On his last show before Election Day, John Oliver allowed himself to dream a little dream. Mr. Oliver, whose “Last Week Tonight” speaks to a mostly left-of-center crowd, spent most of the episode making the case for Kamala Harris. But also, he asked his audience, wouldn’t it be nice, for the first time since 2015, to have the option of simply ignoring Donald J. Trump’s existence? “I want so badly to live in that world!” he said.
A week later, Mr. Oliver was back, reporting from a world he found rather less preferable. He devoted the episode to what the Trump victory meant. But first, he gave his audience permission to change the channel.
“It is understandable,” he said, “not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you.”
Mr. Oliver, of course, spoke from a particular political position. But he was also voicing a kind of weariness that goes beyond reproductive issues or deportation policies or the health of democracy. The Trump Era has been a lot, and for a long time. One person has been Topic A, B and C for nearly a decade, throughout popular culture, but most of all on his native medium, TV.
On Nov. 5, that might all have ended. It didn’t. How will we — collectively, as a culture — do four more years of this? And what might that even look like?
WHEN I SAY THAT Donald Trump, in his first term, was a “TV president,” I mean something different than when we used the phrase for, say, Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton.
It isn’t just about his having been a politician who “used the medium” to send a message, though he was that. It isn’t just about his having been a reality-TV star and decades-long media gadfly who instinctively thought like television, who craved the same types of conflict and provocation that the cameras do, who was always on, who for all practical purposes was as much TV character as man — though he was that too.
Mr. Trump was more than that: He was the No. 1 TV show in America. From the day he rode down the Trump Tower escalator and sent the media into a permanent state of overdrive, he was a kind of multiplatform crossover event, a ubiquitous text and subtext that cut across genres.
He was everywhere on the news, of course, and on political talk shows like Mr. Oliver’s. Stephen Colbert dropped the mask of ironic distance from his “Colbert Report” days and became a full-throated Resistance comic, as did Jimmy Kimmel, once a jolly prankster and host of “The Man Show.” Sports was no escape; Mr. Trump weighed in on N.F.L. sideline protests, and N.B.A. players and coaches weighed in on him. He was the “fake news” jokes on sitcoms and the angsty subtext of dramas.
Presidents had used TV for decades, hoping its common touch would rub off on them: Mr. Nixon said, “Sock it to me,” on “Laugh-In”; Barack Obama shared his brackets on ESPN. But those transactions went in one direction: The politicians went to television, which allowed them to visit its space.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was a permanent resident. He became the master narrative of the fevered American story, and he allowed this or that program to claim a piece of it. When he guest-hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2015, he was, in a way, really allowing “S.N.L.” to guest-host him.
After his inauguration, the show metastasized. ABC, one of the many media platforms dazedly playing catch-up to “understand the Trump voter,” revived “Roseanne” with its star, Roseanne Barr, playing a version of the MAGA supporter she had become in real life. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” developed before the 2016 election, became part of the iconography of the Trump Era, its scarlet robes and white bonnets competing with pussy hats as symbols of feminist opposition.
The news also became a show produced either by the president, about him or for him. The press secretary Sean Spicer’s daily piñata session with reporters became a ratings smash. CNN and MSNBC minted stars and rose on the attentions of audiences looking for adversarial coverage. Fox News became the official network of Air Force One, extending its symbiotic relationship and feedback loop with its tube-junkie audience of one. Tweets became news reports became tweets; blather, rinse, repeat.
There was also overt anti-Trump programming, much of it painful: the ham-handed satire of “Our Cartoon President”; the misguided revival of “Murphy Brown” as Resistance fan fiction; a season of “American Horror Story” conceived as a bloody allusion to the 2016 election; a Tom Arnold docu-search for an incriminating tape of the president. When John Mulaney analogized Mr. Trump to “a horse loose in a hospital,” a creature both dangerous and hapless, it seemed like a minor miracle that someone had found a novel, perspective-shifting, non-hectoring take on the subject.
I repeat: It was a lot. By 2020, the low-key campaign of the whisper-voiced Joseph R. Biden seemed to promise a national screen-time break. Jim Carrey, playing Mr. Biden in an “S.N.L.” debate sketch, used a magical remote control to pause Alec Baldwin’s Mr. Trump. In retrospect, it’s apt that Mr. Biden’s most quotable line of the campaign was “Will you shut up, man?”
But “pause” is not a sustainable setting for culture or for politics. The system wants content. Even through the Biden interregnum, Mr. Trump was a presence, directly in the made-for-TV Jan. 6 committee hearings and his trial appearances, indirectly in Season 5 of “Fargo,” in which Jon Hamm played a MAGA-flavored sheriff. Mr. Trump was the political-cultural equivalent of Poochie from “The Simpsons”: Whenever he was not onscreen, all the other characters were asking where he was.
And now, here he is again.
“WE ALL KNOW THAT the sequel is usually worse,” Mr. Obama said at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Well, it’s almost always different. It can be darker and more ambitious: The horse, this time, has been in the hospital before. Or it can be a farcical shadow of the past: “The Apprentice” followed by “The Celebrity Apprentice.” (There is no rule saying it can’t be both at once.)
Mr. Trump’s re-election, of course, is not just a show but a politically consequential event. If he makes good on his pledges — which have included using the military to crack down on dissent and prosecuting his political foes — that may be a shock to the artistic system as well as every other. We might need to look for precedents for the cultural response not in the history of America but rather in the experiences of places like Eastern Europe.
But it’s hard to imagine TV not having a role. Mr. Trump is an adaptable media creature, having relied in his campaign on the newer format of young-male podcasts. Still, he remains a child of the TV Era, influenced profoundly by what he sees onscreen. He has already announced plans to name two Fox hosts, Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy, to Cabinet positions and Dr. Mehmet Oz — who interviewed Mr. Trump on his daytime show in 2016 — as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Culturally, even if he continues to be a font of memes — recently, athletes have taken to doing his herky-jerky “Trump dance” — his presidency represents a long-in-the-tooth show in its 10th season or so.
A feeling of brand overextension can creep in. The stunt casting grows more far-fetched, the shock plots recycled. (Bill Maher recently floated the possibility of quitting his HBO talk show, “Real Time,” because of Trump fatigue.)
The news media can’t avoid covering the president. But will it, can it, be as uncompromising and even adversarial as it was in 2017? Shortly after the election, the “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to, in Ms. Brzezinski’s words, “restart communications.” It is reasonable to be concerned whether every media owner will stand for tough journalism on principle amid shrinking margins, or whether the returning president’s promise to punish media outlets that irk him might have a chilling effect.
Ratings can be the best defense for editorial independence, as with the various “Trump bumps” of 2017. But if audiences tune out — from numbness, distrust or just boredom — the numbers could become a vulnerability. The same goes for the Trump roast-masters of late-night.
No one knows how this might play out. But there could be pressure to dial back, to pull punches. Entertainment executives could trot out the old standby, “Our audience just wants an escape from all the gloom and doom!” Pop culture more broadly might retreat into a garden of diversion and avoidance, much like TV shifted after Watergate and Vietnam away from Norman Lear-style topicality and toward “Three’s Company” jiggle TV and Me Decade introspection.
And while pro-Trump media may be buoyed now, that’s not guaranteed to last either. In the second George W. Bush term, for instance, Fox News experienced a ratings decline that reversed with Mr. Obama’s election. (Much Trump-adjacent culture — the manosphere podcasts, the U.F.C., the various subcultures around crypto — tends to exist intentionally outside whatever legacy monoculture still stands.)
As for anti-Trump culture, we might be better off, aesthetically and politically, without the cringier elements of Resistance Hollywood. Politically, who knows if a Kathy Griffin protest or Robert DeNiro tirade ever moved a single vote — at least, in the direction that the performers intended.
Some of the most dynamic work of the first Trump term felt of the political moment without directly referencing the president. “Succession” followed a corrupt family of media oligarchs cutting deals for influence and playing footsie with the alt-right. “Yellowstone” probed the culture war (and often shooting war) between urban elites and rural landowners who believed they were making a last stand for their way of life.
If the present feels truly exhausted, often the best pop culture will instead intuit the future. “Friday Night Lights,” premiering in 2006, was a product of the second George W. Bush term, but in its spirit — optimism about common ground between red and blue values — it feels like one of the first shows of the Obama Era.
Likewise, if you looked closely at some Biden Era works, you might have seen the seeds of Election 2024: “English Teacher,” which tried to suss out the contradictory post-Covid mind set of Gen Z; “Beef,” the road-rage drama that painted a stressed-out, perpetually angry America; and the prescient finale of in the satire-drama “The Good Fight,” which closed with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign announcement (days before it happened in real life) and images of him shimmying onstage to “Y.M.C.A.”
We don’t know what will come of these next four years. But what comes after them? We may just see it first on TV.
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