Supernaturalis widely regarded as the longest-running horror show in television history, with 327 episodes over 15 seasons.
The entire Trump presidency, from his first term through now, has been a horror show, blowing past 327 episodes in his first year back in office. Each episode seemingly has its own iteration; however, the plots sometimes repeat themselves.
For example, Trump Cabinet nomination episodes all include lying to Congress. Trump Iran war programs always feature a peace deal that is imminent but never materializes. And Trump construction and renovation projects always follow the same plot twists.
From the White House ballroom to the Reflecting Pool, the Qatar Air Force One, the Kennedy Center, and the Great American State Fair, they all end the same way, in a horrific OMG mess. And the latest offering from Trump Horror Show Productions has the same familiar narrative.
Titled “Helipad,” it opens with crews spending weeks digging up the South Lawn, pouring granite, and laying an oversized presidential seal. Then, right on schedule, it curdles into the same redundant scenario: the president takes one look, decides he’s “dissatisfied,” and orders it torn out. Or it just peters out on its own by revealing gobsmacking faults.
With “Helipad,” one of the problems is that the South Lawn slopes, which could morph into an episode where Marine One slides off. It seems never to have occurred to anyone that this was a design constraint before construction started.
Now contractors are debating whether they’ll need to regrade the entire lawn.
As with every other season of this show, the formula holds exactly true to form. There’s no sign-off from Congress, no review from the commission that’s supposed to weigh in on changes to the White House grounds and other endeavors, a hard and slightly absurd deadline (the helipad needs to be finished before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit in September), and a price tag, $5 to $6 million, officially footed by Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky, that everyone should assume is a floor, not a ceiling.
And, as with every other episode, we already know what the outcome of “Helipad” will be. The costs will climb, the scope will creep, and Trump will eventually find a way to route some of it through the taxpayer, the same way he did for the ballroom and the Reflecting Pool.
It’s the show’s whole tried-and-true, worn-out premise. Trump announces a grand gesture. He ties it to a big date, i.e. July 4 for the pool and the Qatar Air Force One, and a state visit for the heliport, to induce urgency that reflects the main character’s limited patience.
He skips the routine approvals. He lowballs the public cost, sometimes by hundreds of millions of dollars, and insists none of it is coming from taxpayers. He hands out contracts to incompetent cronies without putting them out for bid. Then reality intrudes. The ground doesn’t cooperate, the contractors hit problems nobody anticipated because nobody planned, the price tag doubles or triples, and Trump starts blaming the very people executing his rushed, unvetted vision. Or he blames “vandals.”
Trump’s bumbling, stubbornness, and blundering are reminiscent of the classic animated TV series Mr. Magoo, whose main character was always put into perilous situations.
The Mr. Magoo-esque Trump’s list of perilous situations is equally impressive. A ballroom that started as a $200 million private donation and is now reportedly pushing $600 million, which a federal appeals court blocked Friday.
A Reflecting Pool overhaul that turned into a contractor mess of its own. An Air Force One replacement gift from Qatar has been grounded to undergo critical security upgrades that weren’t included because of the rushed timeline.
A Kennedy Center takeover that includes a whistleblower report alleging multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts, corner-cutting construction that has already rusted over, and the costly ripping out of a new bathroom floor simply because Trump disliked the color.
And a “to be continued” cliffhanger miniseries about Trump’s Great American State Fair, an embarrassing flop because of severe construction and mechanical failures. Organized, like everything else, through a rushed, no-bid contract given to political allies, the event’s centerpiece, a plywood-and-vinyl mockup of Trump’s proposed 250-foot Triumphal Arch, began visibly deteriorating and oozing insulation foam in the summer heat.
Simultaneously, the fairgrounds suffered widespread power outages that knocked out air-conditioning units, left food hall vendors with completely melted ice cream, and repeatedly stalled the signature 110-foot Ferris wheel because of generator issues and engine overheating.
And now the helipad, dug up and redone before it’s even finished.
Ever the vigilant critic, The New York Times, has been consistently surfacing and critiquing the disclosures across every season of this show — he missed approvals, the redos, the ballooning budgets, and each new story has, without exception, been worse than the last.
At the current pace, there’s a real chance the helipad won’t be finished, or won’t be finished right, by the time Xi Jinping’s plane touches down in September, which would leave Marine One touching down somewhere like Pennsylvania Avenue, or perhaps on the rubble of the ballroom construction zone.
Trump has said, more than once, that nobody builds better than he does. “I build better than anybody else. Nobody can build like me,” he’s fond of saying.
The second half of that sentence is the thread that carries each new addition to the anthology of horror shows.
The helipad is just the newest episode. Given the show’s track record, it won’t be the last, and it will surely be renewed.
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