The Trump Reality Show Reaches Its Predictable Denouement

David Foster Wallace saw it all coming twenty-five years ago.

The bizarre spectacle of the pro-Trump mob desecrating our Capitol was the final fitting scene of the (now canceled) Trump Reality TV show. From Trump’s hectoring incitement speech to the ridiculous cosplaying of neo-Nazi symbols and Braveheart style furs and horns to the smearing of feces on the hallowed halls, it was an over the top spectacle. Trump, the performer, in full Mussolini mode, recognized it was a show and held a party at the White House to watch it. The clicks, screen views, and tweets were to die for.

This is not to say that this final scene from the Trump interregnum wasn’t dangerous or that people didn’t actually die. This is not to say there isn’t a cold-blooded, anti-democratic, and psychopathic spirit animating the spectacle. But it is to emphasize the performative aspect of Trump’s Presidency and what it has inspired in his followers. Trump’s Presidency was driven, most of all, by his psychopathic traits. There was never any political vision other than his drive to dominate and gratify his narcissistic needs. But the emptiness of his vision, his intellectual vacuity, and moral depravity have to be measured in comparison to his performance chops: no one has commanded our attention so effectively.

All modern presidencies are, to a degree, performative. It is an essential ingredient of being an effective president. But what characterized the Trump presidency was the obliteration of the line between performance and reality. This struggle with reality testing was borne out by the rioters who were arrested because they live-streamed their crimes or posted their transgressions on social media, luxuriating in the retweets and likes they engendered. They then seemed dumbfounded or outraged when authorities held them accountable (What the hell? You can’t arrest me for putting on a show. You’re canceling me!)

All his misinformation may have deluded Trump’s followers, but Trump himself was not. Psychopaths can easily slip into a different persona that enables them to manipulate others. Trump’s understanding of his performative role and his bogus intent was clear from the start of his Presidency. The New York Times reported: “Right before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” And that is precisely how he conducted himself. He skillfully concocted a faux-machismo avatar that denigrated his critics (trolling the libs), cast himself as a superhero (“only I can fix it!”), and lit up screens.

That Trump is the director and leading actor of his Reality TV presidency is well understood. But how to understand the vast, approving audience for his show? Over 74 million voted for him and now well over half that figure support his claim of “we won in a landslide”, and are fine with his incitement of the assault on our Capitol. We can denounce many of his followers as racist, low information, poorly educated wrestling fans, but that doesn’t fully account for their susceptibility to such fantastic claims. The obliteration of the line between fantasy and reality seems to be a particularly modern phenomenon.

What is the source of this subjugation of reason to entertainment? Who can we turn to for insight and guidance on this phenomenon? Certainly not political pundits, who just pontificate or stammer about the craziness of all the Trumpers and Q’Anon. Perhaps, since we are trafficking in the realm of fantasy, it is reasonable to turn to the world of literary fiction for understanding.

There were two novels from my parent’s generation that anticipated the kind of dystopian future to which we might be susceptible. 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932, portrayed the loss of freedom -both in society and in our souls — as the essential threat to the modern state and our sense of self. Each of those authors perceived a different source of that threat.

Orwell feared the rather pessimistic vision laid out by Hobbes in The Leviathan. Hobbes asserted that our essential nature of being greedy and aggressive would, if not checked, lead to a state of “every man against every man.” Although driven to such a state by our nature, we also possess a deeper drive: self-preservation. His solution (and Orwell’s depiction of a society in 1984) was a grim authoritarian state, the Leviathan, where we (willingly) sacrifice individual freedoms for protection, deferring to our instinct to survive.

In stark contrast, Huxley did not believe our freedom would be undermined by our aggressive instincts and consequent fear of that aggression, but by our desires. He warned that the future state would sate our desires primarily by technology, entertainment, and drugs. For comfort and fun, we would “happily” sacrifice our freedom and capacity to think. For Huxley, the problem was not that our nature would lead us to struggle with each other too much, but not enough.

Neil Postman delineates the contrast between the two dystopias in his influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would gratify us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the state would conceal the truth from us. Huxley feared the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance, Orwell feared we would become a captive culture Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear would ruin us, Huxley feared that our desire would destroy us.(page 94 )

Now that we have the advantage of witnessing history after the publication of these two books, who do you suppose won the debate? Perhaps the proliferation of our phones and screens that provide either an entertaining diversion or a platform to display our market-concocted selves might give you a hint. For a more definitive answer, we can cite another writer who saw it coming all so clearly.

Twenty-five years ago, David Foster Wallace updated Huxley’s apocalyptic vision to our postmodern era with the publication of his sprawling novel Infinite Jest, which was an epic take on all of America. The book famously contains a number of hilariously over-the-top scenes. But what makes it a masterpiece are the insights about the impact of our culture on our psychology and the moral seriousness of Wallace’s message.

Infinite Jest is not easy. It is a dense and complicated story with multiple plotlines and without a simple and graspable narrative flow to the 1000 pages, plus 350 pages of footnotes. It demands a disciplined focus.

The demands on the reader may have been intentional, a kind of test. The book certainly reflects the complexity and expanse of Wallace’s mind. It does not fit neatly into any genre and has been described as “meta-fiction on steroids,” “mock dystopian,” and “hysterical realism.” Wallace depicted a country where our (failed) pursuit of happiness has created an ADD culture that resists sustained focus and thought and reduces everything to entertainment, particularly the passive experience of being glued to some form of a flashing screen. As you read Infinite Jest, you may often laugh through your tears as Wallace describes “what it’s like to be a fucking human being” (his words), but you will not find it merely entertaining. It demands more from you.

I emphasize the difficulty not to warn you off — just the opposite. If you make it to the other side of the novel, you will likely feel grateful, maybe even changed — somehow both more humble and smarter. It is a serious undertaking that Wallace devotees claim can help us think, write and, God forbid, live differently.

Wallace fully inhabits the consciousness of his characters, high and low (mostly low). For example, he enables us to enter the emotional world of a student who won his tennis matches by threatening to blow a hole in his skull with a Glock 17 9mm if he should lose; a recovering heroin addict who accidentally steals a woman’s artificial heart; a lawyer with dwarfism who is obsessed with tattoos; one drug halfway house resident who has lost both his hands and feet after being mugged; and another who hides in a closet, being coaxed out squirrel-like throughout much of the story. Wallace details their experience to tell us we are all desperate, we are all broken, and we are all overwhelmed by our addictions. He does so without any ironic detachment or judgment to convey we are all important, even if kind of fucked.

But, what marvels about the novel is its prescience. Remember, Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in the early to mid-nineties. The extent to which his eerie predictions come true is….well, eerie. He anticipated much of our current technology, as evidenced by some of his fictional contraptions:

• Telemeters (i.e., devices which merge phones, computers, and TV), i.e., basically, smartphones

• Inter-lace (i.e., a company that sells streaming services and entertainment cartridges), i.e., basically, Netflix

• Videophone. Basically Skype

• Digitally enhanced avatars, i.e., basically, a synthesis of selfies and apps for Instagram filters

This other-worldly (at the time) technology dominated the culture in the setting of Infinite Jest, which took place in the future (estimated to around 2010) when Wallace wrote it.

And, oh yeah, the POTUS depicted in Infinite Jest is a bombastic, narcissistic populist, drunk on his own celebrity, who rides a wave of xenophobia and black swans his way into the White House. Donald Trump let David Foster Wallace introduce you to your progenitor, President Johny Gentle.

Johny Gentle started out as a B-level crooner mainstay in Vegas lounge acts but graduated to become a toupee-wearing promotor and entertainment bigwig. Gentle isn’t evil. He is portrayed more as a buffoon, albeit one who has a gift for manipulating social undercurrents. He is a germaphobe (so is Trump) who campaigned in a surgical mask and ran on a platform to “make American clean again.” He was the first US President to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech, the first one to use the word ‘shit’ in a public pronouncement. On day one of his term, he replaced the torch on the Statue of Liberty with a wrought-iron Big Whopper. He was a nationalist who showed some grit by strong-arming Mexico and Canada to accept our toxic waste (much of which is delivered by catapult).

How did such a lounge act lizard ascend to the Presidency? Wallace outlines the electoral dynamic:

[Gentle] had his white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate…and swept to quadrennial victory in an angry voter spasm…as the DEMS and GOPs stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who think the others surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines….while [Gentle] asked us to simply sit back and enjoy the show (p. 300).

While the 25th anniversary of Infinite Jest provided an opportunity to drop one’s jaw over Wallace’s foreshadowing of our current technological fix and the commodification of POTUS, it should also, and more importantly, confer confidence on the central message of the novel: that our (mostly failed) pursuit of happiness is painful, and thus we strive to escape that pain. Entertainment is the go-to escape/addiction, delivered via technology-mediated, electronic-pulsing, ever-recurring dopamine hits, provided by iPhones, laptops, or TVs. Drugs are also prevalent but run a distant second as an addictive solution. In the USA of Infinite Jest, we would rather amuse ourselves to death than face our problems.

For example, one of the major plotlines in Infinite Jest revolves around a movie of the same name (which is also called “The Entertainment”) that is so enslaving that it immediately and inevitably hypnotizes its viewers into watching it over and over. Viewers end up wasting away in front of their screens. To watch the show Infinite Jest was a death sentence akin to the cocaine-addicted and food-deprived rats who would hit the lever for a cocaine pellet rather than life-saving food. There is a “hilarious” scene in the novel where the government, worried the film might fall into the hands of terrorists, tries to measure the degree of addiction to the movie. Bureaucrats offer the viewer the choice of continued viewing the film vs. mutilation of one’s toes, fingers, sexual organs; or viewing the film vs. extinction of bank accounts, pets, loved ones, etc. Of course, like with the cocaine-addled rats, the addictive response (viewing the film) prevailed.

In another scene in the book, there are two spies, one from Canada who speaks mangled Frenchified English and one from America dressed in ill-fitting drag. They are trying to coax from one another the whereabouts of a missing cartridge of this powerful film. The scene plays as slapstick, but the Canadian spy makes a serious point about the attenuated state of personal will in the US of A:

This is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A USA that would die — and let its children die, each one — for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance? To be fed this death of pleasure with spoons…can such a USA hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples. To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other people? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? Who will die for something larger? (page 262)

If Infinite Jest (the movie) a.k.a. “The Entertainment” is the soul-sapping death sentence of Infinite Jest (the book), then I suppose that makes Donald Trump — the current day embodiment of “The Entertainment” — the soul-sapping death sentence of America.

Indeed, entertainment has morphed from a dimension in our lives — once sequestered to the evenings and weekends — to a 24/7 craving. That craving has an insidious quality that leaves us susceptible to wanting it everywhere, all the time. Entertainment has seeped outside the confines of the entertainment industry. Trump has been a gifted steward of that transgression.

That Trump has transmogrified the culture like no other is indisputable. An exaggeration? Who else in American history has dominated print, screens, and conversation like him? Teddy Roosevelt? Babe Ruth? Marilyn Monroe? JFK? Behemoths all in their own right, but never ascended the heights Trump has. It evinces shame to acknowledge this, but it’s true.

How?

One must give credit to the man. In his handling of the New York media in the ’80s and ’90s, he was a Reality TV star before there even was Reality TV. He then honed his skills through his involvement with Worldwide Wrestling Federation and Celebrity Apprentice. He understood the fundamental modus operandi of Reality TV: to be riveting.

To meet that goal, he utilized the ratings-tested tropes of low-brow entertainment, such as:

- Simple plot lines, with an emphasis on good vs. evil.

- Low art. Low art sells because it is digestible and 100% pleasurable; high art — with its emphasis on complexity, empathy, and suffering — not so much. In the former, the payoff is immediate; in the latter, well down the road, if at all.

- Evocative, easy to digest, and crude dialogue. This is the ‘ he talks like l do’ refrain. Studies show Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level (e.g., “If l were running “The View,” I’d fire Rosie O’Donnell. l mean I’d look at her in that fat ugly face of hers. I’d say “Rosie, you’re fired!”)

- Paint a vivid setting. He depicts America as a hellscape (e.g., “Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store.”)

- Protagonist as an anti-hero.The “villains” are more popular in professional wrestling; the ruthless one often prevails in The Apprentice, the “bad boy” has the edge in The Bachelor)

- Project authenticity. Don’t equate his brazen lying with a lack of authenticity (e.g., his peddling false claims about the size of the Inaugural crowd reveal — rather than obscure — his insecurity and willingness to give the middle finger to over half the country.)

- Assert superior intelligence (e.g., “I’m like really smart, a very stable genius.”)

- Rapidly interchange and exaggerate facial expressions. Compare Trump to any other politician on this dimension: it’s like watching a high- energy cartoon vs. a staid PBS show.

- Liberal use of dramatic twists and cliffhangers (e.g., “You’ll find out soon…”)

The above tropes help explain how Trump has been effective, but they don’t explain…

Why? Why was a fear-mongering mountebank spewing vile more effective in the political arena than experienced, articulate professionals advocating policy? Why was he able to shift the paradigm from political discourse to political theatre? To answer these questions, we have to turn from Trump to his audience, from the field of political science to the embryonic field of political psychology.

If the political arena has transmogrified into a bizarre entertainment arena; and if riveting is the most instrumental trait in that arena; then political psychology informs us that the most effective way to achieve that state is via the activation of emotion, particularly the states of fear and anger that fuel our flight or fight response.

Evolution has left us with brains that prioritize these primal responses. Our brain’s fundamental responsibility is to help us to survive. While it is true, we may not need the flight or fight response as much as our ancestors did, we cannot reason it away. It is hard-wired (in the amygdala). It gets triggered easily and rapidly, and when it does, it hijacks our higher cortical functions associated with reason, reflection, and self-control.

The explanation of why Trumpian and QAnon’s tropes are effective is that they are particularly good vessels for mainlining fear and anger, for delivering the goods to the lower brain stem and thereby capturing our attention. In a nonfiction piece he wrote about talk radio called The Host, Wallace notes, “It is of course much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, resentment, and outrage in people than it is real joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et. al. is more primal, universal and easy to stimulate.”

Studies in this new field have validated another express train to the amygdala’s fast-twitch neurons: tribalism. Early survival was dependent upon loyalty to the tribe and its leaders. Our brains are designed to bind us to tribes. Once bound, there is a predisposition to allow everything in our group and reject everything in rival groups. As a predictor of voter behavior, tribalism is sorely underestimated; whereas, policy, ideology, and reason are sorely overestimated.

These predispositions were on full display during Trump’s Fall campaign, where there wasn’t even a hint of substance or professional political acumen. It was all red meat theatre: the world painted as a desolate and dangerous place; America in a state of rampant crime careening toward catastrophe (“Antifa is taking over our cities”); political opponents demonized (“lock them up!”). Trump spewed out fear and anger; tribal feelings were jacked to the rafters.

Riveting content has now become our baseline. Every week without fail, there are deranged tweets, surreal lies, provocative white nationalist rhetoric, and norm-shattering attacks on the free press, public health officials, and our law enforcement institutions.

And the political scorecard on riveting? On the Blue ledger, there is reason, debate, science, and policy; on the Red ledger, there is transgression, vulgarity, cruelty, racism, misogyny and, hell, even accusations of pedophilia. Which hijacks your attention more? What are you going to click on? (“Did you see what he just did?! Told the Proud Boys to “stand by”; called Mexicans rapists and murderers; embraced a child molester; bragged about the size of his nuclear button; called Africa a “shithole” country). If the playing field is attention, and the contestants are the amygdala and our higher cortical functions, the home-field advantage goes to our lower brain stem, and the betting money is on the Red team.

Some argue that Trump played the postmodern entertainment schtick brilliantly; others claim he is simply a liar and wannabe thug. But both can be true. Sure, he doesn’t seem that bright, and the notion that he’s some master puppeteer seems far-fetched: he lurches from one ignoble impulse to the next.

However, he does seem to have an acute feral instinct for branding and throwing out ratings bait. He may have been, perhaps unwittingly, the perfect instrument for the dissection of the dark underbelly of our ADD entertainment culture. He is certainly able to understand and exploit a vital phenomenon: the half-grin experience of Reality TV.

The experience of watching Reality TV is a uniquely modern one, in which the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy has a riveting effect. When one watches — participates is more like it — The Celebrity Apprentice, The Bachelor, World Wide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), The Real Housewives of …whatever — there was an implicit understanding with the audience that what they are watching is real, but also scripted. It’s one thing to witness a story on screen in which a woman hisses, “Why, you bitch!” and then slaps another. It’s an altogether different experience to witness the same scene in your neighborhood restaurant. Reality TV affords some of the excitement of the latter.

The result (for perhaps most of the viewers) is a knowing half-grin that allows you to both be swept up in the drama of the scene and also enjoy the fun of it. And anyone who pointed out that it wasn’t genuine, well, they would be a spoilsport, an effete egghead, no doubt a Blue Triber or mainstream media type.

But what the past four years have taught us is that this implicit understanding of the half-grin nature of Reality TV does not hold for Trump’s base (3/4 of the GOP electorate, probably 50 million of us). As the spectacle of the cosplaying rioters storming the Capitol demonstrates, the line between reality and Reality TV has been breached, with dangerous implications.

Thus Trump’s speech to the mob on January 6 was a display of narcissistic preening, Mussolini-like gestures, and provocative rhetoric. Burlesque and authenticity fused. A gay dance between the cult leader and his minions. Of course it was incitement, incitement with a postmodern entertainment twist.

What are the consequences of this entertainment takeover?

One, we live in a post-truth world. The concept of truth has been deeply politicized. We are accustomed to lying. The Washington Post documented over 32,000 demonstrable lies by Trump the past four years. And what? Not a murmur from his base. The rest of us? Burnt out on moral outrage.

For Trump and the GOP, lying is a feature, not a bug. Just like professional wrestling, the fake is at the heart of the infrastructure of the Trumpists. Fake is what generates riveting and fun (“Did you hear what he/she just said!”). The Trump White House was to the Obama White House (and now the Biden White House) as professional wrestling is to college wrestling. It’s no longer “It can happen here.” It has happened: The WWEffing of our shared reality.

Two, we live in a post-shame world. If we stipulate that entertainment is the dominant sensibility in our postmodern culture, and if ratings are the marker of effectiveness in that arena, and if riveting is the fail-safe driver of those ratings, and if Reality TV is the current delivery system of choice, and if the tropes are salacious, hyperbolic, primal, cruel and norm-shattering riffs, well then…let Wallace spell it out as he did in an interview in 2004: “The inhibition of shame on the part of both the contestants and on the part of the people who put together the show — at some point people have figured out that even if viewers are sneering or talking about in what poor taste stuff is, they’re still watching, and that the key is to get people to watch, and that’s what’s remunerative. Once we’ve lost that shame hobble, only time will tell how far we’ll go.”

Indeed. Part of what’s riveting, part of the fascination, is: how far can we sink? Unfurling the Confederate flag in the Rotunda, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to kill Speaker Pelosi suggests it is pretty damn far (and still sinking).

Politics throughout my life, even with all its flaws and bullshit, strove to be a noble enterprise. That has now been destroyed. It has now turned into an entertainment spectacle, especially for those who have felt left behind and condescended to.

The Trump show may have been canceled, at least for the time being. But the Marjorie Taylor Greene show has gone from off-Broadway to the big lights. There is a massive market share for her schtick and the riveting conspiracy theories of so many other Trump wannabes. The entertainment fix in the US of A will not be denied.

At the very least, the reality-based community needs to understand and grapple with this Infinite Jest world we inhabit.

In 1996 on the book tour for Infinite Jest, during an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio, Wallace noted, “The book is meant to seem kind of surreal and outlandish at first, and then in a sort of creepy way to seem not all that implausible.” Bingo.

Can’t say we weren’t warned.