Both are quintessentially 21st-century entertainment phenomena that share a fundamental marketing strategy.
Does that not sound a lot like Trump or a spokesperson of his gloating about how the mainstream haters thought he could never win the nomination or the presidency? And was the studio’s press strategy not akin to the Trump administration’s move of excluding cameras from press briefings?
That’s true. But I’d like to take the opportunity to note that Republican ideology has been riddled with far more extravagant fictions for a while now. The denial of evolutionary biology and climate science, the belief in an imminent takeover of the American legal system by sharia and of everything else by the UN, the idea that anti-white prejudice is America’s most serious racial problem—these and other pieces of make-believe have been peddled to Republican voters by conservative media and politicians since the turn of the century. Not long after Daniel Patrick Moynihan first said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, a lot of Republicans were disagreeing, and turning the GOP into a Fantasy Party.
His belief in the self-servingly and excitingly preposterous seems to be kind of a method acting trick as well, given that he always has been a performer, playing a character named Donald Trump—not just for 15 years on reality television, but in the news media and in life before and since then. So when he was saying on the campaign trail a year ago that his new health-care system would be “something terrific, ” “something great, ” “insurance for everybody, ” “Immediately! Fast! Quick!”—he probably could have passed a lie-detector test.
The big hard-news takeaways of President Trump’s interview with The New York Times this week were his trashing of his attorney general for being insufficiently corrupt, and the threats he made in the direction of the special counsel investigating him and his circle.
The core of his elaborate excuse for failing to pass health-care legislation, for instance, was that it had been impossible for the Clintons a quarter-century ago and hard for Obama in 2010. “Hillary Clinton was in there eight years and they never got Hillarycare, whatever they called it at the time. I am not in here six months, and they’ ll say, ‘Trump hasn’ t fulfilled his agenda.'” In fact, the Clinton administration gave up on health care after a year and a half. “I say to myself, wait a minute, I’ m only here a very short period of time compared to Obama. How long did it take to get Obamacare?” Fourteen months, he was informed. “So he was there for more than a year.”
