[KB] Trump question

[Sean Zwagerman]

I wonder about weariness--or perhaps the boredom of short attention spans --as the force that might bring an end to Trump. Trump is the nightmarish proof of Neil Postman's prescience in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Trump is the ultimate, the rotten perfection, of the television president. Television is so much the scene and the agency of his presidency that it might provide the imagery for imagining his defeat. Once the exciting Trump show becomes nothing but "dull daily repetition" (having gone on a season or two too long), the viewers/voters will turn the channel (vote for someone else) or perhaps even turn it off (stop voting and paying attention entirely). Of course this terministic screen just raises more questions: will the star of the next hit show be an anti-Trump or an even more extreme/ultimate Trump? Would an anti-Trump, in the form of a candidate who rejects the TV T.S., get any attention at all? Would the voters/viewers even see this candidate, and take him or her seriously? And how much damage will Trump and his spin-offs (Recep Erdogan in The Apprentice Turkey) do before the genre grows stale?



Clarke Rountree writes: "I also wonder about weariness and its rhetorical implications. I'm exhausted from the daily drama and I assume even his followers are. I would think that they might miss the no-drama-Obama days when you could go several weeks without hearing anything about the president or the White House. We rhetoricians tend to focus on the notable more than the mundane in rhetoric. The drip-drip-drip kind of rhetoric (from repeating: "MSM is Fake News!" to a "Here we go again" kind of exhaustion) is harder to account for."



Sean Zwagerman
Associate Dean, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies,
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Associate Professor, Department of English
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby/Vancouver, BC
office: 6164 AQ
cell: 604-374-1468
campus: 778-782-4967
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