Trump Considers Republican Presidential Bid; Democrats Wet Pants with Glee

 

Real estate mogul Donald Trump continues to act like, or at least mimic the words of, a man gearing up for a presidential campaign. While he continues to play coy about his actual intentions, he has insinuated in recent interviews that he is inclined to run as a Republican, but, if he runs and fails to win that party’s nomination, he may consider running as an independent.

Trump, if he has a passing familiarity with American history, will be aware that almost exactly one hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt broke from the Republican Party, watched the Progressive Party (or Bull Moose Party, courtesy of a choice phrase from the eminently quotable Roosevelt himself) spring up around him, and ran for president as its nominee. While Roosevelt lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, the fractured Republican Party and its ineffectual incumbent, William Howard Taft, lost to both. To this day, Theodore Roosevelt remains the only third-party presidential candidate in American history to defeat one of the two major parties in either electoral or overall votes (having finished second in both).

It’s quite possible that Trump, in a perfectly believable avalanche of high self-esteem, sees himself as a sort of twenty-first century incarnation of Roosevelt, a visionary maverick willing to buck the system to bring the country what it needs: namely, Donald Trump. To be sure, the similarities between Trump and Roosevelt—centuries apart in our minds, but not in our hearts—are hard to avoid:

ROOSEVELT: spent decades of his life as a civil servant, first as a New York state assemblyman, then later as New York City Police Commissioner; he spent just shy of a year as Vice President of the United States, and then seven-plus years as President. On top of that, before his presidency he served in not one but two branches of the U.S. military, first as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, later resigning from that post to serve in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War.

TRUMP: builds hotels and casinos, several of which have failed to go bankrupt.

ROOSEVELT: grew up as an easterner but lived as a rancher and a hunter, coming to love and admire and even eventually embody the spirit of the American West; was an accomplished naturalist with an ear for birdsong; published nearly three dozen books on military history, ornithology, biography, political commentary, and American history; had enormous personal charisma that often left even his political rivals disarmed, touched, and filled with reluctant admiration; and possessed an astounding breadth and depth of knowledge that would have qualified him as an expert in half a dozen wide-ranging fields.

TRUMP: has his own reality TV show, where he seems to be playing an unconvincing caricature of himself.¹

ROOSEVELT: won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1906, back when actual accomplishments, rather than anticipated accomplishments, were required for that sort of thing.

TRUMP: in 2004 filed a trademark application for the words “You’re fired,” just in case there was money to be made from other people losing their jobs.

Roosevelt’s and Trump’s own words also help to highlight the stunning similarities in their characters and the quality of their thought processes:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”²

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

“I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country.”  

—Donald Trump, 2011

Trump has claimed to be concerned that American has become “the laughingstock and whipping post for the rest of the world.” At almost exactly the same time, however—and with no apparent understanding of irony—he has flung himself willingly onto the birther bandwagon, questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship in a shameless appeal to the nation’s craziest common denominator.

It is unclear whether Trump is aware of the yawning disconnect between his concern for America’s reputation and his endorsement of one of the stupidest conspiracy theories in its history. It’s hard to say whether it’s occurred to him that a blowhard television personality with no political experience may not be the best way for the nation to turn the corner on that whole “laughingstock” thing. What should be fairly obvious—not to mention disappointing and depressing—to the rest of us is the yawning gulf between what gets called a presidential candidate in 2011, and what qualified just one hundred short years ago.

NOTES

1. Other folks with television shows: the Thundercats, the Smurfs, the Transformers, and any number of other cartoonish boobs with political experience similar to Trump’s. It’s to their credit, though, that they were not part of a reality show. Frankly, we’d also probably prefer President Snarf to President Trump.

2. The famously verbose Roosevelt spoke for approximately ninety minutes—a rather long time by the standards of the stunted modern attention span; rather longer yet when you consider that he had a fucking bullet in his chest.

Rest in Peace, Ken Ober

In keeping with our recent but solidifying tendency to report news items long after they’ve been beaten into the ground by more timely and better-staffed news outlets, we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and mourn the passing of Ken Ober, who died in his home in Santa Monica, California, on November 15, 2009, at the age of fifty-two.

A comedian, television producer, and radio personality, the affable Ober was probably best known for his late-1980s stint as the host of MTV’s game show Remote Control. On the air from 1987 to 1990, Remote Control was a goofy and irreverent homage to (and, later, a component of) pop culture, specifically television. Its oddball categories and characters—Sing Along with Colin, Dead or Canadian, Stickpin the Trivia Delinquent, the Fairy Pixie, Stud Boy, and Beat the Bishop—were funny and entertaining enough to be remembered by plenty of MTV viewers with a thirteen-year-old's mentality, which, of course, made up the bulk of its viewership.¹

It’d be more than a little over-the-top to suggest that Remote Control was a cultural landmark—even in comparison to the formidably low standards of MTV, game shows, or television overall—but it was fun, unusual, and entertaining. However, the show also deserves a certain amount of dishonor for its role in bringing to life one of modern television’s most dismal plagues:

The reality show.

At the time Remote Control originally aired, MTV broadcast little to no original programming. They aired plenty of music videos,² sometimes more or less randomly, sometimes grouped together thematically in shows like Yo! MTV Raps and Headbanger’s Ball,³ but their non–music video content consisted, according to my very hazy memories from twenty years ago, primarily of reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which I for one watched almost religiously.⁴

Remote Control may have lasted only a handful of seasons, but its success was enough to get MTV thinking that if a more or less first-rate game show could get good ratings, there had to be a cheap ways to get second-rate entertainment out to its mostly undiscerning audience. Eventually somebody came up with the morally dubious but financially brilliant notion of grouping together a handful of young, self-absorbed, questionably mature, personally incompatible, unpaid and untrained strangers, shoving them under a microscope and poking them with a stick⁵ until they pissed each other off—and then filming the resulting explosions, editing out the parts that didn’t involve real or perceived racism and sexism, destruction and/or reinforcement of broad stereotypes (sometimes at the same time), booze, sex, aggression, narcissism, and confrontation. And The Real World was born.

Teenaged MTV viewers, with their underdeveloped ability to tell the difference between shit and Shinola—it’s science—moved enthusiastically from Remote Control to The Real World, which, after a few years, was followed by MTV’s Road Rules, a groundbreaking, never-been-seen-before all-new kind of reality television best described as “The Real World in a camper.”

Since then, the reality TV phenomenon has exploded like a
gremlin in a microwave, its roster of shows including but not limited to

American Gladiator; Big Brother; The Apprentice; Celebrity Apprentice; I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here; Survivor; Fear Factor; The Mole; The Simple Life; American Gladiator again, for some reason; America’s Next Top Model; America’s Got Talent; American Idol; American Chopper; American Hot Rod; The Bachelor; The Bachelorette; The Biggest Loser; The Amazing Race; Wife Swap; Who Wants to be a Millionaire; Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire; Who Wants to Desecrate a Corpse; Who Wants to Desecrate a Celebrity’s Corpse; The Anna Nicole Show; and The Running Man.

I’m not about to tell you that any of the above shows⁶ destroyed Western culture as we know it, crapped on the Constitution, or made Jesus cry—although I’d like to think that Wife Swap, just because of the title, came close—but I’ll be damned if I can find anything in that list that didn’t lower television’s already dreadfully low standards for what passes as quality entertainment.

It’s not fair, though, to pin all of the blame—maybe not any of it—on Ken Ober. Granted, his game show did give exposure to Kari Wuhrer, Colin Quinn, and Adam Sandler, and if Ober were still alive and this thought had occurred to me, I’d probably want to give him some good-natured grief about it. But nobody—and I mean nobody—watching an goofy MTV game show in 1987 could have predicted that it would have led to Little Nicky or Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time, much less to the unholy spawn of reality shows that have been torpedoing IQs and TV standards for the last twenty years.

I’m not about to say that Ken Ober was a towering figure in my childhood, but he seemed like a friendly, funny guy, he hosted a fun show that is and deserves to be remembered warmly, and fifty-two is far too young to go. So a heartfelt goodbye to the quizmaster of 72 Whooping Cough Lane, Ken Ober; we’ll miss you. Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.

NOTES

1. I have a legitimate excuse: I was thirteen at the time.
2. That’s right, younguns, I’m old enough to remember when MTV actually played music videos. Gather ’round, I’ll tell you stories of the golden video days of yesteryear.
3. Which featured VJ Adam Curry, who fit into the heavy metal scene only slightly less comfortably than Downtown Julie Brown or, say, Elton John.
4. I would have had good odds of turning out to be a high school dork no matter what, but memorizing sketch after sketch of Monty Python’s Flying Circus pretty much made it a dead lock. But it was so, so worth it.
5. Apologies for the mixed metaphor here. It’s late.
6. The ones I didn’t make up, anyway.