Trump’s “American Hell” is everywhere

There is shocking entertainment news out of Hollywood today.

The reality show powerhouse American Hell is now the highest-rated network across every platform. In a press conference from the White House Brady Briefing Room, producers attributed the network’s rising popularity to its virtues of fear, anger, greed, consumption, corruption and dysentery, which are favorably preached at “thousands of the right kind of churches across the country.”

While widely divisive, American Hell is popular because the ratings prove that its three reality shows have something for everybody. Laugh or cry, the programs are both highly addictive and self-destructive. The ratings winner, of course, is “King POTUS (White) Power Hour,” a moving feast of strange oddities featuring an aging actor as the president whose catchphrase is “You’re Fired” and whose cold open is “Rest in Peace,” the Undertaker’s theme song from World Wrestling Entertainment.

POTUS loves to dance to that theme. He shakes his fists and jerks his legs in a manner suggesting a rare uncontrollable muscle spasm induced by a live electric wire arbitrarily applied to the spinal column. As he dances, he sings in his best Kid Rock voice, “mandate,” “landslide,” and “this war never would have begun if I had been here,” almost as often as he tells us how much he knows about real estate, while explaining things that have never been heard or “seen before.” POTUS is the ultimate front man — a convicted felon who still looks like a star but is really out on parole. He dictates his demands and desires to the world via Truth Social, ending each edition of his personal newsletter with “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” as if he’s a bill collector or a repo man. Well, he was allegedly a slumlord. Any fact he doesn’t agree with is “wrong” and anybody who doesn’t agree with him is his enemy until they agree to work for him.

If this show gets boring, then just tune into the “Dysfunctional Congressional Circus” comedy variety show. True, it’s often in reruns while the cast routinely takes long breaks to ingest more public money — and it has lost most of its audience. Poor casting and writing has plagued this television show for years. Currently it is run, in part, by Michael “My Smirk Defines Me” Johnson and John “Mr. Green Jeans” Thune. Each week the erstwhile pair square off in a high-budget, but low-brow and low-production-value drama against Chuck “Nasty Letter” Schumer, whose pastimes include writing angry letters in cursive to his neighbor kids who keep playing on his massive, rolling lawn. His partner in good intentions is Hakeem “I’m Ready” Jeffries, who doesn’t want to drift away. He anticipates he’ll be the next ringmaster. He’s ready for primetime.

It’s been less than four years since the Democrats and Republicans reached a consensus on a major piece of legislation: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on November 15, 2021. That was the last time we saw the bare minimum the government could do when people work together. Today, this act of good government stewardship is disparaged, forgotten or ignored so Congress can stage low-brow comedy. The entire GOP has relegated itself to a walk-on role in their own show, and they are too busy trying to pick their own voters to actually care. After all, they got to make their nut. They need a sizable guaranteed income, great health care and a comfortable living until they freeze in a blank stare and drool from a podium in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. 

The final offering in American Hell’s reality show lineup is “Jeopardy,” that old family-friendly and favorite game show. Today it’s hosted by the nine members of the Supreme Court. In this version, it costs you money to play for better rights, and the questions constantly change as do the answers — all with little regard to established law while paying as much attention to the Constitution as POTUS does to his daily briefings. On occasion those offering a majority opinion screech like howler monkeys. Ooooh. What a scorcher. It’s natural selection on a whole new level.

The main cast members on all three reality shows are clowns, morons, failed jocks, lawyers, doctors, perverts, criminals, pimps and thieves. It’s no wonder “South Park” was able to skewer the government so easily. The people representing us are walking cartoons. 

Now, let’s divorce ourselves from fiction. President Donald Trump is trying to avoid reality — and no matter how long he tries to put it off, he — and more importantly we — cannot avoid the inevitable. Outlandish claims and actions have real consequences. But neither this administration, nor the press pool covering Trump, are dealing with reality. 

This week the president seized power in the District of Columbia by activating the D.C. National Guard and deploying 800 troops to help police the city’s streets. He also assumed control of the Metropolitan Police Department, which he is allowed to do for 30 days without congressional approval under the Home Rule Act of 1973. Trump claimed in front of reporters this week he doesn’t need congressional approval if he declares a national emergency, and while he hasn’t done so yet, that’s still on the table. The FBI and DEA have also dispatched agents to patrol the streets at night. (I wonder who’s paying that overtime?) On Thursday night, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the police department’s restrictions in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and ordered D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to recognize Terrance C. Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the city’s “emergency police commissioner.” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb responded today by suing the Trump administration for what he called its “unlawful actions.”

Reports say Trump is also threatening to assemble a squad of 600 National Guard troops to be ready at a moment’s notice to put down civil unrest elsewhere in the country. 

We have not seen this type of autocratic behavior since a king ruled our country and colonists  staged a revolt against high tea tariffs. 

When he announced his takeover of D.C. on Monday in the Brady Briefing Room, Trump claimed that Democrats love high crime while he loves safety. Apparently Trump has never heard of, or doesn’t understand, Benjamin Franklin’s words about sacrificing liberty for safety. You end up with neither. Even if he understood, he wouldn’t care. He then told everyone that the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro had been a great district attorney. According to Trump she was so great “she went into show business.” He said it as if it were a compliment.

Everything Trump does is filtered through the lens of a self-congratulatory camera.

The United States in which I was born would never settle for this. Republicans, led by party elder GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, ran Richard Nixon out of office after he lied to cover up the Watergate break-in. You know, when Republicans tried to bug Democratic National Committee Headquarters. How quaint such a notion seems today. Donald Trump is a convicted felon whose list of criminal accomplishments would make your average Mafia Don blush in envy. But Republicans in Congress worship him. There is no Goldwater among them. The best they can muster is a catatonic Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell. 

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Before lunch on Wednesday, Trump appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to announce his personal picks for the memorial’s annual performing arts honorees. “They all passed through me,” he told us. He sounded like a roofing contractor introducing his favorite Hollywood acts. For some reason he even felt the need to discuss the quality of the asphalt and paving near the center. That was before he said he’d be hosting the televised broadcast of the awards show. Because, you know, he’s got nothing better to do — and since he never got a Kennedy Center Honor, he plans on giving himself one. 

“He is off the rails,” a member of the press pool in attendance at the Kennedy Center told me. “Half of what he said didn’t even make sense.” 

Trump talked about asphalt, painting and refurbishing the seats at the center, along with real estate, and often in the same sentence. He conceded Russia might have hacked into some of our government databases. But guess what? He said we also do it, and do it better than Russia. Which countries? When? No one asked, and Trump was on to something else. He said people should stop calling him a dictator and should “join him.” He finished off one question by talking about how more people watched his show “The Apprentice” than watched the Academy Awards telecast. 

This is just the latest oversized, well-lit and highlighted warning that Trump’s bridge is out. His mental decline is precipitous, undeniable and dangerous. But if you’re expecting the press to hold him accountable, forget it. We’re lost.

A lot of the responsibility for the continued lack of coverage belongs to the White House PR department. They are prevalent in the Brady Briefing Room these days, masquerading as reporters, but their sole function is to produce and distribute low grade, repetitious Trump-friendly drivel to be consumed by the masses. You can easily identify them when Trump says “good question” to whatever it is they ask. They offer few facts, but they present Trump’s opinion and deliver it with little imagination. It is the journalistic equivalent of processed cheese without the appeal of Velveeta — somewhere between cardboard and cat vomit.

The danger of ignoring reality is becoming increasingly menacing and serious. There are armed conflicts across the planet where innocent people are dying. Genocide is a real concern, as is starvation, disease and torture. And Donald Trump is talking about asphalt while prepping to host the Kennedy Center Honors. Gosh. I hope his makeup looks good.

There are democracies, like Ukraine, struggling to survive. We face existential threats from the environment, our technology, asteroids in space, Russia, China, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and pollution, and we have to make choices every day that can and do have real consequences on all of those very serious issues. Trump is not a serious person. He has other concerns, like wanting to review exhibits at the Smithsonian to make sure they align with his oddly unique interpretation of American History.

Those who deny reality often pay for it — but others always pay first.

This week, a reporting crew from Al Jazeera died in a tent outside of a hospital in Gaza City after the Israeli military fired on them because it was claimed, with no facts to support the accusation, that one of the reporters was actually an embedded terrorist. The accusation is laughable. Terrorist leaders don’t hide in plain sight on television, where they do their side gig. They hide in tunnels and underneath schools, using innocent civilians as human shields.

The Committee to Protect Journalists denounced the accusations and accused the Israeli military of murder with the intention of silencing one of the few remaining independent voices documenting the ongoing horror in Gaza. The only difference between what Israel did and what Trump does to the press is one of degree. The goal is the same: Limiting access to facts in order to hide reality. Trump apparently just prefers entertainment to torture and murder. But he also probably wouldn’t say “no” to torture and murder if he had to — and his followers would nod in agreement if he did.

On Tuesday in the Brady Briefing Room, while his faithful lieutenants looked on, the President of the United States told us Washington D.C. resembled something out of what I’ve been told is one of his favorite movies: “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” Just kidding. I always took him for a “Porky’s” kind of guy. “Our capital city has been overcome by violent gangs and blood thirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youths, drugged out maniacs and homeless people…that rampage through city streets,” he said of the situation in D.C. 

Talk about laying it on thick. I’ve been to high school football games that are more dangerous than what you see in most of D.C. — even late at night when the political vampires roam the dark alleys of Georgetown.

But, according to Trump, D.C. rivals a war zone. “My father always used to tell me…’Son, when you walk into a restaurant & you see a dirty front door, don’t go in. Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.’…If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty.”

Trump is the source of that dirt, and no matter how he tries to spin it, or to pretend he’s in a reality television show, he cannot run away from the fact that he’s responsible for this — and because of his encroaching mental erosion, it’s doubtful he’ll ever understand that fact. 

But the minions who hold his leash do. Ultimately they will be the ones to pay the price for Trump’s American Hell. 

Ten years from now after the dust settles, if it does, there will be Republicans who will deny Don ever existed — or they will claim to have been secretly fighting him the entire time they worked for him. The reality show reporters will be at different gigs, never once understanding how they made all of Trump’s mayhem possible.

And Jake Tapper will be promoting his new book “American Hell,” which will be available in the fiction department on Amazon.