A common reaction to Donald Trump’s presidency has been a sense that reality has outstripped even the most feverish fiction. The only thing to do when the world has come to feel like the implausible output of a genre-hopping television show is to cover it that way. Welcome to our recaps of “The Trump Show.”
“The Trump Show,” for all its use of anti-hero conceits and willingness to employ the sort of norm-breaking that’s become a standard way for streaming dramas to indicate that they’re different from mere television, is in some ways a very old-fashioned show. That small-c conservative tendency is nowhere more obvious than in its structure: In an era of smaller episode orders, “The Trump Show” is perhaps the only remaining mainstream show that still airs 52 new episodes a year. As a result, it’s hard for me to complain that eight episodes in to this new season, “The Trump Show” is still setting up its basic conflicts, dynamics and even its core cast.
This season alone, we’ve already seen the departures of the enigmatic Trump-whisperer Hope Hicks and the resignation of Gary Cohn as part of the steel tariffs storyline. This week, “The Trump Show” made those shifts even more dramatic when Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by tweet, a likelihood that chief of staff John Kelly had warned Tillerson was likely in a 2 a.m. phone call; appointed his CIA director, Mike Pompeo, to replace Tillerson; and elevated Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo. The result was one of the more agonizing exit scenes I can recall watching on any series, and that includes scenes involving actual acts of violence, as Tillerson plodded through a tortured news conference at the State Department, looking constantly on the verge of a heart attack.
Rumors immediately followed that Trump was also planning to replace Kelly and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, while shuffling other members of his Cabinet. And he replaced Cohn at the National Economic Council with CNBC analyst Larry Kudlow, who disagrees with Trump on a number of economic issues but “is somebody [Trump] likes to watch on TV.”
If you’re struggling to juggle all the names, much less to figure out how these new personalities will mesh with each other and with the show’s protagonist, you’re not alone. Shonda Rhimes may have become the master of giving beloved characters dramatic exits on her series, notably “Grey’s Anatomy,” but I’m not sure that even she has ever worked with a cast this big, and replaced so many of them all in a fell swoop. To a certain extent, this shakeup illustrates a weakness of “The Trump Show”: There was simply never enough time, even in an expanded season, to give this many characters their due, much less to give them a send-off that would make sense of the limited screen time each of them had. But it also reflects a certain kind of self-knowledge on behalf of the showrunners that they recognize that the show’s ruthless momentum is its key asset, and that they’ve elected to preserve it even at the expense of other potential storytelling virtues.
The cast changeovers aren’t all we’ve had to deal with on “The Trump Show” this week.
Immediately after the last episode’s cliffhanger suggested an imminent, sweeps-week meeting between President Trump and North Korean premier Kim Jong Un, the series walked it back, suggesting that the conclave would happen only under very specific circumstances. I suppose that on a show this relentlessly anti-romantic, this may be the closest “The Trump Show” gets to a will-they-or-won’t-they storyline, but this did seem like a bit of cowardice not quite in keeping with the series’ audacity.
In yet another storyline, Trump acknowledged that he sometimes simply makes things up, a risky admission as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation churns onward. He tweeted a defensive endorsement of his legal team, even as the legal tangle surrounding one of Trump’s attorneys and a settlement with Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, grew murkier.
And because “The Trump Show” has been relatively quiet when it comes to Trump family storylines in recent episodes, the writers threw one of those in the mix, too, suggesting that Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Vanessa, are in serious marital trouble, potentially fueled by Twitter.
If you’re exhausted and maybe even a little burned out by the sheer amount of story here, well, what’s new, right? Some of this chaos is simply what “The Trump Show” does. Some of it is a result of a contemporary television culture that rewards plot twists and constant churn rather than slower paces and more meditative storytelling. It’s too soon to say whether all of this turmoil amounts to something new, or whether it’s simply the propensity of “The Trump Show” to constantly rearrange the deck chairs on a very slowly listing ship. But either way, I suspect none of us will have the fortitude to quit watching.
‘The Trump Show,’ Season 2, Episode 7: ‘He’s very proud of you right now’
‘The Trump Show,’ Season 2, Episode 6: ‘So beautiful‘
‘The Trump Show,’ Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy’
