Wag the Dog, Trump, Heartbreak at the Border and the Pandering Populist Politics of Perception
I wrote about Wag the Dog not long ago for my Fractured Mirror column at TCM Backlot. In the twenty-one years since its acclaimed release, we’ve never stopped talking about how timely and prescient Barry Levinson’s caustic, David Mamet-co-written political and show business satire remains.
Like Network, Wag the Dog is endlessly and effusively praised for its Nostradamus-like powers of prognostication but it doesn’t take a modern-day Cassandra to predict that the worlds of show business and politics will continue to blur in dark and disconcerting ways, or that the always dirty game of American politics will only get dirtier and more ethically compromised.
Wag the Dog is not perfect. It’s not Dr. Strangelove. It has Dennis Leary playing a character named Fad King, after all. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it since the re-watch, particularly since the American conscience was shaken and awaken by horrifying sounds and images and stories surrounding the forced separation of children from their parents at the border.
Inhuman ghoul Ann Coulter has accused these children of being actors. When I read that, I thought, “Wow, I expected more from Ann Coulter” for the first and also final time in my life. This echoed a key plot point in Wag the Dog where the beautiful, white, tragic face of a fake Albanian war is a photogenic “orphan” who is actually an unknown actress played by a young Kirsten Dunst, who has been roped into playing a role she, understandably can never put on her resume or IMDB page, by a super producer based on Robert Evans (Dustin Hoffman) in an elaborate scheme to distract the public from a Presidential sex scandal just before an election.
The world has evolved into such a too-strange-and-terrible shit show that I had completely forgotten about the way the sex scandal element of the film echoes the two enormous sex scandals the President is most entangled in (he’s got a whole bunch, going back decades, but nothing like that degenerate Bill Clinton and his golf course locker room talk. Shame on you, Bill Clinton! Why must your misdeeds continually negate and invalidate every horrible thing Donald Trump does?).
I was more struck by the way the saintly, suffering image of Dunst’s orphan, in unison with her heartstrings-tugging story mesmerizes the American public the way images of weeping children being torn away from their mothers at the border is mesmerizing us now to the point that I have almost forgotten about Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal (AKA the tip of the iceberg of the many, many women the Evangelical’s choice for President cheated on his wife with before, during and after the birth of his last child) and the Russian investigation because my thoughts, and the thoughts of my friends and loved ones, are with those kids and babies and parents at the border.
This crisis reflects terribly on the Trump administration and Trump himself. Trump is famously a slave to perception. That’s why he loves FOX News, which has launched a full-court press to convince its easily convinced viewers that
Ladies and gentlemen, your President of the United States!
- These “cages” the kids are supposedly being kept in are actual five-star spas and that what the media has tried to present as weeping in terror is actually weeping with joy and happiness at finally achieving their dream of being indefinitely detained away from their loved ones
- It’s all the Democrats’ fault. They created the problem and it’s on them to fix it in a way that makes Republicans look good and gives Republican everything they want.
Those are contradictory ideas that unsurprisingly resonate with Trump because they absolve him of all responsibility for this mess. For Trump, the only voices in the world that matter are the rage-filled ones in his own head, and the rage-filled ones on FOX News who mimic the angry voices in his head. But eventually even a man with the tunnel vision and stubborn obliviousness of Trump is going to wake up to how angry and sad and overwhelmed we overwhelmingly are by the situation at the border, and how horrifically it reflects the cruel and xenophobic ideology of Trumpism.
Trump wants more than anything to be loved. Right now his policy of separating screaming children from their parents and putting them in camps is making him rightly and deeply loathed.
Trump is a World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Famer who loves showmanship and melodrama. All it would take for him to go from heel (bad guy) to baby face (good guy) in the public eye would be a dramatic and televised announcement that he’s ending the separation policy, and a trip to the border to personally reunite families. With cameras present, of course. That might not work, as children can obviously sense deep, deep Satanic evil within Trump (they say he reeks of sulfur, rotten eggs and Axe Body Spray for the elderly) and can clearly be seen trying to leave their bodies in photographs with him.
I can’t, for the life of me, imagine what the political upside to Trump’s apparent “Let’s get everyone to think we’re black-hearted, child-abusing monsters by acting unconscionably” strategy might be. But I do know that there’s a obvious, huge and outrageously television-friendly benefit to stopping the separation policy and taking credit for its merciful conclusion. Hopefully Trump will do the right, and also popular thing but in this, and all other matters of basic human decency, his track record is abysmal.
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