Afterword: The Trumpen Show
The curtain closed on the 1990s. But the culture-war drama played on.
And after a prolonged period of division and collision, the stage was set for the 2016 campaign cycle. The stars were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The genre was black comedy. And the last act, as it turned out, was a madcap sequel to the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.
When the house lights came up, on November 9, 2016, the audience sat stunned. America, in a culture-war reversion to the 1980s, had managed to elect another tanned and privileged media creature, another septuagenarian disrupter. Trump in some ways was Ronald Reagan Remade—as a Sith Lord with French cuffs. But while Trump, like Reagan, purported to speak for the American Everyman, he and his minions were essentially forging an offensive against the underclass he professed to champion—and against the advances of women, people of color, LGBT individuals, immigrants, and others who had been marginalized by society. Trump’s was a movement that would test the boundaries of racial tolerance, gender inclusion, religious acceptance, and voting rights; a movement intent on rolling back liberalism, feminism, globalization, Roe v. Wade, and everything that the Clintons had represented.
A recap is in order. Eight years of Bill Clinton had led, inevitably, to eight years of George W. Bush, who had vowed to bring dignity back to the West Wing. (In a totemic repudiation of Clinton, Bush would store Saddam Hussein’s pistol, captured during the Iraq War, in the same study adjacent to the Oval Office where some of Clinton’s after-hours encounters had occurred.)
But Bush’s presidency was a fraught one. During his tenure, Al Qaeda terrorists launched the deadliest foreign assault on America since the 1940s. Bush began a foolhardy, unwinnable war in Iraq, which in time would further inflame the region. He bungled the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina, deepening a deadly humanitarian crisis. He was at the controls when the economy, as part of a global recession, went into a tailspin.
The cumulative effect? “George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left,” Peter Beinart would contend in the Atlantic. And Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, would become, in Beinart’s judgment, “the most tangible result” of the Bush fiascos, making many “Democrats unapologetically liberal.” (Voters, to be sure, continued to swing right at the local level and in their selection of governors and congressmen.)
But Obama, for all his successes in health-care, counterterrorism, and rejuvenating the hobbled economy, racked up his own series of disappointments. And so the Obama era—hampered by Washington gridlock (in large measure the fault of a deliberately intransigent Republican Congress)—gave impetus to restive forces across the political spectrum. Soon arose the Occupy movement; the Tea Party movement; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the candidacies of a self-proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a self-styled populist, Donald Trump.
As this book has sought to establish, America from the ’90s onward had actually moved left. Citizens in red states and blue consistently expressed a desire—as Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist Stuart Stevens described it during Trump’s 2016 presidential run—to have “a growing benevolent government, as long as they [didn’t] have to admit they need[ed] it.”1 The nation’s progressive drift was at its most pronounced in the tug-of-war over “values.” In their sexual attitudes, Americans had adopted more liberated views. In popular culture, expressions of erotic desire became commonplace. In relationships, new templates were established for human intimacy and the structure and definition of family. In the workplace and elsewhere, sexual harassment and gender equity were codified in law and in practice. In these regards, the values and norms of the left had won decisively. The future had triumphed over the past.
And yet on many of these fronts the culture was still on a war footing. Battles continued to rage over abortion, marriage equality, legal and social safeguards for LGBT rights, and a host of other issues involving civil and voting rights, affirmative action, criminal-justice reform, income disparity, political correctness, identity politics, and Americans’ lack of moral fixity. In these struggles, the far right was gaining traction. What’s more, after twenty-four years of Clinton, then Bush, then Obama, tens of millions of Americans recoiled at the notion of entrusting their future, once again, to the Washington establishment.
In 2016, two consummate Boomers, HRC and DJT, entered the ring and fought the culture war’s ultimate elimination round. The stakes were higher than ever. The invective was louder. The candidates, scraped and bloodied, hugged the ropes from time to time.
At the final bell, the refs—America’s voters—could well have said, Enough: enough with our nagging ’90s hangover; enough with the tabloid drift, the reality programming, the digital sabotage, the media-contrived confrontation, the race-baiting, the mansplaining, the egomania and xenophobia and homophobia and misogyny and sexual shaming and crude public references to human anatomy.
But, nahhh…
They chose, instead, the hair of the dog—comb-over and all.
And even though the ex–First Lady/senator/secretary of state had landed a larger share of the popular vote, America’s electoral loyalties in the end went to a real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star.
Every TV pundit worth his mousse had a theory about why Donald Trump won, why Hillary Clinton lost, and why the outcome had been preordained. The culprits were disgruntled white men; women “complicit… in their own oppression” (as columnist Suzanne Moore put it); Russian hackers; eleventh-hour meddling by the FBI director; the Trump team’s superior data analytics; and “conspiracy theories… a generation in the making,” as former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson surmised. “As in any good Agatha Christie mystery, there are so many suspects that it’s hard to find the real killer.” Trump won, they said, because he’d projected nationalist pride and isolationist resolve, sentiments that were also resonating across Europe. Trump won because he was considered a businessman who could fix things; because he was the most tenacious and engaged candidate. Trump won because he was Rocky Balboa, an underdog who’d kiboshed sixteen other Republicans in the primaries—and who’d gained voter sympathy after being relentlessly pummeled by the press and the leaders of both parties. Trump won because he’d pledged to address one or more of a given voter’s overriding fears: unchecked immigration, escalating terrorism, legalized abortion, expanding government, declining job prospects, and everything from globalization (“a broken system”) to Obamacare (“a disaster”).
Time and again, observers pointed to the gender equation. They argued that Trump was an alpha-male protector in a time of crisis. Or that many men had viewed him as a revivalist figure—a leader who would bring back a brawny, Old Spice–scented America where every guy could keep his gun, his gal, and his job. And yet Trump was swept into office on a tide of female voters too. While a majority of women had supported Hillary Clinton—by a factor of 54 to 42 percent—Trump had secured the backing of 53 percent of white women voters (62 percent of his female voters did not have college degrees). What would have possessed them to cast ballots for a candidate who had disparaged women as “pigs” and “dogs” and had bragged about groping women’s privates without their consent?
Possible motivations were all over the lot. Some pro-Trump women evidently disregarded his flashes of chauvinism and could justify such statements, having heard them frequently at home, at work, or on the street. Some were willing to cut him some slack because they trusted he’d deliver a brighter tomorrow. Many took cues from their partners or peers, contends journalist Emily Jane Fox, my Vanity Fair colleague: “People [often] underestimate how sexist women are. When you yourself have never been treated equally as a woman—paid fairly, promoted commensurately, treated with respect—you don’t, then, treat other women as equals. If you in your life are harassed, assaulted, put down, left behind, and you’ve accepted that behavior as either the norm or an unfortunate, undeniable reality, then seeing a man treating women that way doesn’t strike you as out of the ordinary.”
Historian and journalist Susan Faludi had seen it all coming. Back in 1991, in her book Backlash, she’d explained how women’s legal, social, and economic advances were running smack into a wall—a “backlash” from threatened men and a patriarchal ruling class. Though women’s rights would expand even further during Bill Clinton’s time in office, society’s male bias had remained intact. And so, twenty-five years later, the triumph of Trump was a culture-war reversion. “As the culture moves further away from the conservative ideal,” Faludi would posit on the eve of the 2016 vote, “as women gain freedoms, minorities assert rights, same-sex marriage proves commonplace—the monster howls grow louder. But the howls say nothing new. This election is the decisive battle in a Thirty Years’ War.”2
A Thirty Years’ War. In this ongoing culture clash, the left may have won the majority of the nation’s hearts and minds. But the right, to be sure, was winning the ground war.
For all this, it was hard to miss the 1990s underpinnings of the 2016 campaign cycle.
First off, many Trump voters had fallen for him in precisely the same way they’d fallen for Bill Clinton. They had warmed to his neediness, his naughtiness, his Boomer narcissism, and his come-ons. (“I love the poorly educated,” he crowed after winning the Nevada caucuses. “I love Hispanics!” he tweeted. “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill.”) During the 2016 primaries, columnist John Saward had visited the county with the nation’s highest percentage of Trump supporters—in economically strapped West Virginia. Saward’s takeaway could have just as easily applied to ’92-vintage Clinton: “Trump is politician as pickup artist, as infomercial salesman; someone who will in a single breath pulverize your self-esteem and then convince you that he is the only one who can put you back together again.… He’s going to take you home tonight, you have such beautiful eyes, baby, what are you doing here all alone? I can make you great again.”
Second, many Trump voters had finally OD’d on the actual Clintons. They had had enough of Hillary’s inevitability, her chattering emails, Bill’s rattling closet, the Clinton brand, the Clinton Foundation,3 the Clinton mumbo-jumbo. Some voters dreaded the mere idea that with each new American morning, Hillary and Bill would be back in the People’s House.
Third, many regarded Trump as a fearless, independent “outsider.” He was a counterforce to the Clintons’ America: a country many believed to be hamstrung by big government, a liberal agenda, a welfare-state mentality, a diminished military, and a rise in what came to be denigrated as political correctness at the office, on campus, and in the drip-drip-drip of rules and quotas and laws protecting the less privileged.4
Indeed, the ’80s and ’90s had helped make voters accustomed to Trump himself. Trump was a celebrity. He was a real estate “tycoon.” He was a brand.
Trump was also a horndog, a braggart, and a social-media-holic—just like voters were. Trump, unlike the typical public servant, was selfish (and committed to self-preservation)—just like voters, who were bone tired of giving and forgiving.5 Trump projected power: his bravado, not to mention his thin skin, might actually spook America’s enemies. (Hadn’t Reagan and Bush, after all, been feared as “cowboys”?) Trump was a press basher who was, paradoxically, a media queen. (Who but a press lush would have phoned up members of the media back in the day and, pretending to be a publicist, represent himself as a client?)
Most important of all, he was a reality-TV star. This was Trump’s trump card, especially when courting a public with a compromised rumor-immune system. Not to belabor the obvious, but Donald Trump knew how to treat politics as a reality show.
At first, skeptics had viewed Trump’s candidacy as his way of burnishing his brand.6 But once he’d gotten a debate or two under his belt, he found his political métier. And the news divisions at the network and cable outlets began to cast him in the lead. Soon they were marketing the presidential race like a prime-time series. On two dozen evenings, TV provided live coverage of the primary and caucus results. Over the course of fifteen months, there were thirty-one debates, town halls, and forums. In addition, Trump’s campaign rallies and primary-night speeches were sometimes broadcast or streamed live. (Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, was going all-in on Trump. No wonder: he’d been the executive at NBC who’d help steer the success of Trump’s own reality show, The Apprentice.) This saturation coverage got viewers hooked on The Great Race. The networks, in effect, were simulcasting an episodic TV series. The program merged three formats, all of which had been perfected during the 1990s: the reality show, the talk show, and the monthslong TV-news saga (e.g., Conflict in the Gulf ’90–’91, the O.J. Trial ’94–’95, and the March to Impeachment ’98–’99, not to mention Bush v. Gore ’00–’01).
The reality genre turned out to be tailor-made for Trump: the serialized nature of the race, the faux suspense, the obsession with process. So too was the fixation on the week’s winners (“We are going to win big-league, believe me”) and losers (“I like people who weren’t captured”). This was a format Trump knew intimately. And he solidified his hold on voters early on, through the debates, which suited his showman’s flashiness and his insult-comic style.
As the Republican candidates lined up on the debate stage, Trump would be positioned at the center lectern. He would field more questions than his competitors. The setting had hints of Survivor and The Apprentice. At times, the moderators focused less on the candidates’ policies than on their views about one another: “Senator Cruz, you suggested Mr. Trump ‘embodies New York values.’ Could you explain what you mean by that?” This line of questioning encouraged conflict and played to Trump’s strengths, amplifying his tendency to razz his rivals.
Meanwhile, the postmortems by experts and the candidates’ surrogates would reverberate for days across websites, social media, the print press, and the news and opinion programs, prolonging the agony and the exegesis.
All along, Trump was playing by reality-TV rules. He didn’t “prepare.” He played his malaprops and bluster as authenticity. He “spun” his performance in pre-interviews and post-interviews. He inserted his family into the process, which helped bolster his appeal and fill out his back story. He spread hearsay (“I’m hearing…”; “Everybody is saying…”). When things weren’t going his way, he blamed his mic or his earpiece. He cast doubt on the moderators. He whined and he sulked and he scowled.
Trump seemed to have the facility to say whatever sounded sensible or outrageous in the moment. He would build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border—which Mexico would pay for. He would announce, in one of his debates with Clinton, that she should be put in jail. He would alter his positions, debunk candidates he’d previously praised, deny saying things he’d said. While the other presidential hopefuls, by and large, gave fact-based responses, Trump understood that on reality programs the cleverest half-truth can mortally wound an opponent and the craftiest player often wins—and wins over the audience. By building on the foundation set by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Trump was elevating the long lie into performance art.
Before honing the reality craft on The Apprentice, in fact, Trump had learned from the clown princes of the trade: pro wrestlers. In 1988, he’d first wooed World Wrestling Entertainment (then called WWF) matches to his Trump Plaza arena in Atlantic City. It was the golden age of conservative populism, as Stephen L. Miller has described it in the National Review, and “pro wrestling’s biggest stage was where Donald Trump the populist was born.” In the late ’80s and into the ’90s, Trump came to respect the stars of the sport, along with their kayfabe, their theatrical antics, and their targeting of “evil” enemies who would be summarily vanquished. “He became a master at trash talk, smack downs, and sheer television entertainment,” according to CNN political analyst David Gergen, and it would culminate in Trump’s 2007 appearance in the ring, where, having emerged victorious (when his designated wrestler stand-in beat WWE honcho Vince McMahon’s), Trump got to shave McMahon’s head—as the fans went wild. “Trump’s blue-collar base,” writes Miller, “believes he’s one of them. He loves the pageantry of it all as much as they do, and he’s spent years upon years cultivating them. These people are fans of Trump more than they are fans of conservatism. They believe he can do to ISIS what he did to Vince McMahon’s dome.”
“Pro wrestling fans understand they are watching a contest that is usually fixed,” adds Gergen. “More than anything, they want to be entertained.” This gut instinct about his audience put Trump in great stead in the GOP debates where, in the estimation of Judd Legum, the editor-in-chief of Think-Progress.org, the entire slate of candidates proved to be no match for him: “Trump is behaving like a professional wrestler while Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair.”
The debates would lay the reality-TV groundwork for all that followed. The snippy contestants, the unpredictable star, the shifting alliances, the offstage histrionics became addictive, not only to the audience but also to the news establishment. The networks began to bank on the ad revenue that came from these unscripted, low-cost, highly anticipated programs, which proved a ratings bonanza. More debates were scheduled. The series snowballed. The star was given more and more airtime. The trivia of the race became magnified in the news cycle and in the culture.
When the Republican National Convention rolled around, Trump broke with tradition and decided to put in an appearance all four nights. And come the general election, he had a distinct advantage. While Hillary Clinton at her rallies would enlist the likes of Barbra and Bruce and Beyoncé, Trump, thanks to his fan base and his months of debate exposure, could draw on a wider audience that considered him on par with his fellow reality peeps and tweeters. He had the Kardashians and Kanye and the Hiltons. He had the Duck Dynasty crew and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Yentl compared with Kimye? No contest. (As pure entertainment, Trump had already won. His show was The Bachelorette; Clinton’s was a public-TV fund drive.)
Reality television and pro wrestling, however, were just the baseline. Trump’s success came from his mastery across the mediasphere. He was the sultan of the piquant tweet.7 He was the phantom of the radio-show phone-in (Alex Jones)8 and the TV schmooze (Morning Joe, Hannity, and, one notable Sunday morning, CBS and NBC and Fox and CNN). Fox News founder Roger Ailes for a time was an unofficial Trump adviser.
Upon taking office, Trump—with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—would call in the media moguls. His treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin had invested in media companies and films (Mad Max: Fury Road; The LEGO Movie). Trump’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, had been a filmmaker, Breitbart News executive, and shareholder in the Seinfeld franchise. Close Trump advisers included people as varied as Peter Thiel (the social-media and data-mining kingpin), Veterans Affairs point man Ike Perlmutter (who made a fortune off of action heroes at Marvel Entertainment), and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (former publisher of the New York Observer). Trump’s pick to head up the White House Strategic Development Group? Hollywood talent-agency CFO Chris Liddell. Trump’s choice to lead the Small Business Administration? Linda McMahon, who’d helped start WWE, the pro-wrestling juggernaut.
More importantly, though, media and show biz were the oxygen that animated—indeed, validated—Trump’s public persona. Here was a man whose Trump Tower office was plastered with magazine covers of himself. He’d played himself in movie cameos. He’d hosted Saturday Night Live. (When SNL made fun of his tweeting, however, Trump would take to Twitter to slam the show as “totally biased, not funny… just can’t get any worse.… Sad.”)
While President Bush had not been a heavy news consumer (claiming he relied on “people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world”) and Obama had professed an aversion to cable punditry, Trump was an inveterate channel surfer. “He’s the Hate-Watcher in Chief,” in the words of Times columnist James Poniewozik. “Trump sees something in the news; he gets mad; he tweets; that becomes the news; repeat.” None other than William Kristol, the neoconservative standard-bearer, would admit that the man he’d so devoutly bashed throughout the campaign “understands today’s media better than the media understands themselves.”9
Trump World would become The Truman Show, 2017. The President-Protagonist, unlike Jim Carrey’s character in the 1998 film, was not an unsuspecting patsy being “cammed” as part of a theme-park-style reality show. Instead, The Trumpen Show was a genre all its own. Its creators had taken control of the political backdrop of the nation, along with the theater curtain called the news media, and retrofitted it. And day and night, a riveted audience was presented with diatribes and pantomimes and magic acts while way, way up there, perched in the rafters, sat the marionettist. He was the President as the Wizard-Behind-the-Curtain. He was the Bannon & Bailey ringmaster. He was the Trumpen Prole puppeteer, watching and tweaking and tweeting and presiding. He was The Trumpen Show’s star and producer, a man tormented by negative reviews—and consumed with his box office numbers. He was Donald ex machina.
It sounds like hyperbole. But a good case can be made that a Trump presidency would never have been possible had the 1990s not normalized and formalized personal branding, reality programming, 24/7 news, tabloid scandal coverage, and online self-expression. Trump was his media echo. What’s more, Trump seemed to understand that harnessing the twin-engine force of traditional media and social media was the new mode for asserting power, for manipulating public opinion (so as to acquire power), for humiliating or undermining others (who were displaying too much power), and for perpetually deflecting or diverting the influence of those in other power centers (so as to maintain power). Kim Kardashian knew it, ISIS knew it, Vladimir Putin knew it, Trump knew it.
Trump was the candidate for the press-processed age. Since the 1990s, voters had become more media-dependent than ever. More Americans had more digital screens in their lives and more time on their hands—including the housebound, the retired, the out-of-work. And they were absorbing and sharing more unvarnished opinion—from Rush (syndicated nationally since 1988), to Drudge (b. 1995), to Fox News (b. 1996), and their progeny—than in previous election cycles. Now, the televised, pundit-spun presidential race had become the race itself. And the Internet’s inversion of the opinion bell curve had brought more extreme voices to the fore. The hard line—and attendant bile—was intended to push viewers’, listeners’, and readers’ buttons. At the same time, many disaffected Americans were taking ideological refuge in the new boom of extremist online outlets, conspiracy newsletters, hate-mongering blogs, and synthetic news sites that were profiting off false and often scurrilous stories. Some sites were disavowed by the Trump camp; others, not so much. This was governing by the long lie—in an era when fabrication was made valid through ceaseless reiteration.
Nearly seventy years ago, there had been inklings. The German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, of the influential Frankfurt School, had suffered firsthand under fascism’s vise. And in 1949 he had prophesized the meshing of the virtual and the real, the lie and the truth, as well as the perpetual media manipulation in America—manipulation that would come to characterize the 1990s and the years ever after. Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, recently summarized Adorno’s prescience vis-à-vis the current age: “As early as the forties, Adorno saw American life as a kind of reality show: ‘Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.’ Now a businessman turned reality-show star has been elected President. Like it or not, Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.”
The election results augured a new and chilling American chapter. The alarming spike in post-election hate crimes and incidents of violence and harassment were clear evidence: certain voters felt that Trump’s conquest had vindicated their views. And through it all, there was an unmistakably ’90s tenor. The nation’s politics were so polarized—and the culture-war battles had been fought for so long—that there was no avoiding it. In the 2016 campaign cycle, synthetic reality had been made flesh. Here, too, had come the Hillary backlash. The Bill flashbacks. The social-media addiction. The kinky dossiers. The tabloidism and venom and gutter talk. (In 1998, for the first time, the New York Times had run the word “fuck,” and quite prominently—in reference to Clinton. In 2016, the Times’s front page quoted Trump himself using the words “fuck” and “pussy.”)
The gutter, indeed. In some ways, the victory of Donald J. Trump would never have been conceivable had America not withstood, survived, and then assimilated the coarseness of the Naughty Nineties. How else would the electorate have been comfortable with a thrice-married president who had a fondness for fashion models, a history of hosting beauty contests, and a string of accusers describing harassment, unwanted advances, or assaults (all of whose claims he denied)? How else would Americans have voted for a candidate who would announce, “We’re gonna knock the shit out of ISIS,” and “You can tell [U.S. companies who return from overseas] to go”—mouthing the verb—“themselves”? How else to justify supporting a man who’d described his years of successfully avoiding STDs as “my personal Vietnam,” or who’d once remarked, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them.… When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.… Grab ’em by the pussy”?
In very real ways, in Trump Times, the ’90s were collapsing back into themselves. “Many of the same players have returned to the political stage,” says my friend Henry Schuster, a TV news producer, “but they are fighting with bazookas now. On one side of the culture war you had the resurrected Clintons. You had Biden. You had Carville and Stephanopoulos, this time as commentators or news anchors. You even had a reborn David Brock—Saul, the Pharisee, had become Paul, the Apostle. On the other side there was Trump. There was Giuliani. And Newt and Callista Gingrich. And Ann Coulter, with a best-selling Trump book. And Kellyanne Conway, whose husband, George Conway III, had worked pro bono for Paula Jones’s legal defense. And don’t forget that Trump, before one of the Hillary debates, even resurrected three Clinton accusers—including Paula Jones.”
Here, too, was Rupert Murdoch in the catbird seat. And Fox News, as state TV, airing Hannity and O’Reilly (until his 2017 ouster) in prime time. And sometime-Trump-ally Roger Stone, offstage right (the same political operative who had resigned from Bob Dole’s campaign in 1996 after photos emerged from a supposed Stone “swinger” ad). And no less than Pamela Anderson hanging out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after he’d disseminated the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s team. It was a virtual Nineties reunion—for the kids in the naughty class.
“Let’s face it,” adds Schuster. “The Internet back then is where social media is now. In the ’90s, the Drudge Report scooped Newsweek’s scoop on the Lewinsky scandal. And The Starr Report brought about the real explosion of the Web, the moment everyone went online to read a combination of politics and porn and soap opera. Now you have a candidate who becomes the president and he’s the one playing the role of Matt Drudge. In Leninist terms, he’s seized the means of production. He’s tweeting. He’s elevating hard-right news. He’s trying to emasculate the mainstream press. And through social media he makes all facts and rules negotiable, all flaws seem like virtues.
“In the ’90s we had a daily diet of news about a president’s private affair, which embarrassed the nation—and most especially the First Lady, ‘the wronged woman.’ Now, we’re so used to all the dirty politics and sex and scandal that it doesn’t raise an eyebrow when the New York Post runs some old pictures of the First-Lady-to-be romping around nude, with another woman, for a photo shoot in a European magazine. This is how far we’d come. Many conservatives and evangelicals, who might otherwise look askance at a guy who’d marry a woman [depicted in] a sexy photo shoot, decided they’d rather attack Hillary. Their ends—getting pro-life judges on the Supreme Court—justified the means.”
As if by some universal law of media physics, then, the Naughty Nineties had inevitably imploded to become the Tawdry Teens. All truth had become malleable, all secrets exposed. What’s more, the same people who were repulsed by this new reality were also secretly fascinated. They watched compulsively, which is how we watch reality TV. “What if Donald Trump understood the Naughty Nineties better than any of us?” asks Schuster. “He’s the one, after all, who managed to flip everything on its head.”
Somehow there was a cold Karma to it all. The week of Trumph’s victory, Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh would summarize it this way: “Amid Trump confirming the size of his manhood on national TV, the return of Bill Clinton’s sexual-assault accusers and a nearly campaign-capsizing FBI announcement regarding Anthony Weiner’s sexting, election 2016 was punctuated by penises—which is apt, since this often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.” And men and power. And race and power. And the substitution, in American politics, of rage for reason, entertainment for information, and nerve for experience.
True, Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote. But America got what an overwhelming share of the commonwealth had been asking for since the 1990s. In the electoral reckoning, civility had been trumped by hostility, respect by chauvinism, tolerance by bigotry, truth by fabrication and deceit, privacy by exposure, modesty by exhibitionism, achievement by fame, shame by shamelessness, and bridges by walls.
For this round, anyway.