“I spoke to the governor; she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well, wait a minute; am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different. They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place. It looks like terrible.’”
— President Donald Trump, discussing his desire to send National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon
Was he watching things on television that were different from what was happening? The possibility was unsettling. If things on the television weren’t true, then almost everything he knew about the world was wrong.
He saw it on the television, the fires and the attacks. They looked like terrible! If he watched long enough, they started to look familiar, to loop back around, to start over again. It was amazing how the same protesters had been wreaking the same havoc in Portland, Oregon, every day and every night in exactly the same way, like clockwork, since 2020. How did they fix the buildings so quickly, in between pillages?
Interrupting the fires and the attacks, there was sometimes a lizard. The lizard was trying to sell car insurance. If you didn’t watch television, you might never realize that animals could talk and that, when they did, it was to express their passion for various kinds of insurance.
What was startling to him was how, despite all his efforts, the crime was still so rampant. Chicago was a war zone. They needed Fire and Med and PD and Justice, and there was also a bear there, running a restaurant. New York was worse, or had been; it needed as many as six different forms of Law and Order to even begin to tackle the lawlessness and orderlessness, and had for decades.
Locally, there was so much going on that he did not know how people survived. Sometimes fraud and deadly mold. Sometimes crime-scene tape and flashing blue lights. Sometimes there was something in your medicine cabinet that could kill. And after that, traffic and weather. And then, in between, you could hear from the people who would fit your bathtub just right. Americans were going through an epidemic of needing their bathtubs fitted, being discontented with their mattresses, and needing to put deodorant all over their bodies.
During the day, everyone was on couches. There was a famous woman and her friends would come and sit with her, in a chair or on a couch, and the people in the audience would clap. Sometimes instead of sitting on a couch with a woman, these people would spin a big wheel and guess the prices of things. At night, instead of the woman with the couch, it was a man who sat at a desk. His friends would come sit on the couch too. Sometimes the man was mad about what the president was doing, and criticized him! He didn’t like it when the man was mad. Greg was never mad—at him, anyway. Greg was great!
Also, ghosts were real, and we were sending hunters after them. Everything was cake, potentially. There were two brothers who would do unspeakable things to your house. Everyone wanted a fish tank or a tree house or a home remodel. Also, housewives were real. It said so in the name. Each city had its own set. Sometimes they needed remodeling too. Wrestling was real, or wasn’t, depending on how you felt on a given day. The Golden Girls were there at night, and so were the Friends and the commercials, the wonderful commercials for all the drugs you could ever dream of asking for. All of those people, emerging Tremfyant!
Were you telling him that this was not true? It had to be true.
It was in the screen: not the small screen that was echo chambers and bad, but the big screen, the good screen, the one that made everything true. He was there sometimes, just to reassure himself. When he saw himself on the screen, he knew that he could make the economy go up and up forever.
No, it had to be true. If the TV lied to him, then everything would fall apart. If the TV was not showing him what was truly there, then the world was a piñata that he was smashing, blindfolded. He was lunging at shadows, hitting imaginary burglars with a real sledgehammer. He was wrecking everything, for nothing!
Every time he went into the real world, it seemed a little different and worse. They yelled at him in the restaurant and the tanks squeaked and the soldiers marched wrong. Perhaps something was the matter with his television. Perhaps he needed a bigger screen.
The post The President and His Television appeared first on The Atlantic.
