Actors have become successful politicians in the Unites States before – for example Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger – but Donald Trump has taken US democracy to a new level, where reality TV has become a continuous real life drama being acted out in the White House.
And now either Oprah Winfrey or some of the media seem to have launched a presidential campaign based on another commercial television success taking advantage of a public obsession with ‘celebrities’.
‘The media’ has been complicit in Trump’s rise to the presidency, and collectively seem unable to see where they are taking democracy. It could be a death spiral.
Idiocracy is a 2006 movie, described in Wikipedia:
The film tells the story of two people who take part in a top-secret military human hibernation experiment, only to awaken 500 years later in a dystopian society where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism have run rampant, and which is devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights.
Aspects of advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism that were depicted are already recognisable in today’s society.
During the 2016 presidential primaries, writer Etan Cohen and others expressed opinions that the film’s predictions were converging on accuracy, which, during the general election, director Mike Judge also said.
Judge also compared Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the movie’s dim-witted wrestler-turned-president, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
When asked about predicting the future, he remarked, “I’m no prophet, I was off by 490 years.”
Trump has been called an idiot, promotes policies favouring corporations, and has just described himself as a genius. However this is confused by a 2013 tweet:
Trump also claims to be a super successful star of reality TV.
Vice: How Reality TV Made Donald Trump President
Ever since Donald Trump first appeared in the 1970s, he has seemed tacky, an archetypal Ugly American in an ill-fitting suit. He was wealthy, sure, but in that Las Vegas used-car-salesman way. Queens, not Manhattan. For years, he was a footnote skulking around the edges of American culture, showing up in episodes of Sex and the City and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
He was such a cartoonish presence that when writers made jokes about someone absurd becoming president, they thought of him.
The Simpsons famously joked about a Trump presidency in 2000.
“As you know we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump”.
In Back to the Future II , Biff turns Hill Valley into a hellish version of Las Vegas, a dystopia the movie’s screenwriter recently admitted was based on what life would be like under Trump. That movie came out in 1989.
Now, Donald Trump has been elected president.
There are many reasons why Trump was elected, but none of it could have happened without the rise of reality television. The link between Trump the candidate and Trump the Apprentice star has been remarked uponbefore, but it it seems more urgent than ever now that it turns out that his unorthodox campaign actually worked. Reality television not only legitimized Trump, his campaign exploited reality TV formulas and used them to his advantage.
Time: Donald Trump Is the First True Reality TV President
It’s official. We have our first reality TV president.
The news that President-elect Donald Trump is going to remain an executive producer of NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice while also running the national government from the Oval Office in the White House (first reported by Variety) should not have surprised anyone.
And yet, somehow, it still does. It’s a jarring reminder that we have entered a brand, new era of presidential politics, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A month into the Trump era, we know enough now to see what the first year of his presidency will look like. It will be chaotic and defiant—but opportunistic and focused on a small number of exceedingly large fights that make great political theater and play well to big, populist crowds.
It will look and feel a lot like a political reality TV show played out on a grand stage, with producers scripting the biggest fights behind the scenes while leaving plenty of room for unrehearsed, populist public drama. Trump is the first truly made-for-television president. Every day will literally be a new episode shot in real-time, in front of a public and a world that simply can’t get enough of the spectacle.
Now nearly a year on the Trump residency looks to be all of that and more.
Much of the media are complicit in helping him get there and in the ongoing running of his ‘reality’ show from the White House (when he is not holidaying at one of his resorts).
But wait, there could be more celebrity politics.
This week the media has picked up on a speech made by Oprah Winfrey and has virtually launched a presidential campaign for her. See Oprah Winfrey’s “a new day is on the horizon!” speech and a lot of stuff in US media over that last few days.
In a bizarre twist, Ivanka Trump (who is also claimed to have eyes on a presidential bid in 2020) tweeted:
Perhaps Ivanka sees the political future as the celebrity president’s daughter pitted against the “Queen of All Media”.
But LA Times asks: Oprah for president? Have we learned nothing?
We don’t know whether the idea of Oprah Winfrey for president, inspired by Winfrey’s eloquent speech Sunday at the Golden Globe Awards, will prove an ephemeral excitation or a movement with staying power. But we find it depressing.
We mean no disrespect to Winfrey, who strikes us as much better informed and more intellectually curious and presumably less reckless or dishonest than the incumbent president. But it’s bizarre that Americans who are appalled by Trump’s oafish and ignorant conduct of the nation’s highest office would gravitate to another television star untested in politics.
That’s what many of them did Sunday evening. Twitter throbbed with speculation that Winfrey’s speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award was the beginning of a presidential run.
It wasn’t just Twitter. there was a lot of breathless coverage in mainstream media too.
This may just be a passing, Golden-Globes-inspired moment of Twitter hype. But it is also a reminder that when the last out-of-the-blue celebrity candidate entered a presidential race, the media shrugged him off as a joke.
As we know, the joke continues, but not everyone is laughing. The joke is on American democracy.
… as the first year of the Trump presidency demonstrated, there are colossal risks in electing a political neophyte to the most demanding public office in the world. Just because the Republicans were foolish enough to travel down this dangerous road — in the process sacrificing many of their party’s best qualities and most valuable principles in a desperate, craven hunt for votes — doesn’t mean the Democrats should follow suit.
Winfrey might possess a more stable temperament than Trump — who doesn’t? — and her political positions would undoubtedly be more in line with those of liberals, Democrats and The Times editorial page, but she would face the same steep learning curve in dealing with foreign and domestic issues.
What is there to suggest that she is any better prepared than Trump was to work productively with Congress or tackle international trade negotiations, the North Korean nuclear threat or the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict?
What is there to suggest that US voters care about whether someone is prepared to be president or not? Or at least sufficient voters to elect a celebrity president.
It’s a measure of the trauma inflicted on the country by Trump’s election that some people honestly believe that the way to unseat a celebrity president is to nominate another celebrity.
Back in September, John Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post: “If you need to set a thief to catch a thief, you need a star — a grand, outsized, fearless star whom Trump can neither intimidate nor outshine — to catch a star.”
Podhoretz called Winfrey the mirror image of Trump — “America’s generous aunt” to “America’s crazy uncle.”
Regardless of those descriptions, neither have backgrounds that should give anyone any confidence they could handle one of the toughest and most powerful jobs in the world.
But the United States doesn’t need another TV star running the country — even a talented and accomplished star such as Oprah Winfrey.
What it needs is someone who has prepared for the job, who has made tough decisions, who is familiar with the issues, who has a history of public service. Not all senators or governors make good presidents, to be sure, but they’re a better bet, by and large, than the typical movie star or businessman.
Trying to sell common sense and actual relevant experience to the media or the voters could be a tough task. Not all media and not all voters have become obsessed with ‘celebrity’, but enough have to make a difference.
The road to Idiocracy may be paved with Celebritoxicity.
Celebritoxicity – the degree to which an obsession with celebrities can harm humans.
