Trump in Bad Lighting — A Propagandist in a Pickle
The first week of Donald Trump's election interference and hush money trial has been a wild ride, reports Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Five years ago, I quipped that the moment Trump’s base sees him in bad lighting, it’s over.
Trump is a media creature, born of make-up, hair dye, poorly sprayed fake tans, staging and production.
Like one of his beauty queens, he’s learned a few things about pageantry — his rallies are a cross between World Wrestling Federation spectacle and the 1976 film Network, where an unhinged anchorman becomes equal parts cult leader and TV game show host.
As he sits in a New York City courtroom in unflattering lighting in the first week of his election interference/hush money trial, reports leak of napping and nappies, while courtroom sketch artists deliver miserable visages of a man who has lost control.
He can’t play to the camera, because the trial is not being televised, so the jury gets to see the profound misery of what happens to a TV performer when he can only play himself — a man accused of trying to cover up a payoff to an adult film star through a fixer, who has already served time for the criminal act.
“What draws me in, as a scholar of autocracy, is the amazing and beautiful and never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact that this trial is happening at all,” wrote Strongmen author Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “A similar trial could never happen in Turkey today, or in Russia, China, or Hungary — which is a big factor in Trump’s boundless admiration of the leaders of those countries. They would never be in this situation. Personality cults across the political spectrum may present the leader as ‘a man of the people,’ but being treated as equal to those people is not an outcome authoritarians foresee.”
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