As the 100-day presidential gestation ritual draws to a close, nothing could be finer than a good old shit-kicking bombing in Syria. “Absolutely beautiful,” said MSNBC’s Brian Williams as he watched video of the missile attack. At CNN, Fareed Zakaria fawned over the man who calls his station the headquarters of “fake news”, declaring that those 59 cruise missiles finally made Trump a real president. Had The Donald known that before the election, he could have bombed California, won the popular vote and looked presidential.
The post-inauguration story line, although bizarrely compelling and borderline fantastical, has been mostly horizontal. Trump says crazy stuff that bears no resemblance to reality, signs executive orders in the presence of white men wearing drab suits, tweets up a storm, and then gets up the next day and does it all over again, rinse and repeat. The narrative has been lacking in significant curvature. There is no arc there, no story routing that takes the protagonist from exposition, upward in rising action, then a climax, a descent through falling action and, eventually, resolution. It happens on “House of Cards” all the time. We saw it frequently with former president Obama. He evolved from an inexperienced junior senator who wrestled his party’s nomination away from an entrenched heavyweight, into a progressive visionary with superhero powers, and then, once elected, fell all the way down to mere mortal status, unable to get his agenda past the Republicans. Finally, Obama disengaged from those ashes and moved the country leftward with style and grace. Those are the kinds of arcs that keep contented smiles on the faces of political writers. The ideology is irrelevant; it’s the ebb and flow of the story line that matters.
Alas, Trump is to conventional story telling what reality television is to a dramatic series. Most of the Trump Land characters – especially the star – are marginally interesting, but lack both cohesive motivation and growth potential. The dialogue is less scintillating than what you might overhear in a dentist’s office. The actions of the various players seem almost unrelated to each other. Still, this reality show of a presidency produces some terrific bits.
Nothing from Beckett’s or Ionesco’s best absurdist works could top Trump’s recent chocolate cake scene. In case you missed it, the commander in chief was dining with Chinese President Xi Xinping at Mar a Largo when the missiles hit Syria. It was the dessert course. Trump, in a later retelling to a Fox News reporter, described the offering on the plates of these two world leaders as “the most beautiful piece(s) of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.” He went on, in great detail, like he was doing a Martha Stewart guest shot. Here is Trump telling the story: “I said (to President Xi) we’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this. And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.” Whoops. The president – ours, not China’s – misspoke. It was Syria he had bombed, not Iraq. But the cake really was chocolate. And beautiful. That much, Trump got right.
So here’s where we are as this presidency’s Hundred Day Clock ticks down: 59 missiles dropped on Syria (not Iraq), the unfortunately named “mother of all bombs” dropped on Afghanistan, and U.S. warships stationed in the Korean Peninsula. Well, make that now headed to the Korean Peninsula. As North Korea paraded its collection of phallic-shaped artillery, teasing the West with its emerging nuclear capabilities, the White House announced it had dispatched warships to the area and was all done with “strategic patience”. (In reality, neither of those words – strategic or patience – has ever had a home in the Trump White House.) Turns out, according to today’s breaking news, that the warships were 3,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula, taking part in exercises with the Australian navy, even though Trump insisted they were right there on North Korea’s heels, as leverage against nuclear chicanery. Another whoops moment.
If you squint hard enough, you can almost see a conventional story arc here. Trump’s inaugural speech painted a picture of a new America First, isolationist administration. Ninety days later, he’s ready to bomb everything except the chocolate cake. His secretary of state, however, insists nothing has changed and that the president is as anti-interventionist as ever.
Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence pulled the format back to reality TV level, sounding very much like a professional wrestler, name-dropping the Syrian and Afghanistan bombings in warning North Korea not to mess with his tag team partner, the Trumper. In the other corner, is that country’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, a NBA fanatic with his own strongman track record that includes the execution of his uncle and extended family. Think how much safer we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis with Kennedy and Khrushchev at the table. The current showdown is so alarming, Russia and China are trying to calm both sides down.
Back in the ‘60s, during my formative years of high school debate, the national subject was nuclear disarmament. I remember arguing that the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction was limited to sane, rational leaders and meant nothing to crazy despots. I can still hear the shrieky, pubescent voice of my opponent in one tournament, all dolled up in his private boys’ school uniform, as he tore into my argument. “Preposterous and speculative,” he insisted. “I demand that the affirmative team point to one modern national leader who would ever be reckless with nuclear power.” Well, smarty pants, it’s taken me 50 years to answer your question. See that orange tinted man shoveling chocolate cake into his mouth? That would be Exhibit A. And that short Korean guy with a bad haircut, holding a Dennis Rodman bobble head doll? Exhibit B.
There is only one thing we can count on right now. This reality show will not end with a rose.