Category Archives: Politics

Essays on politics and current events.

Current Events, Politics

The AMC and Indigenous Media

Arlen Dumas

We cannot trust native politicians to deal with their dirty laundry. We need our Indigenous media for that.

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JULY 19, 2019 • Politics

YEARS AGO, while working for a national Indigenous organization, I’d sometimes get a GTTM, or Going To The Media call. The jist of these would be that the Chief, or whatever figure of authority, was guilty of crimes that the caller—isolated, powerless, and alone—was unable to challenge. She (or, as was less often the case, he) would adumbrate the transgressions, ending with the flourish”If you don’t help me then I’m going to the media.”

Help them I did, and not because they had threatened. I had the good fortune of working for an ethical and competent agency, and if someone was misusing our resources I wanted to know about it. My experience was that people rarely if ever fabricated a claim: even when mistaken they believed every syllable of the indictment to be true. So for example a caller notes the purchase of a new dishwasher by a recently funded Director of Health, or whatever it may have been. Well obviously the Director is stealing funds from the program. What else could it be?

The story of Arlen Dumas, Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, is not a new dishwasher story, but it is a Going To The Media one. Two women have told the newspapers about unsolicited texts from the Chief and a third says she and Dumas once had consensual sex. The Chief claims he is victim of a politically motivated smear campaign, and while he admits to sending messages he says that he was responding to an earlier request for advice. Some of these messages came through the account of a Charles Forbes. Dumas says that he has nothing to do with this account, that someone is impersonating him online, and that he has hired a third-party firm to investigate.

For days now this matter has been covered by CBC, CTV News, Global News, and the Winnipeg Free Press. But it was the reporting of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network that triggered an unspoken community rule not to air the dirty laundry where outsiders can see it. I was already well acquainted with this rule when I was getting my first Going To The Media calls over twenty years ago. According to early reports the AMC women’s council stated they would investigate but Chief Francine Meeches, chair of the council, told CTV News that they have no mandate to do so. A women’s council statement later asserted that they will no longer be part of “a media frenzy based on little more than Facebook posts.” The AMC itself took the side of Dumas and against a “media circus which focused on unfounded allegations.” APTN’s Beverly Andrews asked a question about Dumas at a Peguis First Nation press conference and was told to leave. A July 12 article quotes Francine Meeches saying that “APTN’s credibility is BS. It seems more are losing faith in your organization. You represent those who are against First Nations not in support of First Nations.”

Who knows where the Arlen Dumas story will go tonight or tomorrow or next week or month. What endures is this toxic idea that Indigenous media should cheerlead our politicians while burying stories which cause embarrassment in the world outside—especially stories of incompetent, abusive, or unethical community leaders. It’s true that “those who are against us” (a phrase that almost certainly refers to white people) —might read them and discover therein justification of their prejudices. But Going To The Media is also a path of last but necessary resort in the seeking of remedies that cannot be had in isolated communities dominated by powerful families. The Grand Chief’s laundry may or may not be dirty. We cannot trust our politicians to tell us. We need Indigenous media for that. ⌾

Politics

2020 Vision

Nancy Pelosi has a long history of knowing when to play it safe and when to rock the boat

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JULY 12, 2019 • Politics

ON THE DAY Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born, 13 October 1989, Nancy Pelosi was two years into a Congressional career that would yield the highest ranking female politician of American history. Pelosi inherited a seat twice vacated by death, the first of Phillip Burton and the second of his wife Sala. From the former Pelosi also inherited a commitment to AIDS research and legislation, concerns which at the time set her apart from the Washington establishment and in particular the Reagan administration.

I begin here to remind the reader—should the reminder be necessary—there was a time Nancy Pelosi was something of an Ocasio-Cortez figure, pushing controversial and outside-the-box thinking on recalcitrant colleagues. As a San Francisco Democrat, Pelosi came to Washington from a district that had been consistently blue since she attended her first national convention in 1952. In the alchemy of these contradictory themes, of safety and boat-rocking, the career of Speaker Pelosi was forged.

No one survives even in the safest of districts without wits, and Pelosi is a sharp and shrewd politician. Obamacare could well and with good reason have been called Pelosicare, dependant as its passage was on her considerable skills. She is among the most competent and effective Speakers of the House of the past forty years. But longevity has its hazards. It wasn’t long ago that Pelosi held up the liberal end of the argument. Today we have the younger and more strident voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—a fresh generation of Democrats keen to take on the President. Pelosi has now become the resistance, not of Trump but of the mavericks within her own party.

The President will not be removed from office by means of an impeachment vote. Pelosi’s calculation is that hearings will only aid Trump’s fortunes in 2020, by supplying fuel to his engine of paranoia and vindictiveness. She’s been around long enough to have noticed that impeachment is now (along with the special counsel) an all-weather political tool, drawn from the chest as a matter of routine business, a habit that does not exactly thrill the public. “You can’t impeach everybody,” she has said, when in fact her career seems to have taught her that you can’t impeach anybody—not even Bill Clinton, whose removal from office had the support of the House but not of the Senate.

The case for impeachment has two aspects, one political and one principle. On the political side one must calculate the electoral hazards, and who can doubt that Pelosi has done so. The principle aspect requires an answer to the question, Does the President merit impeachment? Pelosi’s rivals in the Democratic party have answered this question to their satisfaction. They want to exercise the oversight function of Congress and send a message that no President is above the law. Pelosi however appears interested only in the political calculation.

She believes the centre will hold and that Trump will succumb to something that she calls self-impeachment. The voters will decide. Perhaps in the meanwhile evangelicals will restrain the President in matters such as mass raids and deportations. Secretary Acosta’s illegal sweetheart deal with the child mass-rapist Jeffrey Epstein? The president’s call. There is no role for Congress. When presented a question touching upon the behaviour of the Trump administration, Pelosi spills the phrases I’m not focused on / don’t know much about / am not interested in that. “We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that,” she says, without much by way of specifics. As for the mavericks in her party, “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.” Oof. Pelosi has gone beyond not wanting to rock the boat to not wanting to sit in it.

A year ago Joe Biden was the seasoned politician and the beloved Obama sidekick. He was untouchable until suddenly he wasn’t. Survive long enough and you will confront your own obsolescence. It may be that Pelosi is steps ahead of the rest of us, playing a Democratic version of Trump’s QAnon four-dimensional chess. Perhaps Trump will “self-impeach” and the world will be better for it. Perhaps the best course of action is to wait. Nancy Pelosi has a long history of knowing when to play it safe and when to rock the boat. She’s among the smartest politicians out there, until she isn’t. ⌾

Politics

Doug Ford and the Communication Wizards

Doug Ford

From time to time, a pig needs lipstick

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JUNE 21, 2019 • Politics

DOUG FORD’s cabinet shuffle arrives in the waves of discomforting polls and cold receptions—the most noted being the Raptors parade, where people booed the leader of a party self-described as For The People. The government concludes that they have not communicated effectively. In an age when the Party runs its own news channel, on social media, and has taken every opportunity to stage propaganda stunts (featuring cabinet ministers posing at convenience store shelves and gas pumps across the province) it’s equally plausible that they are communicating only too well. The people now know Mr. Ford and his works better, and as a result they are not happy.

Out has gone a Minister disliked by parents of autistic children, not only on account of the government’s cuts to services but also the manner in which the cuts were handled. Was this a failure of communication? Minister MacLeod did no worse than Doug Ford, who told Tommy Lenathen in 2014 to “go to hell.” Lenathen you’ll recall had a son in an Etobicoke home for teenagers with autism, whose residents were characterized by Ford as criminals responsible for ruining the neighbourhood. Lenathen issued a formal complaint against Ford and in response was accused of waging “jihad.” As far as I’m aware nothing came of this sound-and-fury exchange but smoke and ink. Like so much of the Toronto Ford years, there was little substance behind the noise, even Ford’s threats to buy and re-sell the home amounting to nothing more than angry bluster. Communication, ladies and gentlemen.

Having found himself as so often in the past tossing among rough waters, the Premier has rolled heads to make way for recruits who are, we are encouraged to believe, better at the business of managing the message. But let’s pause to note two things: Ford is an agent of malice and chaos, and in this capacity the source of his own misfortunes, and the blunders of his team are on-brand, precisely of the style for which Ford himself is notorious. As a municipal councillor, he drew a rageaholic’s delight in stirring the pot and raising the temperature. There was no issue he could not and did not leave more acidic than he found it. He was and is his own worst enemy, and his restless schtick of aiming a chubby finger at so-called jihadists and elitists changes nothing.

Still, from time to time a pig needs lipstick. Don’t expect the style or the substance of Mr Ford to change: this shuffle is about optics. Replacing the former Finance Minister Vic Fedeli is Rod Phillips, once tasked with the unenviable job of handling the proto-Ford mayor Mel Lastman. Let the CV show that as long as Phillips was in the building, the instability of Lastman’s ego didn’t yield a gigantic black hole. Likewise the new Education Minister, Stephen Lecce, once upon a time protected the Harper government from itself, as a communications staffer. Anyone who was in Ottawa during the Stephen Harper years understood that Communications was a euphemism for party discipline and the screwing of thumbs, a prime necessity in a party cobbled together from diverse and in some cases lunatic elements whose loose lips might on any given day sink the ship.

The Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, Todd Smith, is the Government House Leader, a job given to those with a knack for imposing discipline and herding sheep. Like Lecce, Smith will inherit the public ill-will harvested by his predecessor. But the course that brought us here is unlikely to be re-oriented. Every portfolio will be mandated to cut eight cents from the dollar and to consider nothing sacred. Fortunately it turns out that cuts are good for you. The former Minister of Education reminded us that larger classroom populations promote resilience in children. Perhaps the present Minister of Education (who at age 32 is somehow old enough to have been a campaign staffer in the Mike Harris years) will be more saavy. After all, he’s had the benefit of the only decent form of education, a faith-based private education.

Or more likely the Ford administration will continue to have the look and feel and aroma of an administration shaped by the ever-intemperate ever-pugnacious Doug Ford, because that’s what it is and always will be. In no longer than it takes to say “Chardonnay Sipping Elitist” the cunning communicators of Queen’s Park will be recommending some variation on dented cans of tuna fish to Ontario parents, like their spiritual forebears of the Harris government. Ford will continue to surround himself with cronypals, and the cronypals will make it their prime directive to produce a caucus of standing-ovation dittoheads. Back home the voters will wonder over the point of sending MPPs to Toronto, only to have them turned into sheep by Dean French and fed scripts for Borg-like regurgitation in awkward social media videos. This too is a form of communication—a bad form, and one I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more from the communication wizards. ⌾

Update [22 June 2019]:

Dean French Resigns

Current Events, Politics

The Arc of The Deal

The Trump years have taught us to be shocked but not surprised

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JUNE 18, 2019 • Politics

Trump on the escalator

A

S I WRITE THESE WORDS Donald Trump takes to the sky to begin his re-election campaign, fittingly at the Amway Center, a company associated with multi-level marketing and evangelical Christianity. Four years ago his ascension began with a descent (by escalator) and so as the President climbs tonight one hopes for the historical symmetry of an eventual fall. Up he goes today; may he go down tomorrow. There are encouraging signs. When Trump lands, this headline will be waiting: “Our Orlando Sentinel endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump.”

Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies. So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity. Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is. It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.

An exhaustive inventory of the President’s deficiencies would be exhausting but also unnecessary, there being already many such compilations. In 2016 anyone who cared to know what Trump was knew what Trump was. For decades he had committed to drawing attention to himself. The tolerance of “so many Americans”—62,984,828 to be precise—was in many cases enthusiasm. Sixty-three million voters saw the qualities that the Orlando Sentinel editors see and cast their vote approvingly. The editorial evades the logical conclusion that Trump is no good for democracy and America but American voters (on a diet of reality television) aren’t much good for these either.

Tomorrow’s Sentinel will likely carry stories of white-power nationalists and of rowdy Orlando streets. For the garden-variety racists and the neo-Nazis and the theocrats and the admirers of dictatorship past and present, there has never been a better time to be alive in America. Whatever else one may say of them, the years 2016 to 2020 will be looked back upon by these elements as an American Golden Age, a time when views long driven to the margins could once again emerge into the daylight. Many impracticable objects, such as the mass-deportation of immigrants and state rule by Christian doctrine, became conceivable under Trump. Obama had often quoted Martin Luther King Jr on the “arc of the moral universe.” Maybe that arc could be turned back.

In a thousand ways big and small this has been the work of the current administration. In Donald Trump’s America a class of people who had learned to regard themselves as persona non grata were suddenly in demand and for positions in the highest of public offices. One after another grifters and cheaters and thieves and wife abusers ascended to Cabinet Secretary and Justice and Senior Advisor. And down they came, to be replenished by a fresh influx of third-rate crooks and malcontents. The Best People, according to the President. How surprised they must have been at their good fortune, just as the President himself must have been surprised by the outcome of his campaign.

The Trump years however have taught us that surprise has an arc as well and that it bends not toward justice but uncertainty. In 2015 a reality TV character pursued the Oval Office, and although he was mocked and dismissed, and for good reasons, he prevailed on the votes of 63 million Americans. In 2019 however he will be taken seriously. We are still capable of being shocked, but no longer of being surprised. ⌾

Politics

The Old Familiar Madness

Everywhere you look there’s a strongman rising on the bitter tide of angry men

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 22, 2018 • Politics

CHINA is returning to Mao and Russia is returning to Stalin and the President of the United States is jealous. Where is his Stalin, his Mao, the Father Figure he’ll restore to his glory, his Kim il-Don? Where is the Dear Great Leader, the Father to Keep America Great, Again. Everywhere you look there’s a strongman rising on the bitter tide of angry men. Yes, I mean men. You can walk a mile from here into the filth and chaos, the raw animal stench, of Chinatown, and buy virility enhancers made of the balls of endangered species. We men, with our fragile masculinity and our narcissism, had no problem killing off the last rhinoceros to drink and fuck with a little more stamina. Bodies are for buying and selling, life is cheap, we’ll blow up the world if it makes our dicks a little longer, and that’s all the truth you need to know.

There’s a mass-murderer in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, grinding a generation of children into dust, and he has the help of Putin and Erdogan and the Ayatollahs and all the others. The others, the men who dream of ultimate power. There isn’t a chance in hell Trump will stop them. He admires the murderers, wants to be a murderer, knows he’s the anointed, the man who can kill on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. Evil has been set loose on the world, and for the foreseeable future we are all doomed, there isn’t a thing you can do about it now. The monster is loose, and we want it to be loose, and we want to see some goddamn explosions!

There is a great wave of violence coming, a real blood-letting, a gratification of our primal war-lust, the irrepressible desire of our species to kill with impunity, and to go on killing until the human will collapses. Don’t be fooled by the editorial pages and the other scoundrels, the other liars and cowards—we’re not doing politics anymore, we’re preparing for tribal warfare. We, the human species, every last one of us will be drawn into it, in the end. The old order won’t surrender, and the new won’t prevail without a fight. No one knows what the world will look like in one hundred years, but whatever it is, it’s going to require war.

It’s the old familiar madness, the deeply repressed barbarism that takes over, from time to time. Sure, we seem civilized, our orderly streets filled with shoppers, the calm commerce of a modern city. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, and no one, absolutely no one, is screaming for blood. The Filipino nannies go by, pushing strollers that bear the children of educated upper-middle white women. The children who will inherit the world, the children on whose behalf others will kill and die, the children who for now are innocent, not that it makes a goddamn difference.

Politics

We’re All Vampires Now

The Mercers Are Evil, Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bastard, and Facebook Is For Vampires

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 20, 2018 • Politics

THE DISEASE KILLING US is a goddam burrowing maggot, and you realize how deep it goes when you pull. At first it’s just this sick and sickening President, like a pustule on the body politic, but then it’s the media and money in politics and all the greedy bastards who aren’t going to yield until they’ve killed the oceans and your city is under water. And the sickness doesn’t stop there. Pull a little more, and it’s you and me, every day a little more insane, every day a little more lost, and you’re a fool if you don’t see it.

Bastards

We’re all going down, once again into the churning primal vortex, the mad chaos that’s never far away. Eventually we’ll reach that place where the gravitational pull exceeds our collective will, and there will be no turning back. Bricks and battle, baseball bats in the streets, knives under our shirts, a foot stomping on a face over and over until one side runs out of bodies and blood. Today some of us are putting bombs on porches, and some of us are cheering for the Nazis, but most of the decent among us have simply given up on politics and are looking for a good seat to watch the world burn. That’s the best news the evil bastards have had in a long time. Don’t worry, you’ll get a fire.

The President of the United States is a vicious racist bastard who’ll kill your children and hang them high for a cameo on Fox. He’s surrounded himself with operatives every bit as dead on the inside as he is himself, grifters and junkies who feel nothing except the pain they inflict on others to get themselves off. It’s already too late to save the Republic: this President knocked and the world let him in, not because we didn’t know he was a vampire but because we are all vampires now. The President survives by feeding on our worst characteristics, and every depraved mutation of the human gene works to his advantage. He is us and we’re him and it’s useless to argue otherwise.

Before Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, and the others of the vampire Trump nation, were White House sycophants, they were Mercernaries, part of a cult led by the misanthropic father-daughter team of Robert and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon was spreading his toxins on the Mercer-funded Breitbart News and hoping to burn everything to the ground. The Mercers are technocrats and data nerds, heavily invested around the world in “psychographic modeling,” which they hope to use to manipulate voter behaviour. Maybe they’re good at it, maybe not. Robert and Rebekah Mercer funded the theocrat Ted Cruz before they chose Trump, but the Cruz campaign wasn’t impressed with the work of the Mercer’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica. That’s how the falling-out began.

The Mercers prefer the dark—vampires usually do. They want to be in the background, not in the spotlight. Cambridge Analytica is in the news because a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, admitted that the company took private information from millions of Facebook users to help the Trump campaign and the Brexit referendum. Not long before that, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, was taped discussing his company’s role in the Trump victory and the techniques Cambridge Analytica uses to destroy opposition candidates, including bribery and entrapment. The Mercers want to overturn governments in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Americas—not for ideology or policy, but merely to cause revolutionary chaos and turmoil, because it makes them feel powerful. There shouldn’t be a place, anywhere in the world, where these misfits can sleep without keeping one eye open, and the same goes for their reptilian operatives, right up to the Corrupter-In-Chief.

Pay attention. You and I let the vampires in, and if we don’t want to become vampires ourselves, we have a responsibility to do something about it. The Mercers and Mark Zuckerberg have been working together for years, and there’s no reason to think it’s gotten better. Don’t ever forget that Facebook started out as FaceMash, a hot-or-not drinking game that Mark Zuckerberg created with student data stolen from the Harvard server. It’s a small step from there to selling us all on the dark web to fake-news nihilists and power-drunk extremists who want to burn up the world, like the Mercers do, because they can and because we let them.

Politics

Dirty Deeds and the GOP

A brief history of the recent Pennsylvania race summarizes the moral bankruptcy of American conservatism

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 15, 2018 • Politics

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a let-down for the President when Rick Saccone lost his Pennsylvania seat to Democrat Conor Lamb, earlier this week and in a Republican district Trump himself had carried by 19 points. But there was consolation. Paul Ryan claimed that the President had in fact helped Saccone, in a race that he described as even more dire before Trump’s rally, and on Fox and Friends the hosts re-cast Conor Lamb as a Republican supporter of GOP policies. Fake news, they call it. Anyways, Steve Doocy added, Lamb’s PA18 district won’t even exist after November, so no biggie.

PA18

What Doocy didn’t mention was that PA18, a suburb of Pittsburgh, has been redrawn by order of the state’s supreme court. It’s the first time a state court has abolished district boundaries ruled to be the work of partisan gerrymandering. PA18 was engineered to make Democratic wins impossible, and for a while the effort paid off. So, yes, PA18 won’t exist after November, but the reasons ought to shame rather than encourage the GOP, assuming they are capable of shame.

The rise of Rick Saccone corresponds with the fall of David Levdansky. For twenty-five years Levdansky represented Pennsylvania’s 39th, but the Democrats went into the Obama 2010 midterm with a narrow, one-seat majority. The Republicans made no secret of their plan. They would pour campaign money into the state legislatures and, if victorious, re-draw the state districts in ways that favoured the GOP’s congressional ambitions. The work was handed to something called the Republican State Leadership Committee, under Chris Jankowski, and is the subject of a 2016 book, Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. The Republicans code-named the operation REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project, and as I said made no secret of it.

The first step, ousting Levdansky, was simple enough. On Saturday October 9, with three weeks left in the race, the Republicans began a saturation campaign, filling the airwaves and the mailboxes each day with attacks on the Democratic candidate, claiming he had championed a $600M Arlen Specter Library. (Specter, as you know, had recently defected the Republicans to run as a Democrat. Thus by association Levdansky was labelled as not only a liberal, but a traitor.) The smear worked, the Republicans took over the legislature, and madly off in all directions went the gerrymander.

The redaction of PA18 was even messier than the GOP’s midterm assaults. The new congressional district excised Pittsburgh, and its urban Democratic voters, and produced a delirious map where one side of a street was in one district and the other side of a street in another. As I recall it, one of the candidates lived in a house that became the only house on the street in its district. The overall effect of this dog’s breakfast was to produce reliably Republican blocs in the southwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh, which was what the REDMAP operation had set out to do and what the state’s supreme court has now undone.

And let’s not forget what was special about this month’s special election. Rick Saccone was after the seat vacated by Republican Tim Murphy, a pro-life politician with a lover, an extramarital affair, and a “pregnancy scare” on his CV. Bad as that may be, it’s not what brought him down. Once the bad news started, it kept coming. Murphy’s staff provided the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with astonishing and lurid stories of an office culture spinning out-of-control, and soaked in abuse, hostility, and corruption, where there was 100% turnover and where it had become impossible to recruit and retain competent staff. (Sounds familiar, right?)

Down went Murphy, like the PA18 gerrymandering project, and up came Saccone. In a statement about the court-mandated map, he said he would run and win, regardless of the district, “because it’s not about the lines that are drawn, but about the values I represent.” Haha, and yes, the lofty values of the GOP—we’re all experts on that now, living as we are in a moral universe where Republicans hold Roy Moore godly and where President Donald Trump champions an abstinence-only curriculum. Saccone likes to brag that he was Trump before Trump, but the voters have now weighed in on the GOP’s values and there’s nothing to be proud of. Let the Trumpists fall, let the conversation turn to life after this administration, and may the work soon begin of undoing the GOP’s dirty deeds.

Obituary, Politics

Dishonor thy Mother

The Billy Graham Library tells the story of a vile and sickening son

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 5, 2018 • Politics

WILLIAM MARTIN, author of A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story, says Franklin Graham’s relationship with President Trump “will come to embarrass him.” But for that to occur, Mr. Graham will need the capacity to feel embarrassment, for which there’s no evidence.

Franklin Graham

During the funeral of his father, Franklin reminded his audience how humble the man had been, and that he would have disapproved of the attentions given him on the grounds of a 40,000-square-foot museum dedicated exclusively to his life and work, and no one laughed. Nor did the obituaries delve, as far as I’m able to tell, into the origins of this tourist trap, ludicrously called the Billy Graham Library and set up by Franklin to further milk the lucrative family brand by exploiting the memory of his dead parents.

The backstory of the Billy Graham Library tells you everything you need to know about the vile money-and-power-grubbing charlatan who now controls the $300M “non-profit” and tax-exempt Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, or BGEA, and its annual revenues in excess of $100M. Franklin Graham had the idea for the compound in 2001, and it soon became the occasion of a bitter family struggle in which he prevailed. A family struggle, because Franklin’s plan required the burial of his parents on the museum’s Charlotte, North Carolina, property, in violation of the wishes of his mother, Ruth Graham.

Ruth and her son often engaged in power struggles, and as a child, as now, Franklin was stubborn and aggressive. This was no different. Once Billy had transferred control of the BGEA to his son, Franklin took his proposal to the city and leveraged an eventual family shrine for a sweetheart deal on 60 acres of land adjacent the Billy Graham Parkway, where the business headquarters and Billy Graham Library now reside. BGEA then received funding for the Billy Graham Library, including $1,000,000 from The Charlos Foundation. (Franklin has arranged his affairs in a way that allows him to pay for nothing and to profit from everything.)

The Graham siblings denounced Franklin’s proposal, calling it tasteless and tacky and little more than a tourist trap and money-making operation, beneath the dignity of their father’s reputation. One of the daughters referred to the Billy Graham Library as The Cracker Barrel, and Ruth denounced it is as a circus. The conflict-averse Billy audited these views but refused to participate, saying only that wherever Ruth ended up, he would be buried by her side. And so it was. Billy Graham announced the final resting place of his wife on June 13, 2007, at the point when she no longer had the physical capacity to speak on her own behalf, or to object. “I know this goes against my mother’s wishes,” Ned Graham was quoted as saying.

All of this, and much more, is detailed in a December 2006 Washington Post article, “A Family at Cross-Purposes,” by Laura Sessions Stepp. From Stepp we learn that, while lucid, Ruth Graham was clear that under no circumstances was she to be buried in Charlotte. Her wish was to be interred where she had lived for many years, in the mountains, but Franklin had his scheme and would not be thwarted. Because he controlled the family’s resources, and because his personality tends toward dominance (like the grifter President he so often defends) Franklin bludgeoned his siblings, and likely also his father, into submission. Ruth Graham was buried on the grounds of the Billy Graham Library, aka the circus, on June 17, 2007, nine days after its opening.

And a circus of a kind it is, a heavily subsidized, “40,000-square-foot experience” and Disney-styled cash cow—in this case, a singing animatronic cash cow who welcomes over 200,000 visitors each year along their “Journey of Faith” through the museum and toward Ruth’s Attic Bookstore and the Graham Brothers Dairy Bar. (One of the Billy Graham Library’s designers, ITEC Entertainment Co., is unsurprisingly a theme park contractor who has done work for Disney.) The website billygrahamlibrary.org helpfully informs prospective visitors that cash, personal checks, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa are accepted. Admission is free, but donation boxes are located in the lobby for those who want to subsidize Mr. Graham’s paranoia, hate, cultural warfare, and generous annual compensation, which ranges from $880,000 to over $1,000,000.

Politics

Anal Tax and Sex Carbons

The Ontario Conservatives Know How to Entertain

✎  Wayne K. Spear | February 27, 2018 • Politics

I WATCHED THE ONTARIO PC leadership debate last week, and while I found it a touch dull, there’s no denying that the Conservatives understand, and can deliver, entertainment. The entertainment value of the race to replace former leader Patrick Brown, for example, benefitted early on, with the entry of the up-and-coming political neophyte, Patrick Brown. He’s a fresh face, and he’s never governed, but, according to various rumours, he once had a leadership role somewhere but stepped down, or maybe didn’t. It’s not clear. No doubt we’ll learn more about this mysterious Mr. Brown from the papers, should he decide to re-enter, or re-re-enter the race. Or wherever we’re at now.

Hot Anal Sexleft to right: Anal Sex Woman, Too Sensible for Ontario, That Mid-Level Drug Dealer, Has A Famous Dad

The Ontario PCs are the most diverse of the provincial political parties. There’s something for everyone at the Conservative salad bar: the faux-populist entrepreneur, with mid-level experience in the retail pharmaceutical trade; the fresh and photogenic outsider with the famous last name; the family-values Puritan; the polished and informed candidate far too sensible to ever be elected by Ontario voters. And possibly Patrick Brown, who, if he re-re-enters the race, will distance himself from the theatrics of the previous Ontario PC leader, as well as of the previous leadership candidate, Patrick Brown, and Patrick Brown.

CommosJust say OhNos! to Commo-fascisms

Far and away, the top issues in the 2018 Ontario election are anal carbon and sex tax. If you watched the first debate, you heard the words carbon and anal quite a lot, just as you have over the past eight years, in your local church and grocery store. Every man, woman, and child is talking about these things. That’s because there’s hardly a citizen who is not daily imperiled by anal carbon and the sex tax. The build-up of carbon in the anal cavity is not only messy, but painful and dangerous, and it makes sitting for long periods, or passing waste, excrutiating. Anal carbon is said by some to effect the climate negatively, especially bovine anal carbon, but although anal carbon is taught in the schools, the evidence of its effects on climate is inconclusive. That, and the fact it encourages our children to hoard carbons, is why all the Ontario PC candidates repudiate the teaching of anal carbon in the classrooms, describing it as “making parents uncomfortable.” Whether it’s man-made anal carbon or mixed couples.

As for the sex tax, sex used to be the only fun thing you could do in Ontario, other than maybe stealing shopping carts, without spending money. And now the government is making sex expensive by taxing it. (The Ontario puritans are ruining everything. At this rate there will soon be liquor laws!) The HST, having sex tax, is highly unpopular in Ontario, as was the Great Sex Tax, or GST, before it. That’s why, wherever you go in Ontario, people are forever talking about sex taxes and anal carbon, unless they are talking about anal tax and sex carbon, which are also very common topics of discussion in the coffee shops of this province. You see, the principal concerns of all the people that live in this part of the world center on a single tetravalent chemical element from the periodic table, basically a lump of coal, and on the hole in their ass. That may be the best way to understand this leadership race, and why it may end with Ontario getting a lump of coal and an asshole.

Politics

The Once and Forever Candidate

If Doug Ford runs for everything, one day he just might catch something

✎  Wayne K. Spear | February 8, 2018 • Politics

DOUG FORD’s run for mayor had already started when a path to Queen’s Park appeared, and if Ford loses in June who doubts that October will coax his return? The man is always running, or teasing about running, as if there could be a doubt. The only variable is the destination. In the past five-or-so years, Doug Ford has imagined himself the succesor of Stephen Harper, Tim Hudak, Rob Ford, and now Patrick Brown. And in between he has run, or has said he would run, for municipal council and the provincial parliament. Doug Ford, the once and forever candidate, always ready to run everywhere for anything.

Doug Ford

The Etobicoke Kennedys, we locals sometimes call the Fords, and not entirely with irony. They are now a three-generation political dynasty, if you include nephew Michael. And before you dismiss this comparison as too generous, remember that the Kennedys had a more-than-passing familiarity with intrigue and pills and thuggery, and that the flattering myth of Camelot was just that. Doug lacks even an interest in the mechanics of charm, and his style tends more toward resentment. But resentment is a cheque that someone will eventually cash if only you carry it around long enough. The populism of Mike Harris enjoyed scant currency until Bob Rae had made the 905 sufficiently angry. For seven years, from 1995 to 2002, Harris’ nonsense was Common Sense. The voters didn’t want a government, they wanted a wrecking ball. Has Kathleen Wynne brought them back, yet, to this point? She seems to have been trying.

Doug Ford took a third of the vote in the last Toronto election. One in three voters, over 330,000, endorsed his message of rampant insider corruption and gravy-train elitism. He’s only ever had one message, of outgroup anger and burn-it-to-the-ground populism. Folks, he hates the people that you hate, and he’ll poke them in the eye. For you, folks. The Doug Ford myth is reverse Camelot, where the rotten elites are inside drinking Chardonnay and have locked all the good people out. Reverse Camelot isn’t a myth about public service or even ideology—it is an appeal to the tribe, a call to charge the gate, a war of cultures. That’s why Ford has been able to survive when his claims—such as being an ordinary outsider, rather than a wealthy and well-connected member of a multi-generational political family—turn out to be objectively false. It’s not about Doug Ford, it’s about the people and the things that Doug Ford hates and will endeavour to confound.

I’ve lived in Ontario long enough to know that phony populism, of the kind peddled by Doug Ford, goes around and comes around. He’ll tell you he’s running for Premier because it breaks his heart, folks, to see what’s happening to his beloved province, not because he was raised on the mother’s milk of political ambition. He’ll tell you he’s just like you. He’ll tell you he’s going to Queen’s Park to clean things up, not because he craves the power of office, of any and every office. He’ll tell you only he can fix what is broken, and that only he can drive out the elites. Maybe this time it will work. If it doesn’t, he’ll be back, running the path towards another office. When Doug Ford arrives at a fork in the road, he takes it, hoping that eventually it will come with a meal.

Politics

America’s Taliban Has Arrived

Let’s hope we can end it, before it ends us

✎  Wayne K. Spear | February 6, 2018 • Politics

MICHAEL GERSON SAYS that the gag reflex of Trump-supporting Christian leaders is “entirely gone,” but think about the things American evangelicals have been swallowing from these so-called leaders, not only for years but decades. And not only swallowing but hungrily imbibing, as well as underwriting with outlays of their precious income. Televangelist con-artistry and snake oil salesmanship. Bigotry from the pulpit. A “Prosperity Gospel” which despises the poor, and which lobbies the government accordingly. A mean and self-promoting cult that not so much prays for the sick and the elderly, as preys upon them.

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I could keep going, but you don’t need me to. The long list of televangelism’s crimes and depravities has been well publicized, but none of this seems to have harmed the racket. Now that I’ve typed this sentence, I can’t but think of another crook and his well documented crimes, and how the stupid and credulous nonetheless threw in behind him. It gives me a horrible shiver to think that everything which is true of evangelical and especially televangelist Christianity is true also of Mr. Trump: the authoritarianism, the menacing bluster, the incoherent and impossible promises of rewards to the faithful, the love of money, the magical thinking, the incessant appeals for donations, and above all else the self-promotion on the backs and bank accounts of the duped. Trump and the evangelicals, in other words, are using the same playbook, and for the same ends. So, yes, they’re happy to take it, and happy to swallow, too.

It would all be simply ridiculous if it weren’t dangerous. Trump has weighted his cabinet with religious extremists, and he receives regular counsel from them in the form of a Faith Advisory Council, a rogue’s crew of bigots and hypocrites and money-grubbing sycophants. We’ve yet to know where they will steer him, but the prospects are not happy. As I write these words, Michelle (Earthquakes Are Punishments of an Angry God) Bachmann is seeking guidance from the Almighty on whether to seek the vacated congressional seat of Al Franken, but whether or not she wins, Bachmann will continue to exert a bad influence. The other news which got my attention this week was a video of Trump advisor Gloria Copeland, whose advice is not to get a flu shot but, instead, to inoculate oneself against sickness with the Word of God.

You can be confident that Ms. Copeland and her husband (also advisor to the President) get the flu shot, no matter what they counsel others. Kenneth Copeland Ministries is a do-as-I-say scam of the familiar televangelist sort, by means of which the Copelands have become fabulously rich through the fleecing of a flock. Some years ago their anti-vaccination propaganda led to a local outbreak of measles, as this “Jesus heals” nonsense so often does. Partly as a health precaution, the Copelands avoid contact with the unwashed masses, and Mr. Copeland himself once described commercial airline travel as “getting into a long tube with a bunch of demons.” He flies in a $3-million private jet purchased with the money of his congregants. Like every faith-based scam—ISIS or Hamas, Hezbollah and Qaeda—the foot soldiers are expected to carry the burden and to take the bullet, while the leaders amass their fortunes. (It’s true that Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat lived frugal lives, but make no mistake: extremism is a money-making operation.)

We’ve reached the point at which no one can be under an illusion, unless of course it’s an illusion of one’s willful choosing. President Trump’s administration is nothing more, but also nothing less, than the giant con and tax-avoidance scheme of every palace-and-botox Word-of-God blowhard. I repeat, the same playbook and the same end. This is why the President’s bottomless narcissism catches its reflection in fellow-travellers such as Paula White, Ralph Reed, Robert Jeffress, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell, Jr., whose ignoramus followers constitute his base and best hope of political survival. At home these charlatans promote themselves by peddling stupidity and hatred, and abroad their end-of-times fantasies threaten the survival of our species. War in the Middle East? Nuclear holocaust? Well, well, it’s all in God’s plan, and whatever we might do to this world, the Lord will supply us another. Have faith, and let the End Times roll. The American Taliban has arrived, and let us hope we can put an end to it before it puts and end to us.

Politics

The President is Not a Duck

Some people are never going to use the R-word to describe Donald Trump. No matter what.

✎  Wayne K. Spear | January 16, 2018 • Politics

Martin-Luther-King

Were he alive, Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned eighty-nine on Monday. It seems a mercy that he isn’t, and didn’t, because nearly a nonagenarian, he’d be captive with the rest of us in a world where no one need ask, “How are things going on the race relations front?” It’s a question that answers itself. Race relations are in the shithole, as the president might say.

After dropping the s-word, the President was praised by David Duke and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, and by some other “very fine people,” and not for the first time. Peter Barker, in a New York Times article, “A President Who Fans, Rather Than Douses, the Nation’s Racial Fires,” catalogues a number of occasions on which Mr. Trump and his staff have been asked whether the president is racist. Well, I mean, if saying he’s not a racist is in your speaking notes… Anyways, Barker asks Jesse Jackson if the president is a duck and Mr. Jackson notes that the president indeed quacks, “but to categorize him by a name [duck] does not quite address the issue [that the president is using his webbed feet to bottom feed].” Got it.

https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/951881688015167489

Next, from Barker’s column, Dr. King’s nephew, Isaac Newton Farris Jr., thinks that “President Trump is racially ignorant and racially uninformed. But I don’t think he is a racist in the traditional sense.” Now try and imagine Martin Luther King speaking this way. “Hate cannot drive out hate, and by hate I mean not hate in the traditional sense but rather a condition marked by a state of insufficient emotional information.” Eight years ago a chunk of America thought they’d entered the Age of Post-Racialism, and now we live in an age that is almost exclusively characterized by tribal identitarianism. Yet notice how many people today cannot bring themselves to use the R-word, resorting instead to equivocation and whataboutism. King no doubt would have regarded “not racist but racially ignorant” as a distinction without a difference, if not a tautology. And he would have had something more interesting, and less ridiculous, to say.

But Trump! You have to give him credit for generating memorable quotes. Mexicans? Those people are rapists. Nigerians? Those people live in huts. Haitians? Those people have AIDS. Norwegians? Those people should come to America. Donald Trump is a Thoser who sees human beings in categorical terms. Every black neighborhood is a war zone, sustained by welfare cheques—”TRUMP THINKS ONLY BLACK PEOPLE ARE ON WELFARE,” says a Newsweek headline from last week—and every Iranian is an ayatollah, a foreigner with a nuclear bomb in their turban. Why else prevent Iranians, en masse, from coming to America? This broadbrush way of thinking discloses ignorance and racism, racism by definition being the habit of viewing people in categorical terms. (Note to the President: there are Norwegian rapists.)

It’s remarkable in retrospect how few infamous King quotes have to do explicitly with race. Even as he developed a radical critique of capitalism, his themes were freedom, hope, struggle, faith, solidarity, love, justice, brotherhood, dignity—in short, universal themes of our shared humanity. On the occasions in which he uses racial terms (“I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.”) it’s to push the notion of unity. But of course he knew the face and mind and methods of racism intimately, and targeted its foundation. His most famous quotation, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” could be a @realDonaldTrump subtweet. And it’s depressingly easy to imagine President Trump angrily quacking back a Twitter insult, in all-caps, while the usual suspects find a way to tell us he’s not a duck.

Politics

Life in a time of moral clarity

My enemies are admitting they want to go back to a time when white men could own human beings. This is progress of a kind.

✎  Wayne K. Spear | December 12, 2017 ◈ Politics

UNDER THE OLD dispensation politics was a bipartisan craft and the interests of the country superseded those of the party. Or so was the theory. In any case, that was then and this is now. Not long after this article is published, Alabama may well have elected to office a man already twice removed from office, for refusing to uphold the oath which he had sworn. As Senator, Moore will go to Washington in the mode of a Trumpist, which is to say contemptuous of the rule of law, of the constitution, of the norms of the legal profession, of most of his colleagues, of the separation of church and state, and of the American culture itself.

Before Roy Moore was notorious as a Gadsen, Alabama deputy district attorney with an appetite for teenage girls, he was the notorious champion of a Ten Commandments monument who was removed from office for (among other things) refusing to follow the law and for abuse of administrative authority. Roy Moore’s career has been a lifelong effort to play a both-ways game, as a simultaneous officer of the law and a conscientious objector to the law. Courts and judges and rules and norms are all fine and good, for you and for me, but Mr. Moore recognizes the legitimacy only of the subjective interpretations of his personal God. The law is what Judge Moore decides that God wants it to be.

The Trumpists have not simply endorsed or welcomed Moore, they have made him into a figure of existential significance. And it’s not wrong-headed for them to do so. Either the Party of Trump is going to take the country further along the trajectory of autocracy and vengeance, and in doing so flourish, or else it will stall and maybe even perish. The bits of their souls “establishment” Republicans were unable to sell they’ve now given away, by making a final bargain with the racists and authoritarians of which Moore is of a piece. Let’s go over the inventory: candidate Moore is now on record for linking 9-11 to American godlessness, for glancing nostalgically upon the era of American slavery, for recommending elimination of all constitutional amendments 11–27, for wanting to keep women and Muslims out of politics, for comparing homosexuality to bestiality, and for supporting Birtherism. And this is only a partial list.

His opinions are not illegal but they are necessarily a matter of law, or will be if once again the people of Alabama choose to hand Moore the power to legislate. It’s not hard to imagine what laws a Senator Moore would champion. He’s told us time and again. But apart from any individual law, Roy Moore is eager to take America back to the cultural norms and atmosphere of the 1800s, when African Americans were property and women knew their place and the South had not yet suffered ignominy. To get there Moore will doubtless support Trump in the work of persecuting, prosecuting, firing, intimidating, or otherwise eliminating any and every critic and obstacle, including institutional and constitutional checks and balances.

The onset of my adulthood arrived roughly at a time when the Roy Moores of our world were in retreat, forced by the advances of civil rights and feminism to rephrase themselves. The terms of that long yet superficial armistice have now been repudiated. We are now firmly in the Trump Era, where abolition of the 15th Amendment is a Twitter hash tag and where deliberations of the coming white ethnostate are occurring in an urban coffee house near you. Donald Trump has clarified the landscape in an exhilarating way. The people who love and admire him are emboldened to undertake his cause, and the rest of us should likewise be emboldened—to fight and to prevail. We are living in a time of moral clarity, and that’s progress of a kind.

Politics

God’s Men In Washington

As weird as it may seem, “Theocracy” is the logical description of Trump’s Administration.

✎  Wayne K. Spear | October 31, 2017 ◈ Politics

THERE’S A GAME I sometimes play on Twitter, and it begins whenever I find a vicious troll in a Twitter feed. If you use Twitter, you know the type of person I’m talking about. He (or she) confuses your / there with you’re / their, uses the words snowflake and libtard, has a thing for all-caps, and loves Donald Trump. Now for the game. You must guess the precise wording on his (or her) Twitter profile. Follower of Jesus? Proud Christian? Lover of God? Five points if you correctly choose “Bible citation” as your answer, ten if you pick the chapter and verse.

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It’s petty, I know. But it’s also revealing. Across social media the Jesus People are handing hourly beat-downs to their fellow-Americans, oblivious to the irony. Perhaps there is no irony. Evangelical Christianity is an angry and self-pitying creed, obsessed with persecution and impatient for a strong leader to initiate the final battle against the enemy. Soon enough the social media wars will be transposed to the streets, and when they are I won’t be surprised to see Christians trading their bullet-points for bullets, once again with no sense of irony.

Eighty-one percent of white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump, a man who enjoys the support of a pious rogue’s gallery including, but not limited to, Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Jerry Falwell Jr (Liberty University), Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Ralph Reed (Christian Coalition), and Pat Robertson (700 Club). In the days after the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, several of the President’s advisory boards disbanded, appalled by his non-denunciation of neo-nazis and white supremacists. But the Evangelical Executive Advisory Board remained intact, minus only one member, the African-American and megachurch pastor A.R. Bernard. Evangelical Christian support for Trump has been strong from the beginning, and it looks as if it’s going to stay that way until the red heifer comes home.

White evangelical Christian best describes the Tribe of Trump. Not everyone who supports this President is an evangelical, but an evangelical is highly likely to support this President. Tucker Carlson identifies himself as an Episcopalian, but his contempt for the Episcopal Church makes it clear that his religious views are fundamentalist. Sean Hannity is the executive producer of a recently-released conversion-porn movie called Let There Be Light, about a miserable and alcoholic atheist who finds god in a near-death experience. Hannity plays himself, although not very convincingly according to a review I found online.

There are enough evangelicals in Trump’s cabinet to cast a movie called Let There Be Theocracy, starring Mike Pence as the Vice-President, Jefferson Sessions (Attorney General), Rick Perry (Energy), Betsy DeVos (Education), Ben Carson (HUD), Sunny Perdue (Agriculture Secretary), Tom Price (HHS), and introducing Scott Pruitt, as the godly EPA Administrator who says that “true environmentalism, from my perspective, is using natural resources that God has blessed us with.” In Let There Be Theocracy, Sean Hannity also plays himself, again not convincingly, in the role of a Fox News host who believes that Hillary Clinton is the President and that she should be prosecuted for colluding with Russia.

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Steve Bannon and Seb Gorka went to the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit recently to declare war on behalf of the Judeo-Christian West. Bannon put one of the Bible’s most poetic books, Ecclesiastes, to a cheap and nasty use: “There’s a time and a season for everything, and right now it’s a season of war against the GOP establishment,” he said. The many evangelicals and conservative Catholics around the President keep telling us that Donald Trump is fighting for Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) values and doing a great job of it. Who am I to argue?

America’s evangelical Christians finally have God’s man in Washington, and God’s man is stuffing the government with Theocrats. We will soon learn a lot about their God from this administration, and it’s going to be a long, long time before we’ll forget what we discover.

Politics

The Made-for-TV President

Where would Donald Trump be without fake media like The Apprentice?

✎  Wayne K. Spear | October 10, 2017 ◈ Politics

A FEW YEARS AGO I spent a week at Sunset Bronson Studios, in Hollywood, home of Let’s Make A Deal and The Biggest Loser and the first-ever “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Opposite the third-floor offices of Judge Judy a fellow named Clint Arthur runs his business, Celebrity Launchpad. Arthur’s Sunset Bronson students learn pitching to small-market morning television producers and the art of hustling their way to New York and Los Angeles, where celebrities are born. His tagline is “Make a difference & a fortune sharing your message on local TV.” Celebrity after all translates nicely into influence and money, regardless of the means by which it’s attained.

celebrity apprenticeDonald Trump plays a successful human being on a TV game show

You can easily grasp why the President of the United States makes me think of Celebrity Launchpad. The Arthur method bares a truth of our era, that performance is everything. In the 1980s Donald Trump worked the New York tabloid and chat-show circuit as a Lothario figure, and in the 1990s his revised performance, as a builder and politician, went national. The celebrity breakthrough arrived in 2003 when Trump was offered the starring role in a reality television program. Here is what Kelly McEvers had to say of this, in an October 5 NPR interview titled “The Apprentice Creators Look Back.”

At the time of The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s companies had already been through four bankruptcies, and there were two more to come, including the Taj Mahal. Airbrushing all this out is what [producer] Bill Pruitt says he feels most guilty about now. He says he was a good con artist, and his con helped take Donald Trump all the way to the White House.

There you have it: the performance is everything. Mark Twain once remarked that a man with an established reputation for rising early could safely sleep until noon, and the same appears true of a man with an airbrushed reputation for business success. Over and over again The Donald failed—at marriage, at dealmaking, at ingratiating himself with the members of a social class whose acceptance he craved, and at business. When the new millennium arrived he was persona non grata among New York’s elite and a notorious credit risk no American bank would touch. No one who had followed his antics since the early 80s could take him seriously, whether as a businessman or a politician. But that was in real life, and television is something altogether different.

Donald Trump kept at it when there was nothing in the bank and nothing in the tank except hype. The columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked in January 2000 what he thought of the rumoured Trump candidacy and dismissed it with the comment, “he’s managed to cover ninety percent of his head with thirty percent of his hair.” Such was the state of affairs when Mark Burnett committed the considerable resources of his major-network prime-time game show to a rescue and rehab operation. We’ll never know what would have become of Mr. Trump in the absence of this deus ex machina, but we know what did happen. An entire generation who knew about Trump only what The Apprentice chose to tell them swallowed Burnett’s fiction whole. Trump used the show to perfect a business model he’s since carried into the White House, surrounding himself with toadies whose sole job is to flatter the boss, shilling Trump-licensed products, giving his children jobs as “advisors,” and spending NBC’s money at Trump properties.

Don’t ever forget that Donald Trump hadn’t built anything for years when The Apprentice made him the world’s most famous builder. In the 1990s he became a RINO (Real estate In Name Only) by licensing the word TRUMP to the developers who did the negotiating, land acquisition, financing, contracting, and project management. A large chunk of The Apprentice was fabricated, from the sets to the pretense that Trump was judging the contestants to decide who would be fired. (In fact the producers chose who would leave and who would stay, using criteria that had everything to do with show business and little to do with Trump’s in any case dubious business acumen.) But it wasn’t all fake. The show’s star was, as the theme song goes, a lover of money, and as we’ve seen since January 20 of this year he likes to fire the people around him. The Apprentice did well—very well—because the future President has a knack for drawing attention to himself, which is the alpha and omega of a celebrity job description.

The President has spent his life working three of the principal routes to fame: New York talk shows, Los Angeles film and TV, and DC politics. (He’s hinted at a fourth with his comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.) Today he’s the most famous and most-talked-about human being on our planet. When he tweets the world moves. Every day the newspapers turn his cast-away and often incoherent utterances into news. The stock market rises and falls on speculation over the thoughts in his head. He may soon say something that starts a war. Hundreds of thousands of lives perch upon his volatile mercies. And this, all of this, because he understands that in America you prevail as long as you perform.