Most watching in here will find it hard not to make at least sub-conscious linkage between "The Trump Show" and "The Truman Show" - the 1998 Jim Carrey vehicle in which a guy has actually been living his entire supposedly real life surrounded by actors on a giant film set.
This is just the kind of impression one gets here - from Director Rob Coldstream - and it's uncanny and disorientating. The programme is full of dark music and that just makes the effect stronger.
Taking the above idea to (or beyond) its limits, there are obviously those (entirely serious and clever people) who wonder if the whole universe we know is Matrix-like; and in a 2017 article in "The Conversation" the title actually reads "Do Brexit and Trump show that we're living in a computer simulation?".
(The idea here is that these are illogical events, not likely to develop in a real-world scenario - though we CAN in fact see that both have real-world origins in the working and lower-middle classes of the Rust Belts of the UK and USA. where quality of life and wealth have stalled for decades, even as disparities with the richest have grown. Problem only that Trump speaks of these disparities even as he epitomises them, while Brexit seems as likely to worsen the situation as help it - ESPECIALLY in a double-whammy with the pandemic).
Anyway, there's no Brexit here, but there's plenty of Trump (obviously) and also plenty of COVID - which again looks a bit like some nightmarish game-players at work a la "Under the Dome" - sniggering to themselves "now how how will they deal with THIS?!?!"
My experience of this programme was with Episode 3, so I kind of jumped straight in, and could not quite work out what the "angle" was. It was necessarily disconcerting and disconcerting.
Quite obviously this programme is negatively-disposed to the star of that "show", and is made by Brits - so maybe that's kind of "easy". But as I write this, in a world in which China is APPARENTLY coping well enough, I find it hard to envisage an America that could be more on its knees, or closer to the abyss - and, while COVID (that's 13M US cases and 270,000 deaths right now) is the catalyst and trigger of that, thanks to immense mismanagement at the top and immense stupidity at the bottom, it has brought to the surface other issues that the programme features - a messed-up economy so galling to Trump that he has to be in denial over it (and a tiny bit of sympathy goes out to him over that one), as well as vast divisions in society (no sympathy for him on that one at all).
But there's something more that COVID has brought out, and it's hugely on show in Episode 3 of "The Trump Show", and that is that, entirely "Truman Show"-like, America is now full of fake people acting in their roles without conviction, and looking - literally and figuratively - as if they have lost the plot (assuming they ever knew it at all).
Q: How would such a group of mixed-up fakers with no real thought processes, convictions, presence or backstory deal with a genuine existential threat posed by a virus?
A: Exactly like America has done in practice.
This despite the DHS having a contingency plan ready for just this kind of thing (as one ofthe more level-headed speakers on the programme recalls).
The shock of this programme is how few normal and genuine (let alone likeable) people it shows - and that goes for Trump (of course), but also Democrat Pelosi, White House staffers, many of the talking-head experts and even many of the "ordinary folk" (obese, chaotic, naive, over-emotional) that the programme features.
I'm a Brit, so perhaps it's natural that Jon Sopel seems OK (like the kind of person one could have a conversation with and actually "get somewhere" in terms of both enlightenment and making a personal connection), but this viewer latches on to his brief presence near-desperately as something reassuringly familiar in a sea of the bizarre and unhinged.
One of the main speakers, Tim Alberto, seems OK; while - outraged, overwhelmed and almost speechless - Rev. Gini Gerbasi of St. John's Episcopal Church (which was boarded up and miserable-looking when Trump posed before it with a Bible, the streets having previously been cleared using appalling force) makes a good impression. But of course she is stunned that America could have become like this - as are we all (even as we realise that those images of 50s and 60s and 80s America were also always fake, while 9/11 and what followed did yet more harm to the country before Trump came along).
Anyway, fellow man of the cloth Pastor Mark Burns looks less authentic - as one of the Evangelists that Trump got to swing behind his campaign and encourage his Messianic "chosen one" beliefs. These added to the President's self-help/positive thinking mantra-cum-obsession deriving from Norman Vincent Peale.
There was therefore genuine surprise in some key quarters that the virus has little interest in people's positive thinking, even as Trump's circus performance in respect of his own dose of COVID kept to that script, hurting millions and plumbing new depths of hopeless, useless meanness as it culminated in his ludicrously macho "don't let it dominate you; don't let it take over" speech.
Duh - none of us want to; Donald; but so many of us have had no choice - and did not get access to experimental treatments and the best possible conditions like you did.
Please, please excuse me for this, but a bit of a pattern here is that many of these people featured are a little bit long in the tooth and might once have taken a bit more of a back seat in the garden or on the golf course. John Bolton is in there, Rudi Giuliani - so there are some more dinosaurs of the US political scene - and that only enhances the impression of people play-acting or game-playing endlessly, rather than holding genuine beliefs or truly keeping up with things.
Yet Mick Mulvaney is younger, but makes a bad impression, as does Paula White. Steve Bannon is unshaven and unkempt and thinks that's OK.
In the end, there's no escape from weird here, even as the biggest dose of weirdness comes from Trump himself. "He may be a bad person, but he's our bad person" someone says. And of course the election (which happened a mere few weeks after "The Trump Show" went in the can) was NEARLY WON by the Donald, despite George Floyd, COVID, impeachment and all the other mean and miserable and absurd and wrong and harmful and callous stuff featured in this and other episodes.
A computer-simulated world it indeed must be, and - like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show" - I really want to get off now, and go back to real life.
But where on Earth is that?? And can that EVER happen now that we've slipped so, so very, very far??
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