This cocktail party proves Trump has no idea what's coming
Christof, the megalomaniacal director of The Truman Show, played brilliantly by actor Ed Harris, had a line he loved to repeat: “We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented.”
I’ve been thinking about that line as of late because of the avalanche of stories about Trump’s “human printer” (or whatever she is), Natalie Harp, who prints out things for Trump to read since the climate skeptic in him can’t get enough of paper.
According to lots of media reports, she only prints out good news for him, with the intensity of a star-crossed paramour, or whatever she may be. If these reports are true, then Trump is only seeing the world that he is presented.
It’s either that, or Trump’s dementia has progressed to a point where he lives in a reality that bears no resemblance to reality. There have been some who have generally compared Trump to Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank but, after what happened on Wednesday, Trump has truly drifted into a fictitious universe, a reality that he is now presenting himself.
Truman Burbank’s reality was a meticulous, white-picket-fence cage called Seahaven. For Trump, it’s a cacophony of appliqués, granite, gold, tarp-covered Corinthian concrete, marble and placards, a proverbial White House soundstage, and this week, in the midst of a war and cratering economy, he gave the press corps a tour of his far-from-reality set.
Wednesday’s tone-deaf press gaggle wasn’t about inflation, or the war he’s dragged the country into with Iran, or the dismal jobs reports that keep getting updated and downgraded.
No, it was his vaunted, stylized and once-uneven helipad, which is made with some super-duper granite he claims can withstand 35,000 pounds per square inch, or whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Trump explained, “That’s stone that, if you took a hammer and you started hammering right now, all day long, you wouldn’t see a mark on it.”
I think the same thing could be said about Trump’s obtuse head?
He put his autograph on a piece of the $5 million helipad going in on the South Lawn, then laid out this so-out-of-touch scenario that it makes Truman Burbank look like a realist. He said that guests could step out of the car onto “a beautiful new roadway,” walk the path, “have cocktails and everything outside of the White House,” on the helipad he meant, and then head into the ballroom.
It was a remarkable half hour of enthusiastic fantasy from an 80-year-old man who has genuinely lost his mind, lost his marbles, lost his way, or is lost in space.
Somewhere behind him, out of frame, is the criminality of a crater where the historic East Wing was reduced to rubble by a wrecking ball for a shiny eight-figure ballroom.
You might think of that demolition the same way Trump has torn down the American economy. The ballroom is supposed to be underwritten by corporations and private donors who are the only ones benefiting from Trump’s destructive economy.
But in the end, we, the taxpayers, will be footing some or most of that bill because Trump inevitably dumps the excesses of his soiling on us.
Outside the gates of the metaphorical Seahaven, a different reality is unfolding for everyone not invited to a cocktail reception on the helipad. Grocery bills keep climbing. Premiums keep climbing. Treasury yields are sitting at levels that make economists nervous, and the jobs numbers have been weak for three straight months.
But for Trump, that’s all negligible compared to slabs of stone with “a million-year life.” In the reality that is presented to Trump, only lives that last a million years count. Those of us who are mere mortals don’t have a place in his Seahaven.
Now, here’s the part of the Truman Show comparison that used to feel like a stretch and now doesn’t. Remember the studio light that falls out of a clear blue sky and shatters at Truman’s feet? That was such an obvious, glaring sign that something in his world is fake.
Truman hears a radio broadcast explain it away as an airplane losing parts, and he shrugs and moves on. And that pretty much sums up the description of a White House where the polling is dismal, the lights are falling everywhere, and the response is a blissful meander on the cocktail-table helipad.
Whether that’s willful denial, a genuine loss of his mind, or simply the product of Harp’s curated information dumps telling Trump everything he wants to hear, or a combination, all of it is beside the point.
Trump has stopped processing the outside world as real. Every falling studio light — a bad poll, a court order, a recession warning — gets put into the trash can (Harp obviously doesn’t recycle at the risk of upsetting her boss). To Trump, everything is going great, historically great in fact, so long as the White House is being made in his image and his own reality.
And like Truman, surrounded by actors whose only job was to keep him inside the dome, the fake best friend, the staged traffic jams, and the wife who sells kitchen appliances, Trump is ringed by people whose function is to tell him how much they love him or how much he’s loved.
Their job isn’t to inform him. It’s to keep him content, keep his illusion airtight enough that he never has reason to walk toward a gas station or a grocery store to see what’s actually out there.
Truman Burbank eventually did walk to that edge. He found the wall painted like a horizon, climbed the stairs, and stepped through the door into the real world.
But Trump? No, there is no such thing as a horizon wall. And he shows no interest in finding the door that takes him outside. He’s perfectly happy inside the White House dome, admiring the failing and doomed construction of his handiwork, while the rest of the country, unable to change the channel, hears about a cocktail party on a helipad that it will never be invited to.
