In the series premier of the 24-hour surreality show that has transfixed the entire world, land baron, celebrity nut job and all around buffoon, Donald J. Trump accidently wins the presidency and sets out to “Make America Great Again.” The series’ premise revolves around this end goal as the characters—each one battling to out-camp the other in sheer comedic and villainous excess—set out to do just that.
The series begins as our protagonist, Donald Trump, walks on stage with a painful grimace to accept his unintended electoral win of the U.S. presidency following a raucous and ribald campaign complete with boasts of power-grabbing pussies, promises to build a giant wall across the continent, and his steadfast refusal to pay so much as one dollar in taxes on his billions. When none of his most outlandish stunts and stunning calls for beating people up keep him from his victory over a supremely qualified middle-aged woman who didn’t understand how to send an email, Trump moves into the White House—sans his often bare-nakedly photographed immigrant wife, Melania, who remains locked away in a golden tower surrounded by Secret Service agents and, one can only assume, the occasional bottle of vodka.
Despite his initial reluctance to accept the job he knows nothing about and fly around in the second-rate Air Force One, Trump has had a taste of cult-like adulation and is prepared to do whatever it takes to maintain the non-stop applause that give his small fingers a hard-on. Setting off his presidency with a barrage of incendiary and nonsensical Tweets that establish him as the Twit of the 21st Century but get him lots of air time, Trump takes to heart the wisdom of Hitler’s good man, Joseph Goebbels, who advised, “Tell a big enough lie often enough and people will believe it.” Thus our illustrious president proclaims that millions of illegal immigrants had robbed him of the popular vote by voting for his opponent and he was determined to root them out, that millions of invisible people showed up to his coronation and he was going to prove it, and that he was, indeed, a Christian. And then he battled Nordstrom’s.
The over-the-top lunacy and idiocy with which he sets out to rule the world is first rate entertainment, but Trump alone can’t make for a show and that’s where a cast straight out of a depression-era freak show comes in. There’s his Gal-Friday and Chief There-There-Mommy-Will-Kiss-It-And-Make-It-Better Soothsayer, Kellyanne Conway, looking each episode like a starving woman edging closer and closer to the brink of utter madness. Our Miss Conway gives a performance so lacking in nuance and restraint that all she has to do is walk on set and the audience is sure to howl in laughter (or switch to the weather channel).
Alongside Kellyanne is poor, hapless Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary, who bumbles his way through one pathetically goofy press conference after another in which half the press is banned or pushed to the back of the room to make way for the tabloids and white supremacists. Each time he takes the stage Spicer’s tasked to defend the indefensible, and we watch with both pity and horror as he tries to push words out of his mouth in the same way that cats spit up their hairballs. It doesn’t look like poor Sean is destined to make it through the end of the first season, a fate that missing Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, appears to have already suffered (stay tuned for the upcoming episode, “Where’s Reince?” in which the White House staff is sent to the Lincoln Bedroom to see if any poltergeists have seized him).
But perhaps the most riveting characters of the series are not the President and his entourage (which includes his narcissistic but weirdly adorable adult children who do their best to keep Daddy in line while cashing in on the presidency by turning their family business into a global fiefdom and knock-off shoe emporium that’s going out of business, and a cabinet comprised of nitwits, racists and Gordon Gecko clones, each appointed to dismantle the very agencies they head). The true stars of the show are not these twisted darlings but the twin evil villains whose nefarious aspirations threaten the very foundations of American democracy, if not the future of humanity and the right to an abortion.
First among them is Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist and Personal Grim Reaper. Played with a wink and a nod to Boris Karloff and looking more like a disheveled drunkard who can’t find his own penis than a demonic megalomaniac who can’t find his own soul, Bannon seeks to destroy the state and replace it with—well, we’ll have to keep watching to find out. Bannon wears his white supremacy on his dirtied, snot-streaked sleeve as he openly quotes Nazis and calls things like progress and equality “poisonous illusions.” But nothing could be more poisonous than Bannon’s own whispers which he hisses into the ear of our despicably gullible president to persuade him to embark on a campaign to rid America of Muslims, Jews and dark-skinned people, with feminists, gays and journalists thrown in just for kicks.
If Bannon is our Gotham’s Joker, Russian President and porn boy wanna-be Vladimir Putin is its Riddler. With the mind of Moriarty, the face of The Simpsons Mr. Burns and the soul of Snidely Whiplash, Vlad has become Trump’s BFF and potential blackmailer (or is he? We are left to guess as the clues start mounting up—but could they be red herrings? If so, the script writers have their work cut out for them if they’re to offer up a more convincing conclusion). Putin, we are led to believe, has obtained secret videotapes of Mr. Trump paying prostitutes to urinate and who knows what else, and hacked the election so that he can knock NATO out of the way and get on with the business of invading other countries. It’s a story line to make Francis Underwood look like Mr. Rogers.
Will Trump align with Putin and the two set their sights on China? Will Putin help Trump to get his hands on some oil and his oily hands on some Eastern European pussy? Or will Trump realize, just in the nick of time, that only one of them can rule the world and only nuclear war will resolve which bad boy is the winner in this global pissing contest? It looks like we’ll have to just keep watching to find out because the only thing we know for sure is that Making America Great Again is not for amateurs.
While some have criticized the series as implausible and absurd, it’s that very implausibility and absurdity that have transfixed the nation as we tune into the news earlier and earlier each day and endlessly scrounge around the internet to find out what just happened or what’s in store tomorrow and if our civil rights make it past the weekend. Never before has a political thriller presented such a combination of suspense, comedy, tension and garish spectacle as Minority Rule: Donald Trump Takes Charge. And never before has its audience been drawn into such performance art as our nation’s citizens rise up from their couches and take to the streets and town hall meetings to voice their outrage and their fears.
Where the series goes, we can only guess. But one thing is certain. The line between reality and fiction has finally dissolved and the dystopian postmodern world of alternative facts and Orwellian Double-Think is upon us. Stay tuned.
Minority Rule: Donald Trump Takes Charge, playing on all stations, all the time. Starring Donald J. Trump as King Donald, I; Melania Trump as The First Stepford Lady; Kellyanne Conway as Her Damaged Self; Sean Spicer as Melissa McCarthy’s Next Emmy; Steve Bannon as the Grand Imperial Bluto; Vladimir Putin as Count Moriarty; Ivanka Trump as Daddy’s Taboo; Eric and Donald Trump, Jr as The Menendez Brothers on Safari; Betsy De Vos as The Billionaire Bimbo Who Bought the Schools for Flip or Flop; Steven Miller as the Creepy Guy We Won’t Even Notice Until it’s Far Too Late; Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as The Three Busiest Guys on the Planet; and the entire Trump cabinet as The Creatures From the White Lagoon. Five (falling) stars.