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The purpose of Trump's COVID press briefings are to turn politics into a reality show

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  1. Kuromantis
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    In dystopias imagined in literature, television is a common character. The totalitarian regime of Fahrenheit 451 banned books but encouraged watching TV. George Orwell’s 1984 has the telescreen, a device that broadcasts and surveils at the same time. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined the “feelies”—movies whose tactile approaches to storytelling made them, allegedly, “far more real than reality.” The briefings that air on American television each day are tragically nonfictional. But they fit squarely in this dystopian tradition. They summon the sober set design of a government at work for its citizens: charts, slides, data, flags. But, because they are led by Trump, they typically sow chaos rather than provide comfort. They alchemize tragedy into a TV show. They end, sometimes, with people wondering whether they should drink Lysol to combat COVID-19. They lull, they lie, they muse, they confuse, and they do a version of what anxious authors warned might happen when television doubles as a means of control: They steadily underplay the human cost of a crisis. They are evidence of our own dystopia—aired live, every evening, on CNN.

    But his press conferences embody another kind of fear as well: the ones conveyed in The Hunger Games, in which TV works as a harbinger not only of curtailed freedom, but also of cruelty. And complacency. And complicity. The Hunger Games, that distinctly 21st-century dystopia, flips the Huxleyan premise: In Suzanne Collins’s political universe, The Hunger Games—a TV show that pits 24 young people against one another in a gruesome fight to the death—does not make for entertainment that is realer than real. TV, instead, works even more insidiously: It steadily nullifies the distinction between spectacle and reality. Under the show’s influence, citizens of the Capitol become capable of watching children murder one another and of applauding the exhilaration of the “games.” Collins got the idea for the story when, channel surfing, she happened upon a reality-TV competition—and then flipped to footage of the Iraq War.

    “With each briefing, Trump is making us worse people,” Tom Nichols wrote earlier this month. The president is making America a worse country too. One insight of The Hunger Games is how easily political manipulation can be disguised by the shininess of pageantry. Our version of Collins’s reality show is not outwardly violent, not brazenly apocalyptic. It works much more insidiously. It suggests that human deaths are best understood as ideas—“numbers,” as the president puts it. It does not spend time mourning those lost, because mourning is also an admission of defeat against Trump’s “invisible enemy.” Hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug, is a miracle one day and an afterthought the next. The American president wonders aloud whether lungs can be Lysoled, not seeming to care that there are real people on the other end of his wonderings. Public health is presented as a matter, fundamentally, of PR. Life, death, fear, hope—they all serve the president’s “ratings.”

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