MSM is now bleating about Trump getting his ‘Nixon in China’ moment with an anticipated Kim Jong-un North Korea meeting, but the real issue should be whether the post-Trump cultural products look like the inevitable operas.
The first casualty of this round of the Culture War was not Fake News, but international politics, making its media manifestations more historically important, especially to the accidental president.
The celebrity of an event is always more important to Trump than its history. What will the cultural products celebrating this tragic Trump regime look like since they might have to be translated from the original Russian?
There are numerous post-presidential cultural products like a film on the TV interview of David Frost with Richard Nixon and several black comedies on GW Bush.
A Trump film would be too easy, what with the plethora of Trumpian media in an administration whose policy history seems comprised of photo-ops and the hawking of branded tchotchkes.
Trump craves memorialization just like Nixon needed his China visit to resemble the myth of Oliver Perry rather than obscuring Watergate. A full-length feature film could do it, but an opera would have the Trumpian panache of transcending nouveau riche ignominy.
A biopic or opera on Warren G. Harding would be much too meta, what with the scandals, the ineptitude, the bastard(s) — they might all be missed as referential to the new worst president ever.
A Denizen/Dennison opera could include all of the sexual assaults, the Excess Hollywood bus tape, the hypothetical wet bed, a litany of conquests and lawsuits, singing lawyers. Imagine a libretto with the Mooch talking about Steve Bannon’s auto-excitement, the best of those tweets. SAD!
Agent Orange listening in on his son’s meetings with Russians, while fending off bald eagles. Choruses on balding cures, scalp surgery… white tic-tacs and diet coke. Slapping his kids and a reflection on his being sent to military academy. A quintet of Bone Spurs. The payoffs for abortions?
And now… #TrumpRussia and North Koreans! Diversions Galore (not a Bond girl).
Too much?
Maybe it should be an opera about Keith Schiller, considering how much gatekeeping he’s had to do.
Or maybe just from the point of view of Dennison’s three wives — a film remake of First Wives Club. Or just a documentary about 2006-2007, with the reprobate feeling trapped by yet another trophying marriage.
Joseph Yun, the State Department's special representative for North Korea policy, announced his resignation by the end of this week due to personal reasons.
cnmnewsnetwork.com/...
In other words, Trump seems to have thought that Kim would meet to give up his nuclear weapons. But for Kim the meeting is about being treated as an equal because of his nuclear and missile programs. After all, Saddam Hussein abandoned his weapons and was invaded and hanged. Muammar al-Qaddafi abandoned his and was toppled with the help of American airpower and dragged out of his SUV to a grisly death. Kim Jong Un, by contrast, kept his programs and now is on the verge of a state visit.
The Trump administration now seems to realize this. And so, despite the president personally teasing the announcement, the White House is now saying that no meeting will occur until North Korea takes “concrete steps” toward denuclearizing — a restatement of its previous position.
So, what’s happening? I suspect we are seeing the downside of both the denuding of State Department expertise and the curious way in which staff Trump’s staff handles him: like a toddler, in Dan Drezner’s famous characterization.
It seems that none of Trump’s aides told him the invitation was nothing special — that North Korea desperately wanted such a visit for more than 20 years. Nor did his staff consider the possibility that North Korea wasn’t offering to abandon its nuclear weapons programs. Maybe none of them realized that.
Prexy Dennison is becoming more like Warren G. Harding each day...