For 14 seasons right up to his first run for president, Donald Trump was the star of his own reality shows, “The Apprentice” and then “The Celebrity Apprentice.” The shows stopped, but Trump as president is still creating his own reality.
When so many Americans say they’ve tuned him out — like a bad TV episode — the metaphor is an apt one.
In the increasingly warped world in which the showrunner president appears to dwell, he inherited messes and created the best economy in history. Trump took a country that was an international laughingstock and made it respected again. He won election three times, he said yet again at Friday’s White House Correspondents Assn. dinner. But the second was rigged against him, so brave “patriots” revolted on Jan. 6, 2021; they were ultimately foiled and then unfairly prosecuted and convicted — only to have super-hero Trump return to dispense clemency and spring the freedom-fighters on his first day back in office.
Daily, on matters big and small, the president just makes things up. The botched makeover of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was the work of vandals with box-cutters (neither of which have been found), not mistakes by Trump’s no-bid contractors. He ended eight wars (or is it 10 now?) but was unjustly denied a Nobel Peace Prize. Then he started a Mideast war, never mind that he’d promised voters he would never do so. But good news: He quickly won it (though strikes and counterstrikes — and deaths — continue). What’s left is just a “skirmish” against Iran, Trump dismissively told a crowd in Georgia last week, just days after four service members were killed in Jordan and Iraq.
Rarely, however, has Trump’s recasting of reality to fit his chosen narrative been so evident on varied fronts — and grotesque — as in recent days.
A day after the Georgia rally, the Pentagon was found to have fudged the war casualty numbers on its website, subtracting the latest four deaths from its official count and seemingly minimizing the death toll in Trump’s war/not a war. Amid an outcry, the so-called War Department restored the four soldiers’ deaths, but in a separate, unexplained category. The department also acknowledged a much higher number of wounded troops.
Trump, in true showbiz style, is quick to take a liking to people “from central casting,” and so it is that the wholly incompetent Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News celebrity who tries so hard to give high-T energy, is in charge of the Pentagon. He knows it’s his job to make Trump look good, facts be damned. Recall that in March, just after Trump started the war on Iran, Hegseth assailed the media for harping on the deaths of six service members in Kuwait to “make the president look bad.”
The Pentagon’s wretched scripting of the Iran war’s casualty count came just after Trump posthumously put words in the mouths of the four most recently killed soldiers. He claimed to reporters, “All of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’” Which, amazingly, just happened to echo Trump’s oft-stated rationale for his war.
Who does things like that? Trump, of course. His many “Sir” stories of what favorable things people supposedly say to him are likely fictitious as well, having the puerile whiff of “Penthouse letters” fantasies, but they don’t involve slain men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice and can no longer speak for themselves — including to refute the president.
Separately, and in a different way tragically, Trump lately has escalated his second-term rewriting of American history to fit his celebratory no-warts-at-all version. He doesn’t see that Americans can celebrate the nation’s history even as they acknowledge the periods of enslavement, Jim Crow, women’s long wait for a vote, military failures and much more; most citizens recognize that the perpetual efforts to right such wrongs — their own efforts and those of citizens long before them — truly are what make America great. What Trump sees instead is people who hate their country. He says so.
Last Friday, he signed an executive order calling for signs to be installed outside the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History warning that the museum I’ve visited dozens of times since I was a preteen doesn’t accurately reflect U.S. history. Some day soon, I’m confident, Trump’s signs will themselves be history — just like the ones that read “Whites Only” or “No Irish Need Apply,” another shameful prop proudly discarded.
Trump has targeted the Smithsonian, a national treasure, since regaining office. After a first executive order last year demanded removal of “improper ideology” from its many museums, some material was removed or changed (including references to Trump’s impeachments). The culmination of his scriptwriters’ work was the 162-page, perversely titled “Saving America’s Story,” released on the Fourth of July.
Exhibits at the Smithsonian museums occasionally have sparked controversy, but never before has the entire institution come under assault. “To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History,” the report said, it’s “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”
Huh. I never came away with that sense, nor has anyone I’ve known or shepherded to Smithsonian sites over decades.
As for Trump’s sense of history, it was on sick display over the weekend, in a social-media binge that depicted him in scores of AI-generated posts as, variously, “Guardian of the World,” posed against a fiery backdrop of strikes on Iran; “The Man Who Saved America”; a caped crusader saving George Washington from falling off Mount Rushmore; and the “Cosmic Commander.”
Trump is none of those things, just as he wasn’t the successful mogul he played on TV. And as polls show, Americans have soured on his reality-show presidency, especially when their reality is high prices and headlines of war and killings in city streets.
Being outrageous, erratic and unpredictable is a selling point for a reality TV figure. But not for a president.
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