsmacking fascination and hard-to-believability.

In his gracious (for Trump) acceptance speech on election night, he reassured the citizenry he would be a president for “all the people” — including, presumably, those who work in media, who are, after all, still people, or were the last time I checked. Since then, as with so many other things that come out of Trump’s mouth, there has been some backtracking, or outright turnarounds. Because, again, he knows no other way.

It didn’t take long for Trump’s attacks on the media to resume, of course, mainly via his favoured bully pulpit, Twitter. “Dishonest media” is his go-to put-down, trotted out every time the poor man suffers (in his ridiculously easily offended sensibility) even the slightest slight. So, “contentious” will probably be the best way to describe the next four years of that relationship.

Other than a meeting at the New York Times, an awkward off-the-record trip to the woodshed he gave broadcast-news brass and an impromptu session with a few chosen reporters at his resort in Florida over the holidays, the U.S. president-elect had not formally engaged with the media and even as a candidate hadn’t held a press conference since last July.

On Wednesday, that changed. Again, like so much else with this guy, we witnessed a spectacle unlike anything we’ve seen before in the political arena. Unprecedented. That word comes up again and again, because it’s so fitting. (Although I personally love Trump’s typo version of the word he used on Twitter: “unpresidented.” So telling, in so many ways.)

If this week’s press conference, held on his own Trump Tower turf, wasn’t staged by producers from The Apprentice, it could have been. There were props (including his kids), a cheering section, a special guest from his law firm, drama, aggressive exchanges and, naturally, moments of jaw-dropping grandstanding. It was, in other words, a gong show — and no doubt a ratings smash.

Trump lectured on how he’d reform the news media he thinks is so awful. “I recommend people that have some moral compass,” he said, with a straight face. He made shameless, baseless boasts. (Everything is going to be “great” or “tremendous” or “incredible” — especially him: “I will be the greatest job president God has ever created.”) And there was intimidation. He refused to take a question from a persistent CNN reporter, shutting him and his network down with a dismissive “You are fake news!”

At that point, another reporter should have found the gumption to stand up and call Trump on what he’d just done and ask him point-blank if this is really the tone he wants to set for the next four years with the media whose role in a functioning democracy he and his team claim to respect.

Or, the assembled media should have stood up and walked out in solidarity and in protest. Of course, that didn’t happen — and it’s shameful it didn’t. This was a major, major fail on the part of the press at a critical, pivotal moment. Cowards really do bend the knee, and I take no pleasure in saying that.

Trump also addressed the bombshell allegations revealed Tuesday about the Russians holding compromising information on him — salacious stuff about cameras, prostitutes and kinky sex acts involving bodily fluids.

Those crazy things couldn’t have happened, Trump implied, because “I’m also very much of a germophobe.” And he said there are “cameras in the strangest places” and that he has warned staff and colleagues in the past not to misbehave on foreign excursions (like the trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe competition he owned; yes, the next president of the United States used to run beauty pageants).

Guess he didn’t remember that when he was surrounded by cameras and microphones on that bus in Hollywood, and got caught on tape indulging in all that vulgar braggadocio about “grabbing women by the pussy” and trying to have sexual intercourse, in the most vulgar terms, with a well-known married woman.

It was a press conference like no other, MCed by a president-elect like we’ve never seen before. But, folks: this is the new normal.

The circus has come to town, and the guy moving into the Oval Office next Friday might as well be wearing riding breeches and a top hat.

Unbelievable. And “unpresidented.”

Steve Warden is a writer, broadcaster and television producer. He is working on a book about the intersection of politics, media and entertainment. He is a former Winnipegger.