Goodbye, Golden Goose
Time
for Donald Trump to head down Sunset Boulevard.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 14, 2020, 11:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Many see a wannabe despot
barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as
words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful
transition, constitutionality — swirl above.
One presidential historian sees
something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has
been tweeting pictures
of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases.
Norma Desmond watching movies of
herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the
dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Howard Hughes, descending
into germaphobia, madness and seclusion. Greta Garbo, sequestered behind her
hat and sunglasses. Charles Foster Kane, missing the roar of the crowd as he
spirals at Xanadu, his dilapidated pleasure palace.
The president and his
cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months.
But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva
is apt.
Trump has said in interviews and at
rallies that two of his favorite movies are the black-and-white classics about
stars collapsing in on themselves, “Citizen Kane” and “Sunset Boulevard.”
In “Sunset Boulevard,” Max the butler
and a camera crew conspire to make the demented silent film star believe she’s
getting her close-up when she’s actually just being lured down the staircase to
answer for her sins.
The Republicans enabling Trump’s
delusion are like the camera crew, filming a scene with the disintegrating diva
that is never going to be seen.
“What is the downside for humoring him
for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official told The Washington Post.
“No one seriously thinks the results will change.”
Trump, who once
wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending U.S.C. film school,
never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a
competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good
acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist
and a ratings-obsessed showman.
Even after Georgia and Arizona were
called and Joe Biden clinched 306 electoral votes — the same number Trump declared “a massive
landslide victory” when he reached it in 2016 — the president is putting on a
play within the play, one in which he’s still the star.
Trump Boswell Maggie Haberman reported that there is no grand strategy and the
president “is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next,”
playing his familiar game of creating a controversy and watching it play out.
As a growing number of Trump advisers
and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh — and as the Secret Service was rocked
by coronavirus infections and quarantine orders from the
president’s mask-defying, super-spreader campaign travel — White House
officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers
deserted him and judges ruled against him.
“We are moving forward here at the
White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Peter
Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said on Fox Business Friday.
Kayleigh McEnany chimed in that
the president would “attend his own inauguration.”
In his remarks about Operation Warp
Speed Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden, Trump showed how tortoise-slow he
has been about accepting that he’s out.
“I will not go, this administration
will not be going to a lockdown,” he said. “Hopefully, the — the, uh, whatever
happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be — I guess time
will tell.”
Time has told. Do we detect a sliver of
reality creeping in?
The president, who
has never shown much interest in governing, has finally dropped all pretense to
focus on the core tenets of the Trump Doctrine: himself, cable news, Twitter,
self-pity, and caterwauling about perceived slights.
“.@FoxNews daytime ratings have
completely collapsed,” he tweeted. “Weekend
daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made
them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest
difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”
The goose was at Fox’s neck. What an
unnatural and delicious sight.
The network helped Trump become
president and allowed him to maintain his viselike grip on his base. Fox was
the oxygen inside his alternate-reality bubble.
But because Trump is 100 percent
transactional, he couldn’t accept pure math, training his laser beam on Fox
when it dared to veer ever so slightly from total fealty by correctly calling
the race early in Arizona.
Trump is right about this one thing: He
has been a Golden Goose for the news business. Every time he opens his mouth,
50 headlines jump out.
But the Golden Goose is also a Silly
Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome
for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the
branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.
He certainly branded the Democrats very
effectively with socialism, defunding the police, shutting down the country and
ending fracking. Biden escaped but a lot of down-ballot Democrats didn’t.
Now Trump should move on and stick to
what he knows best: promoting himself. Like Norma Desmond, he should give in to
the fantasy of his life that he is so devoted to and leave the rest of us to
live in the cold, cruel, unforgiving, inconvenient reality.
Mr. DeMille just called, Mr. President.
He says he’s ready for your close-up. Keep your pancake makeup on and step on
out of the house now. The cameras will be waiting.
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer
Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best
sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. @MaureenDowd • Facebook
