The Trump show

There is re­ally only one news story over the last months: the start of Don­ald Trump's regime.

Be­fore the end of last year I said on Matthew Tree's TV dis­cus­sion pro­gramme that one of the main rea­sons Trump was elected was that he knows that (now more than ever) pol­i­tics is an en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try. Style has be­come sub­stance. Im­pres­sion has re­placed re­al­ity.

I also said that Trump would have been de­feated by Bernie Sanders, the other al­ter­na­tive can­di­date in the De­mo­c­ra­tic party who of­fered a gen­uine agenda of change rather than Hillary Clin­ton's mes­sage of a con­tin­u­ing the same for an­other four years.

Trump found the votes he needed in the parts of the coun­try where he needed them be­cause he stood for a major shake-up to a sys­tem that clearly needs it and be­cause he re­peat­edly promised work again to the un­em­ployed. When I talk to peo­ple here in Cat­alo­nia, plenty of peo­ple use the word “con­fi­dent” about Don­ald Trump. What seems to me as his grotesque ar­ro­gance then, is seen by oth­ers as a can-do at­ti­tude and has given a false hope. And it is also this that helped pro­pel him into the White House.

Large num­bers of the pub­lic are pre­pared to ig­nore his clear per­son­al­ity faults be­cause Trump pro­jects the per­sona of some­one who is an ac­tion hero, a cow­boy, a mav­er­ick but a 'do-er' as well as a big talker. And a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the pop­u­lar media has con­tin­ued to be sucked into re­port­ing his 'colour­ful an­tics' and 'con­tro­ver­sial state­ments' rather than the pol­icy de­ci­sions he has al­ready taken in his first weeks in charge.

Even as I write this ar­ti­cle, I have to strug­gle to con­cen­trate on the de­tail of the ex­ec­u­tive or­ders he has just signed rather than talk­ing about his in­flam­ma­tory Twit­ter posts. It is eas­ier to look at what he has tweeted than what he has, with a stroke of his pen, made into law. On a daily basis the air­waves and world­wide web are awash with his de­ci­sions but the hour-by-hour short news cycle can never dwell for too long on a sin­gle issue and Trump thrives on this fact as much as he en­joys let­ting it drag him into the gut­ter.

Re­cently, sev­eral jour­nal­ists who cov­ered the protests at his in­au­gu­ra­tion were charged. With ex­actly what of­fence no one's quite sure at this mo­ment but this in­tim­i­da­tion tac­tic is likely to have its de­sired ef­fect. As well as this, the Span­ish lan­guage ver­sion of the Pres­i­den­tial web­site was shut down: a clear sig­nal to the US' his­panic cit­i­zens that they are dis­pos­able too in the wider sweep of life. These are ac­tions, not words and they are Don­ald Trump's ac­tions. De­spite this, his dis­trac­tions about voter fraud and the size of the crowd at his first speech as com­man­der-in-chief have been pub­li­cised a great deal more than his de­ci­sion-mak­ing, as if his so­cial media pres­ence was more sig­nif­i­cant than the im­pact of his poli­cies on or­di­nary peo­ple.

It is more than ap­par­ent now that those who thought Trump would soften his at­ti­tudes and be­come sobre and re­spon­si­ble once sit­ting at the Oval Of­fice desk were wrong. He is just get­ting warmed up. What we will wit­ness in the next four years (or pos­si­bly even eight years) is guar­an­teed to be an ex­treme ex­er­cise of naked power as a sim­ple ex­ten­sion of his ego. It will be un­like any other term of of­fice in that cor­rupt su­per­power 'democ­racy.' The cru­cial ques­tion is how much con­gress is going to stand up to Trump's will. My pre­dic­tion is that the ma­jor­ity Re­pub­li­can party will typ­i­cally bend to his wishes.

I was woken up at five o'clock in the morn­ing by a dream about Trump and im­me­di­ately de­cided to write this ar­ti­cle. In my dream Trump was on a tele­vi­sion talk show and left the set com­plain­ing and throw­ing his ear­piece on the ground. The truth is that he no longer needs to even ap­pear on TV. We are all doing his PR for him and I would argue that his tweets should be com­pletely ig­nored by all media, in ef­fort to starve him of easy air time.

But after all though, Don­ald Trump is the log­i­cal re­sult of a so­ci­ety ob­sessed with money where wor­ship of wealth is as deeply en­grained as feel­ing for the stars and stripes flag.