Welcome to the Season Finale of the Donald J. Trump Show

Every reality show needs a villain. Every American needs a story.

Welcome to the Donald J. Trump reality show in a country where “reality” is a genre.

Reality is capturing a kind of reality that has replaced actual reality.

Reality TV has spread wide its thighs and pushed out a mewling whining entitled selfish incurious man — pushed him out bloody, wiped him clean, and presented him to us as leader of the free world.

Welcome to the Donald J. Trump reality show that no one wants to turn off. Welcome to your daily hell, your daily entertainment. Welcome to the new normal, same as the old normal, only this time capitalism has won.

Welcome to the collapse of what used to be American democracy. Welcome to the age of the algorithm. Welcome a 2 degree global temperature rise. Welcome to turning our backs on refugees. Welcome to the age of AI.

You think you have control? You advertise how much you care with a hashtag. And within seconds it is washed away by a wave of whatever’s coming next.

There is no escape because the thing that feeds you is the thing that drives it.

Welcome to the Donald J Trump reality show — did you think it was over? It’s not over. We’re just getting to the season finale.

These are the organs that churn. You are somewhere in there, liking, hearting, raging, clickety click click click. Your brain is hooked — addicted every time someone likes something you tweeted.

Will our charismatic predatory villain get impeached? Can any sliver of truth survive the onslaught of 10,000 lies he has told? But maybe the truth is like reality, bendable depending on what drives it. Or defines it.

Fake news isn’t even fake news anymore because Trump has said it’s all fake news. Trump has said the press is the enemy of the people and how can the people argue when the press has been strangled by clickbait?

Is the news the enemy of the people because Donald J. Trump needs it to be? Or is the news the addiction of the people because capitalism demands it to be? We shall have no god before the system that says the only thing that matters is how many eyeballs, how many clicks, how many useless dehumanizing comments.

Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC — not only are they perpetually tuned to the Trump channel, they all depend on it. Users and viewers comb over the latest outrageous thing Trump tweeted or threatened or said or chanted then the program breaks to talk about Cymbalta or adult diapers or the new baby back ribs. Sell it, America. Sell it.

We scroll our insanity, changing our brain chemistry, flipping our species into a generation that has no choice but to embrace sociopathy just to survive — a daily Twitter feed:
sea level rise
are bras necessary?
Venezuela in crisis
watch this golden retriever save a drowning cat
Brexit
it’s international chocolate day
plastic the size of an island floating in the ocean
the best strawberry shortcake you ever had
Fukushima
first female spelling bee champ
Five shot dead with AK-47 in a church
bananas or no bananas
woman discarding puppies in a trash can near Coachella
the explosion of the Keto diet
another Syrian hospital gassed
top seven greatest pop songs from the 90s
whole tire found in belly of whale.

Maybe we shouldn’t see it all at once like that, maybe we should turn it off, maybe we should walk outside, maybe we should breathe.

Trump, like Twitter’s algorithm, knows the hive mind all too well. He knows he can change the whole news day with a single tweet. He knows us better than we know ourselves. Distract us because we need to be distracted. It’s Trump or superhero movies. It’s Trump or stuff we can’t do anything about. If Trump doesn’t like what’s being said about him he simply changes the conversation — and it’s so easy, isn’t it? He’s become Godlike is his ability to thrust us into chaos at random.

Remember when the news broke because the Trump Administration was separating babies —BABIES — from their parents and ordering toddlers to appear in court? Their red, soggy faces awash in a kind of terror even the war torn streets of whatever country they fled couldn’t compare to. Why is that person pulling me away from my mommy? Where is my mommy?

Yet, two seconds later Trump, or someone pulling the strings on Team Trump, puts Melania in a green jacket — some stupid probably-made-in-China ugly coat with a message on the back that says, “I really don’t care, do you?” And just like that, no more attention on the children — it was all on Melania. Trump threw her out like a piece of raw meat for all of us to feed on and feed on we did. For days. And days. How can we ever separate what matters from what doesn’t after a day like that?

We tell ourselves lies like “we can walk and chew gum at the same time.” We can be outraged by everything all at once, all day, every day. But really? We can? It’s just another episode of the Donald J. Trump reality show that we can’t turn off.

We’re all waiting for the season finale. Impeachment. We’re waiting to catch him if we can. Our slippery, elusive charismatic villain can’t be caught because he can’t be shamed.

We’ve thrown everything at him — nothing sticks. He just gives us more of what we want — more of his reality TV president persona — more Lil’ Marco. Crazy Bernie. Crooked Hillary. Little Adam Schiff. Goofy Elizabeth Warren. We can’t catch him because we can’t fathom him.

Trump is like fossil fuels. He never should have dug up and used as energy to begin with but now that he’s out there we depend on him too much and he can’t stopped. He burns, we rage.

But we’re entertained. Every. Single. Day.

When you hear the journalists covering Trump they always laugh, don’t they? They chuckle when they read his outlandish proposterous tweets. Why do they laugh? Because they — and you — are entertained. Right? We’re disgusted. We’re hopeless. But nothing is more exciting than a day of Trump.

What would we do if we fired the villain off the TV show? How would the show survive? How would Twitter keeps its stocks so high? What would the rage machine have to rage against? He’s Hannibal. He’s JR. He’s the Godfather. Are you not entertained?

It’s all become such a predictable pattern, a way to spend the day pretending that tweets are actual activism or that they reflect anything other than Trump’s ability to pity fuck the hive mind.

How will the villain stand over us and piss down our throats today? How will he demonstrate just how much power our media machine has handed to him today? What did he tweet? What did he threaten? What lie did he tell? The same lie as two minutes ago? A new lie? A bad lie? A real lie? He shocks, we ripple. He shocks, we rage. He shocks, we clickety clickety click. Like, heart, like, heart.

Hoping for the democrats to defeat Trump? Good luck with that. All it takes is one clickbait headline of something Hillary said, or something Ivanka said, or something James Woods tweeted, or what Trump had for lunch — it’s right up there with babies being ripped from the arms of their mothers or a muslim ban. The algorithm doesn’t care. We are starting not to care because our brains are hooked on what the algorithm dictates. They knew we’d become junkies and they didn’t care.

Stay tuned for Season Two of the Donald J. Trump reality show, when the Democrats still can’t win the Senate, the window closes for any action against climate change, but some trifling gaffe Joe Biden made will matter more. Any candidate pure enough for the hive mind not to attack will be no match for our villain and that will work out just fine because no one really wants the Donald J. Trump reality show to end if the villain isn’t going to be on it.

Welcome to the Donald J. Trump reality show because reality is preferable to reality. Clickety click. Like like. Heart heart.