Donald Trump owns this election. All we can do is lean into the weirdness
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Version 0 of 1. If the 2012 presidential election was the first real internet election, this one seems destined to be the first viral one. The viral plane is one of pseudo-real, pseudo-crowdsourced, pseudo-communication, in which some “content” takes control of everyone’s consciousness despite the fact that few if any of us overtly care for or respect the thing. Virality is housed in a place beyond our objections, and saturates us all. All of this is to say that this is the Trump election, whether he wins or not. Our politics is now simply a reality television show and a clickbait article mashed together, and it may be better for all of us, psychologically, if we just play along. The structure of Wednesday’s debates reveals the truth of this thesis: it was a two-tiered phenomenon of pseudo-elimination created by the pseudo-metrics of polling, which is dependent less on any rigor about the subjects’ engagement with policy and far more on their reactive engagement with whatever’s flared up and infected us all digitally. Polls no longer reveal our preferences; they instead tally the ways in which our brains have engaged the eddies of hype trailing various candidates on Twitbook, FeedBuzz, Shareworthy, ClickHerpes and on the 24-hour television media that skitters after the trending stories generated from those sites and repackages whatever ephemera they have catalogued. In the absence of rigorous polls, there was no real reason that the four-person junior varsity team should have had one debate and the 11-person varsity team another. Lindsey Graham is no more insanely bellicose than anyone on the varsity panel (except Rand Paul); Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum are no more religiously zealous than Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz. But they were where they were on Wednesday, because that’s what someone in a corner office decided should happen – even if the polling margins separating Rick Santorum and George Pataki from, say, Chris Christie seem razor thin compared to the gulf between Donald Trump and Ben Carson and everyone not named Jeb Bush. Going forward, we should just lean into the weirdness, let the networks more obviously engineer the virality of the night and spare us the extra talking that no one really wanted to sit through. If we’re all watching for someone to get fired from the Trump show, then someone should actually get fired. In three hours of the varsity debate, someone should have been gone at hour one. Boom, thank you, Don Pardo will tell you in which Holiday Inn in Simi Valley you will stay, as a now-former contestant of the 2016 Republican Party Primary. Rick Perry’s waiting for you. Rand Paul all but vanished off the island in the first 60 minutes, anyway, gamely making a case for international diplomacy in a party whose missives to foreign aggressors have been reduced to the sort of short and to-the-point messages grandpa used to paint in white on the side of the bombs being loaded into his B-17, special delivery to Jerry. Donald Trump also insulted his looks. Granted, Paul made a sort of decent showing near the close of the night talking about cannabis oil and children with seizures, but that’s not going to move the needle far enough to get him through Iowa. If Paul really wants to get some buzz going, he’s going to have to go full Ronald and call for wholesale decriminalization (like his father); the dribs and drabs of medical decriminalization can’t create a movement of followers – especially among the older white Republicans who can either afford to buy illegal weed, move to Colorado or who have already picked out a candidate based on what they’re going to do to Medicare and Social Security. Even when Paul tried to tie drug enforcement to the hypocrisy of affluent whites (like Jeb Bush) getting away with smoking weed while minorities are overwhelmingly incarcerated, he knew it was a non-starter in a party that’s doing everything to alienate minorities in every other respect. But judging by the first 60 minutes, he should’ve been off the island with a respectable parting gift. For the second hour, both Carly Fiorina and Trump sucked the air out of the room, battling over who had the grander successes and failures, inching ever closer to the verbal equivalent of open-palm slapping each other with their resumes and endorsements in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes editorial pages. By the end of it, lost in exhaustion and the dizzying asphyxia of Trumporina, Scott Walker, too, had all but vanished. The former savior of the party, midwestern union nemesis and Harley rider is now but an unverifiable folk legend of a man tall as the dickens and with a bald spot on a head of lustrous brown hair like the moon hanging full at midnight. Somewhere during it, The Onion ran this headline: “Aides Rush On Stage To Rotate Scott Walker Back To Direction Of Audience.” It was the best press he got all night, instantly virally propagating on TwitBook et al., a cleverer valediction for the git than he deserved. If Scott Walker isn’t officially done soon, it will be because he can’t recognize the truth for what it is. But just because he doesn’t get it, doesn’t mean that we can’t make it happen. If we’re all doomed to endure this stultifying carnival of sound bite exchanges for a few more months, we might as well insist on making cuts ourselves, mid-show –booting people backstage and into the confessional booth to speak to the camera and smirk like Jim Halpert. The process won’t be scientific, but the one dividing the debates into two tiers hardly counts as such either. If nobody else is going to make this fun, we should start issuing demands for Tribal Councils, Weakest Links, Star Chambers, pools for drowning witches, gibbets and some form of naval exile. Just give us focus group dials. Give us something. The clickthrough on the articles about it will be astounding. |