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You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / Not Yet Ready to Make Nice Open Thread: Trump’s Speech As Theater

Not Yet Ready to Make Nice Open Thread: Trump’s Speech As Theater

by Anne Laurie|  March 2, 20174:34 am| 13 Comments

This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Republican Stupidity, Not Normal

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Trump is in a great mood today and is thrilled with news coverage and feedback, two people close to him say. "He's basking in it," one said.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) March 1, 2017

A senior admin. official says the 'revised' travel ban order will be signed later in the week. They don't want to step on tonight's big win.

— David Martosko (@dmartosko) March 1, 2017

Boy howdy, that was a quick 24 hours, wasn’t it?

This is worth reading, though — the Washington Post‘s pop-culture blogger, Alyssa Rosenberg, explains “Pundits are treating Trump like theater. They should learn from the real critics“:

On Wednesday, as a wave of positive headlines describing President Trump’s first address to Congress rolled in, Slate chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie tweeted in disgust, “This morning is a good reminder that so much of what passes for political analysis is just theater criticism.” On behalf of critics everywhere, I take a minor amount of umbrage: After all, we generally set higher standards for performances than “basic competence,” and we tend to address style as well as substance. But given that his real point is that the pundits who praised Trump seemed to be falling for mere optics, maybe political commentators could stand to take a few tips from those of us who practice criticism for a living.

1. When someone doesn’t tell the truth, the reason for the distortion matters as much as the distortion itself: One of the hot debates in pop culture criticism right now is what obligations fiction has to be historically accurate… The thing about identifying areas where pop culture diverges from the cultural record, or where a work of fiction embraces one school of historical interpretation over another, is that at the end of the day, it’s still fiction. So it’s generally more interesting to analyze what goals or ideas those diversions serve, rather than simply identifying that they exist. The president of the United States has a much, much higher obligation to tell the truth than movies and television do. But fact-checking is still a first step: Identifying what function Trump’s errors, distortions and outright lies perform in his presidency matters, too.

2. The presidency is a season of television, not an episode:… You don’t judge whether a television show as a whole is good or bad on whether the showrunners, writers, actors and directors can sustain what’s good about their work for an hour or two, the way you would judge a single episode of television. You judge it on whether they can do that for a season, and then for the majority of the show’s run. Political analysts need to approach a presidency the same way. The test of whether Trump has found a way to be presidential (if, in fact, you judge his performance last night as meeting that standard) is not whether he can do it for one night, but whether he can do it for years…

Or even, y’know, for a whole day, before getting derailed by his own minions?

With 24 false or misleading claims in 1 day, yesterday was a record day for our "100 days of Trump Claims" database. https://t.co/eiScy9ekUc

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee (@myhlee) March 1, 2017

Some sources in WH are frankly surprised at how pundits are warming to the speech. Say Trump has not changed, no big shift in policy coming.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 1, 2017

.@SykesCharlie on MSNBC just attributed the glowing media reaction to Trump's speech to "battered pundit syndrome."

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) March 1, 2017

On the @CBSEveningNews, more wonderfully plain talk from @ScottPelley: "Some of the problems Mr. Trump promised to solve — don't exist."

— tonydokoupil (@tonydokoupil) March 1, 2017

Fellow pundits: There's no way to make the creation of an office charged with scapegoating immigrants either "unifying" or "presidential".

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) March 1, 2017

Pundits loved the tone, white supremacists loved the text. Look at yourselves.

— Majestik møøse lamb (@ZeddRebel) March 1, 2017

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Reader Interactions

13Comments

  1. 1.

    Nicole

    March 2, 2017 at 4:44 am

    Glad I’m not the only one awake.

    Yeah, I have some right-wing acquaintances on FB and they saw a totally different speech. Or maybe they didn’t but just don’t want to admit to themselves the level of their wypiponess.

    Still, it didn’t take long for CNN to return to being, well, CNN.

  2. 2.

    Peale

    March 2, 2017 at 4:48 am

    But dead soldiers in heaven. That’s got to count for something. Shouldn’t there be some kind of theological criticism of the civic religion?

  3. 3.

    NotMax

    March 2, 2017 at 5:11 am

    Sounds like some underling misplaced the special small pen that makes Dolt 45’s hands look bigger.

  4. 4.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 2, 2017 at 5:20 am

    Some bad theater critics need to be gathered together to be shot into the sun.

  5. 5.

    low-tech cyclist

    March 2, 2017 at 5:51 am

    Scary that a real theater critic has a better sense of how to write about the President’s speech than the pundits whose job it is to make sense of it.

  6. 6.

    Paul

    March 2, 2017 at 5:55 am

    Poor Trumpy! All that good press goes down the crapper today! Thanks Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III!

  7. 7.

    kd bart

    March 2, 2017 at 5:58 am

    Leonard Pinth-Garnell would’ve considered the speech as Bad Theatre.

  8. 8.

    amk

    March 2, 2017 at 6:05 am

    all it took to ‘sway’ the pundtwits was a dead man and his poor wife. no questions or outrage about the thug who killed him. no need of any terrorists to destroy murkkka, these corrupt clowns will do it and the morons will believe them.

  9. 9.

    TS

    March 2, 2017 at 6:06 am

    @Paul: Never fear there are still some sycophants in the media who think the speech was wonderful, the presidents policies are wonderful, the stock market is booming (did they ever thank Obama for pulling the country out of recession and having massive stock market rises – of course not) and Sessions has problems but trump is king.

  10. 10.

    Mustang Bobby

    March 2, 2017 at 6:17 am

    Well, in my other life, I am a theatre critic; I even have a PhD in it. I have been trying to figure out Trump not as a politician but as a character in a play and trying to grasp the essential element of acting: what is his objective? Every action, every word, every element of portraying a character must have an element of trying to achieve that objective. But he has so many and in such a disorder that none of them are truly clear even to him. And if the actor can’t figure it out, the audience sure isn’t going to.

    This should close the show out of town. But alas…

  11. 11.

    Paul

    March 2, 2017 at 6:56 am

    @TS: I realize that. But I was referring to what the news coverage today will consist of. All Sessions!

  12. 12.

    JeanneT

    March 2, 2017 at 7:40 am

    Tom Levinson did a very beautiful series of tweets schooling Cillizza about how to evaluate Trump’s speech, and points out it’s not a journalist’s job to PRAISE the speech, but to analyze it for meaning

  13. 13.

    Cheap Jim

    March 2, 2017 at 10:10 am

    OT, but when and why did teevee producers start to be called “showrunners”?

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