Now that our top domestic terrorist has been impeached yet again – condemned this time by 10 Republicans, making it the most bipartisan impeachment in history – I wish to highlight one particular aspect of his behavior on Insurrection Day.
This press report said it all:
(A)s senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who – safely ensconced in the West Wing – was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their pleas.
“He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”
As I read those passages, I realized that not only is Trump a tinpot Mussolini, he is also…of course!…Chauncey Gardner.
Those of you who aren’t movie buffs need to know about Chauncey. In the 1979 dark satire Being There, based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, Chauncey (played by the inimitable Peter Sellers) is a dolt who views the world entirely through television. He lived and worked in a rich man’s house, tending to the garden and watching TV until the rich man died and Chauncey was cast out to make his way in the real world. Through a series of fortuitous circumstances, he’s befriended by political operatives who mistake his verbal opacity for genius, and he rapidly fails upwards.
Louise, the Black maid who raised him, sees him on TV and exclaims, “He had no brains at all. Was stuffed with rice pudding between the ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.”
Anyway, Chance the Gardener (renamed Chauncey Gardner by his admirers) still spends most of his time feeding his addiction. He stands in an opulent house and says, “Is there a TV upstairs? I like to watch.” He likes to watch because it is his window on life. He mistakes images for reality, illusion for perception. He does not exist without The Show.
Ditto President Chauncey, who convinced himself that he was a successful businessman by playing one on a TV “reality” hit; who measured his worth in TV ratings, and relentlessly boasted about them; who spent untold hours of his failed tenure watching Fox News and mistaking its lies for reality…until finally, on the cusp of Insurrection Day, he contrived to orchestrate and produce his very own Show.
No wonder he sat there so mesmerized! He had called forth that violent spectacle, and there it was unfolding before him. Everybody in America was watching his Show – the ratings were great! – and even though Republicans on the Hill were frantically calling to say that their lives were in danger, and that he should do something, somehow to him that simply wasn’t…real. Only the images on live TV were real. He liked to watch.
Check out this passage, in the aforementioned news story:
(House GOP leader Kevin) McCarthy did eventually reach Trump, but later told allies that he found the president distracted. So McCarthy repeatedly appeared on television to describe the mayhem, an adviser said, in an effort to explain just how dire the situation was.
Very clever. President Chauncey wouldn’t get the message unless he saw and heard it filtered through his TV. The only way to make it real was to intrude on the rice pudding between the guy’s ears. To quote the closing line of Being There, “Life is a state of mind.”
But soon enough – though not soon enough – the terrorist will be driven off into exile. And perhaps he will gaze out the window and say, as Chauncey did, that car rides can be quite enjoyable:
“This is just like television, only you can see much further.”