Day 334: The Final Number

 

Hello, dear readers! Long time, no write! I honestly don’t know how professional writers stay on track. Between the holiday transition from Thanksgiving to Christmas and the sudden, literal disintegration of my old warhorse of a car, my writing came to a crashing halt for nearly a month. I need to work on not allowing my "RL" challenges from interfering with my aspirations to be a dedicated writing hobbyist.  

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Let us get down to business.  

Just two days ago, President Donald Trump interrupted live television to address the nation. Now, I am old enough to remember when such "special announcements," as they were once termed, complete with bespoke graphics, were reserved for issues of vital national importance: matters of war and peace, major economic policy announcements, and other issues of broad national concern. Well, as this befuddled administration is now well known for doing, Trump decided to interrupt the nation's evening to, once again, waste everyone's time with an empty-calorie rant about the great job he and his cabinet of kleptocrats are doing, economic realities be damned. 

It truly was a bizarre performance. Before watching it, I expected - silly me, you'd think I would have learned by now! - that Trump was going to make an important announcement, as past presidents have used prime time to do. I was expecting a formal declaration of war against Venezuela, or Denmark, for that matter, or the announcement that he had decided to lease Alaska back to the Russians. Instead, I got a tired old man having the verbal equivalent of a hissy fit; a man insisting that you believe him on every issue, rather than trusting your own lying eyes. It was not so much bizarre as pathetic.

What I found particularly interesting was how the entire spectacle fizzled out before the evening was over. Even the punditry class, which usually enjoys analyzing such a moment with exacting detail, seemed crestfallen by the show. They expected something momentous, dinosaur bones they could chew on for the next week.  Instead, they got Albatros bones to pick at; the television equivalent of Noah Hawley's Alien Earth: a disappointing fizzle that left the audience with little more than regret for wasting their time watching such an amateurishly flawed production. (No! I won't stop riding that hobby horse until I get a written apology from Hawley himself!) Before the night was over, most pundits had already moved back to other topics, as if the president never addressed the nation at all.  That is what you call a ratings bomb. Just ask Taylor Swift about her last album...

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What we saw Wednesday night was an entertainer who is way past his prime, reduced to cliches and tired routines that only his most diehard philistine fans would appreciate. We are watching the final act of a failed reality television show, one with ratings so bad that even A&E wouldn't renew it for another season. No matter how frenetic the song and dance routine he does, the audience is leaving the theater in droves, and he is powerless to stop them.  

Those are some pretty bad ratings.  Even FOX News - you know, the network that had to pay nearly a billion dollars in damages for spreading propaganda about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump - recently published a poll that has Trump way underwater on nearly every issue:

This is why even such stalwart minions, such as Marjorie "Jewish Space Lasers" Taylor Greene, have finally hit the eject button. When even the 'MAGA Firebrand' is resigning from Congress after being branded a 'traitor' by the man she once revered, you know the ratings have tanked. She isn't just leaving; she’s fleeing a set where the props are falling over, and the lead actor is shouting at the empty seats.

The Fox News numbers confirm it: when you're underwater on every issue but the border—and even there, the tide is turning—Trump's production of his 'Cavalcade of Fascists' starts looking more like The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

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 This is a significant problem when the base of your movement has been dubbed a "couch potato" demographic, referring to voters who are not politically active but spend the majority of their time on the couch watching television.  What happens when your captive audience starts changing the channel because they find your routine boring?  

Your show gets cancelled, that's what.

This is why the Entertainer-in-Chief is so panicked: he has lost his audience, and the Vaudevillian hook is starting to reach out for him to end his act for good.  Hence, the desperate performance on Wednesday night.  The curtain is beginning to fall on Trump 2.0, and his production team is already trying to distance itself from the show.  

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