C-SPAN Is This Year’s Guilty Pleasure

By Judson Berger

Friday, May 24, 2024

 

Whether Donald Trump returns to the White House or not in January, Apprentice politics have already made a comeback.

 

Made-for-television gladiatorial combat was mostly missing from a primary season during which both eventual winners sat out the debates. Americans were served the undercard event instead, and viewership steadily fell. Nikki Haley had her zingers and “scum” riposte, Chris Christie was Chris Christie, and Trump simulacrum Vivek Ramaswamy toggled between preloaded character modes that included a button-pressing bomb thrower, but the encounters were 2016 Lite. Nothing approached the chutzpah of inviting your rival’s husband’s sex-abuse accusers to watch the show, or the “smash that like button” effect of discussing genital dimensions onstage.

 

Fret not. The drama returns this spring.

 

Stormy Daniels’s salacious, gratuitous testimony in Alvin Bragg’s hush-money/business-records-falsification case against Trump more likely than not foretold the direction this year’s politics are headed. As Andy McCarthy’s coverage summed up earlier this month, prosecutors elicited from the porn star “that Trump assured her that he and his wife did not sleep in the same bedroom; that she (Stormy) reminded him of his daughter Ivanka . . . [and] that the now-former president and de facto Republican presidential nominee became more polite after she ‘spanked’ him with a rolled-up magazine.” Michael Cohen followed with only slightly less juicy testimony. The trial is expected to wind down next week.

 

Whatever happens, its revelations will be weaponized in the presidential race. Trump will have his own arsenal of dirt with which to fight back, including what emerges in two upcoming Hunter Biden trials. Credit the showrunners for the fact that one of them gets under way just in time for the first debate, assuming it goes forward, between the presumptive nominees. Another subplot to watch for: Trump’s (inane) suggestion that his opponent was prepared to have him killed. Stay tuned.

 

The court/campaign nexus is not the only place for the reliably tart and tawdry. The elected cast members who put on Capitol Hill’s daily proceedings clearly aspire to make C-SPAN your guilty pleasure this season.

 

It was, fittingly, discussion of the Bragg case that triggered a talk-show-style shouting brawl at a recent House committee session. Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up the family of the judge overseeing the trial, and, when Representative Jasmine Crockett questioned the relevance to the matter at hand, Greene made fun of her “fake eyelashes.”

 

In a snap, Congress was high school. AOC called out MTG. “Are your feelings hurt?” Greene teased. “Oh girl, baby girl, don’t even play,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back. Crockett escalated alliteratively, commenting on the Republican’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body,” and then swore. If the dais could have been flipped, it would have been. So chuffed with this comeback was Congresswoman Crockett that she has since filed a trademark application for the phrase, as reported by USA Today. (Jerry Seinfeld’s best-received line in his recent commencement address was, “We’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.” How quickly this was instantiated.)

 

Armond White, invoking perhaps a better cultural reference point than The Apprentice, draws a bold line between such antics and those of producer Andy Cohen’s Real Housewives. “This form of narcissism relates to political selfishness,” Armond writes. “Cohen has normalized the catfight.”  Jeff Blehar suggests calling the House of Representatives offshoot Catfighting in Congress. Either way, he muses,

 

I would say that such trashy behavior is beneath the dignity of the House, but that would raise the question: Is this really beneath the dignity of the House at this present low point? . . . How much dignity can we reasonably expect out of a gridlocked body whose most prominent members are in Washington, D.C., not to legislate but to build their own grassroots “brands” by creating viral video moments and sparking dramatic confrontations?

 

Reality-show politics are back. We saw flashes during the Kevin McCarthy ouster, when Matt Gaetz staged his coup without a cause and Nancy Mace strutted around wearing a scarlet “A” to protest not only her treatment for participating but, evidently, the failure of her childhood school to provide any Hawthorne. There was the short-lived public service of George Santos, and that business with Lauren Boebert in a theater (the details have been lost to history, sadly).

 

As with Survivor or Jersey Shore or Top Chef, connections will be forged with a niche but loyal audience this season. Stars will be made; money, raised; the overall caliber of the artform, debased. And the Mike Judge prophecy will come ever closer to being fulfilled.