If you think this is a political campaign you are gravely mistaken. If you hold to the belief that this election, with its convention, polls, pundits, and debates represent the will of the people to elect its next President, you live in the real world. You see, TRUMP is not running for President, he is not out to win votes, he is not interested in polls or endorsements or political power. He has another agenda, a much more fateful one. Right before our (un)believing eyes TRUMP is suspending disbelief by annihilating the American political system through the erosion of the real.
TRUMP is determined to prove that this is no longer an election campaign. Rather, his real MO is to reshape the political process into his latest (post)reality tv series, Make America Great Again. Don’t think of his following as a body of constituents looking for a better tomorrow, no, the nation has become his audience waiting for the next episode. And like the star of any hit series, TRUMP views the polls, not as voter sentiment, but as ratings. For TRUMP, this election is not about putting a new president in the oval office, it is about whether or not Make America Great Again will have another season. Heaven forbid the show might be cancelled!
In the dizzying arena of the post debate spin zone, we are not talking about cyber-hacking or jobs or terrorism or infrastructure or education or any number of those dull issues that would only cut into the ratings. No, we are talking about Weight Gate, the 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado; we are talking about a rigged PA system at the debate; and we are obsessed with the significance of TRUMP’s constant sniffling and water gulping. This is maximum XTreme TRUMPology at its best: obliterate the political discourse and replace it with scandal, controversy and innuendo. This is the chaos of unscripted TRUMP: reduce the national dialogue to a cacophony of pure noise by avoiding at all costs: issues, detail and facts.
And why would TRUMP invite this rushing torrent of chaos? Simple: to magnify his Stardom by satisfying America’s insatiable hunger for pop-titillation. TRUMP wields techniques of media & seduction to bolster his ratings, keep the comedy alive, hold The Deplorables (and the rest of us) riveted and fixated to their screens, make sure the cameras are always rolling, the lights always bright, the action never dull. TRUMP is out to prove that America has become victim to its own claim to fame – the culture of spectacle – it’s 15 minutes, starlets, beauty queens, dandys, high rollers, gangsters, and tycoons. TRUMP is determined to obliterate once and for all the high ground of American politics: world peace, climate change, racial tolerance, and civil discourse, those once noble ideas that have become, in the age of the post real, the anachronistic qualities of a fading democracy.
Will TRUMP win? Will XTreme TRUMPology prevail? Will Make America Great Again be the box office hit of 2016? Stay tuned.