We all have those devilish “what ifs,” fantasies and delusions that flutter in and out of the mind like butterflies in the stomach. For Donald Trump, these fanciful blusters are not confined to the recesses of the mind but play out on a scale of epic proportions. Sure, there have been moments of incredulity (his claim that he had the most watched presidential inauguration ever), moments of bumbling oxymorons (such nuggets as “I think I am actually humble. I think I’m much more humble than you would understand”), but the release of the video that President Trump reportedly showed to Kim Jong-Un at the summit in Singapore shows that the man has positively outdone himself.
I could dedicate a section of this article to a blow-by-blow account of the video, but words do not do the piece justice. I implore you to watch it. If not for any other reason, it gives an insight into a perspective on the world that is privy to very few and yet the focal point of the man that resides in power. The video reveals a world in which Trump and Kim Jong-Un are the saviours of universal peace, gatekeepers to a better world that is palpably within their grasp. With its 1990s, C-list movie trailer voice over, its painfully saturated imagery and a script likely left on the cutting room floor of the latest Segal movie, Trump has found a new way to blur the increasingly unnavigable distinction between reality and satire. We tend to treat people and objects as they present themselves. Donald Trump’s “movie trailer,” however, is one of the rare exceptions to the rule and it leaves a deep-seated feeling of unease. It looks like satire, sounds like satire, moves like satire and yet is an earnest piece of government media.
Think about the process for a moment – Trump had to instruct his Director of Communications that he wanted to produce this video. The White House had to hire researchers to source the archival material, a sound engineer (who, from the sounds of it, is languishing in a 1980s throwback retirement home), an editor and countless more in order to show this video at one of the most monumental and historic diplomatic meetings in recent history.
Now, there is protocol to how political critique works. I am supposed to present the case and the context, outline the proposed point-of-view and attempt to counter it with a nuanced response. This? I am hapless. Simply speaking, this is an insight into a manner of thought that is perplexing. It is a view of the world that is so far removed from reality, not only in content and implication, but in the very manner in which it is presented.
It is easy to dismiss absurdity as an everyday product of the Trump era. We can blanket ourselves in the notion that it cannot get any more bizarre or unexpected but, if there is anything that Trump has shown a tendency towards, it is to continuously surprise us with the range of his unpredictability. So perhaps you can file this article away in the archives of Trump’s farce because I am sure its time in the limelight will be short-lived. But who knows, it seems we are are all in on his fantasies and delusions for the long haul and, when that is the case, anything can happen.
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