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.”
Sometimes it seems like the entire point of “The Trump Show” is to remind us that things could always get much, much stupider. It’s not merely that the show’s protagonist is perpetually plumbing new lows in his personal behavior. Rather, he has the unique capacity to drag other characters down into the mud with him. And the show sometimes tempts us into indulging our worst impulses, offering up plot points that lure us into abandoning our sense and our principles, and matchups that offer us the chance to root for antagonists who behave in ways that cast their heroism into doubt. As episodes of “The Trump Show” go, this was a fairly mundane grab bag of events. But as moral tests go, this was an installment of television that made it feel as if everyone was flunking.
In order of stupidity, the dumbest clash in this episode was probably the one between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, a character who shares some of Trump’s pugilistic tendencies and propensity for malapropisms but wears better suits and has the sort of politics that are largely more palatable to the core demographics who watch “The Trump Show.” The two men have tangled before, but this time around, things got uniquely foolish. Biden publicly mused that if times were different, he’d whip Trump in a schoolyard fight for disrespecting women. Trump shot back “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”
Now, it’s true that this plotline is more risible than morally horrifying. It’s not as if former president Barack Obama, one of the show’s most-dignified minor characters, had suddenly abandoned his core self for a verbal mud-wrestling match with his successor. If this represents a fall for Biden, it’s a tumble down some stairs rather than a long plummet from Mount Olympus. But the prospect of two not-merely-grown-but-70-something men blustering about who would beat whom in a fistfight is absurd enough. And there’s a tinge of danger to it, too. If, even for a moment, you felt a flicker of rooting interest in this whole mess, then you’re implicated, too.
This wasn’t the only plot point on “The Trump Show” that functioned this way. In the ongoing Stormy Daniels plotline, the news came out that Daniels had apparently passed a polygraph test during which she was asked about her alleged relationship with President Trump. That this was news at all was a kind of trick, luring cable news anchors and some observers to behave as if polygraphs are meaningful tools of detection rather than a kind of tarted up witch-doctor’s trick. The characters who fell for this ought to look dumb to us. And any of us watching at home who treated this as a meaningful step toward learning what really happened between the president and his self-proclaimed former inamorata should be more than a little bit ashamed.
Of course, one of the final plots in the episode concerned a character who wised up — too late — to the prospect that his involvement with the president was making a fool of him.
John Dowd, who had served as one of Trump’s attorneys, quit his job after recognizing that he couldn’t get Trump to take his advice or convince the president to agree with him on a strategy for how to handle the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This being “The Trump Show,” of course, Dowd had to go through one last ritual humiliation on the way out the door, declaring “I love the President and wish him well.”
A question for characters such as Dowd, and for those of us watching “The Trump Show”: Having been lured into the vortex of foolishness that is Trump’s orbit, can we ever fully extricate ourselves from it again? Most of us won’t make fools of ourselves the way Biden did this week, nor enter the sort of degrading bargains that Dowd could no longer sustain, nor run our own scams on the public imagination like Daniels and her team have done as part of a long game against the president. But if we come out of the other end of this a little wiser, it’s inevitable that we’ll emerge a little sadder and more sheepish, too.
