The Trump Show Is Returning. Will It Be Triumph, Tragedy or Farce?
The New York Times
TV has fixated on one person, as news, comedy material and dramatic subtext, since 2015. Can it do another four years?
On his last show before Election Day, John Oliver allowed himself to dream a little dream. Mr. Oliver, whose “Last Week Tonight” speaks to a mostly left-of-center crowd, spent most of the episode making the case for Kamala Harris. But also, he asked his audience, wouldn’t it be nice, for the first time since 2015, to have the option of simply ignoring Donald J. Trump’s existence? “I want so badly to live in that world!” he said.
A week later, Mr. Oliver was back, reporting from a world he found rather less preferable. He devoted the episode to what the Trump victory meant. But first, he gave his audience permission to change the channel.
“It is understandable,” he said, “not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you.”
Mr. Oliver, of course, spoke from a particular political position. But he was also voicing a kind of weariness that goes beyond reproductive issues or deportation policies or the health of democracy. The Trump Era has been a lot, and for a long time. One person has been Topic A, B and C for nearly a decade, throughout popular culture, but most of all on his native medium, TV.
On Nov. 5, that might all have ended. It didn’t. How will we — collectively, as a culture — do four more years of this? And what might that even look like?
WHEN I SAY THAT Donald Trump, in his first term, was a “TV president,” I mean something different than when we used the phrase for, say, Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton.
