As soon as President Biden dropped out of the race, leaving his vice president to take on the candidacy, a pile-on of news organizations tracked me down to ask for comment. They weren’t after any insights on Kamala Harris’s campaign (I have none) but instead wanted to know how I felt now that events were tracking the main story line of my HBO show “Veep.”
The show stars the unbeatable Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer. As the series progresses, Selina is suddenly thrown onto the main stage when the president decides not to run for a second term, leaving her to go into the convention as the new presumptive nominee. For 24 hours, the mainstream media asked if I was pleased with the comparison.
This is the first time I’m setting out a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I’m not. I’m extremely worried! Not about Ms. Harris. I’m sure she’ll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom.
In fact, I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left. Look how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which happened only two weeks ago, so speedily transformed from real-time tragedy into iconography. No sooner had Mr. Trump ducked for cover when some indefinable Trumpy-sense clicked on, calculating with acute precision how best to turn the moment of survival into a sequence of living memes, first by asking for his shoes, perhaps so he could be seen to exit at full height, and then raising a fist to the clouds, mouthing, “Fight, fight, fight.” Someone died in that mindless violence, but what does it say about the supremacy of the defining visual that Mr. Trump commemorated the moment at his party’s convention by caressing the victim’s uniform live onstage?
Which brings us to the Republican convention in Milwaukee. The convention was not so much the choosing of a leader as the transfiguration of one — the Donald reborn as the One who brushed off death as if it were some loser mosquito whack job. With humility he declared himself chosen and protected by God, the sly implication being that while Mr. Biden was slowly stumbling toward his end, Mr. Trump was most likely immune from his. For 20 minutes Mr. Trump spoke with saintly measure of how he was going to unite the country and then for an hour more made it clear he would do this by delegitimizing every alternative point of view.
Heretics, including Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, promptly repented, with conviction in their voices and deadness in their eyes, and a collective hosanna rose from the assembly, many wearing anointed ear bandages to cover the stigmata they prayed would one day afflict the sides of their own heads. The whole event was about making us believe in Mr. Trump’s Second Coming (or his third, if you’re one of those who think his second came in 2020 but that was stolen and everyone knows it).
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.sim slots