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oliver gave his audience permission to change the channel....

On his last show before Election Day, John Oliver allowed himself to dream a little dream. Mr. Oliver, whose “Last Week Tonight” speaks to a mostly left-of-center crowd, spent most of the episode making the case for Kamala Harris. But also, he asked his audience, wouldn’t it be nice, for the first time since 2015, to have the option of simply ignoring Donald J. Trump’s existence? “I want so badly to live in that world!” he said.

 

The Trump Show Is Returning. Will It Be Triumph, Tragedy or Farce?

James Poniewozik

 

A week later, Mr. Oliver was back, reporting from a world he found rather less preferable. He devoted the episode to what the Trump victory meant. But first, he gave his audience permission to change the channel.

“It is understandable,” he said, “not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you.”

Mr. Oliver, of course, spoke from a particular political position. But he was also voicing a kind of weariness that goes beyond reproductive issues or deportation policies or the health of democracy. The Trump Era has been a lot, and for a long time. One person has been Topic A, B and C for nearly a decade, throughout popular culture, but most of all on his native medium, TV.

On Nov. 5, that might all have ended. It didn’t. How will we — collectively, as a culture — do four more years of this? And what might that even look like?

WHEN I SAY THAT Donald Trump, in his first term, was a “TV president,” I mean something different than when we used the phrase for, say, Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton.

It isn’t just about his having been a politician who “used the medium” to send a message, though he was that. It isn’t just about his having been a reality-TV star and decades-long media gadfly who instinctively thought like television, who craved the same types of conflict and provocation that the cameras do, who was always on, who for all practical purposes was as much TV character as man — though he was that too.

Mr. Trump was more than that: He was the No. 1 TV show in America. From the day he rode down the Trump Tower escalator and sent the media into a permanent state of overdrive, he was a kind of multiplatform crossover event, a ubiquitous text and subtext that cut across genres.

He was everywhere on the news, of course, and on political talk shows like Mr. Oliver’s. Stephen Colbert dropped the mask of ironic distance from his “Colbert Report” days and became a full-throated Resistance comic, as did Jimmy Kimmel, once a jolly prankster and host of “The Man Show.” Sports was no escape; Mr. Trump weighed in on N.F.L. sideline protests, and N.B.A. players and coaches weighed in on him. He was the “fake news” jokes on sitcoms and the angsty subtext of dramas.

Presidents had used TV for decades, hoping its common touch would rub off on them: Mr. Nixon said, “Sock it to me,” on “Laugh-In”; Barack Obama shared his brackets on ESPN. But those transactions went in one direction: The politicians went to television, which allowed them to visit its space.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was a permanent resident. He became the master narrative of the fevered American story, and he allowed this or that program to claim a piece of it. When he guest-hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2015, he was, in a way, really allowing “S.N.L.” to guest-host him.

After his inauguration, the show metastasized. ABC, one of the many media platforms dazedly playing catch-up to “understand the Trump voter,” revived “Roseanne” with its star, Roseanne Barr, playing a version of the MAGA supporter she had become in real life. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” developed before the 2016 election, became part of the iconography of the Trump Era, its scarlet robes and white bonnets competing with pussy hats as symbols of feminist opposition.

The news also became a show produced either by the president, about him or for him. The press secretary Sean Spicer’s daily piñata session with reporters became a ratings smash. CNN and MSNBC minted stars and rose on the attentions of audiences looking for adversarial coverage. Fox News became the official network of Air Force One, extending its symbiotic relationship and feedback loop with its tube-junkie audience of one. Tweets became news reports became tweets; blather, rinse, repeat.

There was also overt anti-Trump programming, much of it painful: the ham-handed satire of “Our Cartoon President”; the misguided revival of “Murphy Brown” as Resistance fan fiction; a season of “American Horror Story” conceived as a bloody allusion to the 2016 election; a Tom Arnold docu-search for an incriminating tape of the president. When John Mulaney analogized Mr. Trump to “a horse loose in a hospital,” a creature both dangerous and hapless, it seemed like a minor miracle that someone had found a novel, perspective-shifting, non-hectoring take on the subject.

I repeat: It was a lot. By 2020, the low-key campaign of the whisper-voiced Joseph R. Biden seemed to promise a national screen-time break. Jim Carrey, playing Mr. Biden in an “S.N.L.” debate sketch, used a magical remote control to pause Alec Baldwin’s Mr. Trump. In retrospect, it’s apt that Mr. Biden’s most quotable line of the campaign was “Will you shut up, man?”

But “pause” is not a sustainable setting for culture or for politics. The system wants content. Even through the Biden interregnum, Mr. Trump was a presence, directly in the made-for-TV Jan. 6 committee hearings and his trial appearances, indirectly in Season 5 of “Fargo,” in which Jon Hamm played a MAGA-flavored sheriff. Mr. Trump was the political-cultural equivalent of Poochie from “The Simpsons”: Whenever he was not onscreen, all the other characters were asking where he was.

And now, here he is again.

“WE ALL KNOW THAT the sequel is usually worse,” Mr. Obama said at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Well, it’s almost always different. It can be darker and more ambitious: The horse, this time, has been in the hospital before. Or it can be a farcical shadow of the past: “The Apprentice” followed by “The Celebrity Apprentice.” (There is no rule saying it can’t be both at once.)

Mr. Trump’s re-election, of course, is not just a show but a politically consequential event. If he makes good on his pledges — which have included using the military to crack down on dissent and prosecuting his political foes — that may be a shock to the artistic system as well as every other. We might need to look for precedents for the cultural response not in the history of America but rather in the experiences of places like Eastern Europe.

But it’s hard to imagine TV not having a role. Mr. Trump is an adaptable media creature, having relied in his campaign on the newer format of young-male podcasts. Still, he remains a child of the TV Era, influenced profoundly by what he sees onscreen. He has already announced plans to name two Fox hosts, Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy, to Cabinet positions and Dr. Mehmet Oz — who interviewed Mr. Trump on his daytime show in 2016 — as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Culturally, even if he continues to be a font of memes — recently, athletes have taken to doing his herky-jerky “Trump dance” — his presidency represents a long-in-the-tooth show in its 10th season or so.

A feeling of brand overextension can creep in. The stunt castinggrows more far-fetched, the shock plots recycled. (Bill Maher recently floated the possibility of quitting his HBO talk show, “Real Time,” because of Trump fatigue.)

The news media can’t avoid covering the president. But will it, can it, be as uncompromising and even adversarial as it was in 2017? Shortly after the election, the “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to, in Ms. Brzezinski’s words, “restart communications.” It is reasonable to be concerned whether every media owner will stand for tough journalism on principle amid shrinking margins, or whether the returning president’s promise to punish media outlets that irk himmight have a chilling effect.

Ratings can be the best defense for editorial independence, as with the various “Trump bumps” of 2017. But if audiences tune out — from numbness, distrust or just boredom — the numbers could become a vulnerability. The same goes for the Trump roast-masters of late-night.

No one knows how this might play out. But there could be pressure to dial back, to pull punches. Entertainment executives could trot out the old standby, “Our audience just wants an escape from all the gloom and doom!” Pop culture more broadly might retreat into a garden of diversion and avoidance, much like TV shifted after Watergate and Vietnam away from Norman Lear-style topicality and toward “Three’s Company” jiggle TV and Me Decade introspection.

And while pro-Trump media may be buoyed now, that’s not guaranteed to last either. In the second George W. Bush term, for instance, Fox News experienced a ratings decline that reversedwith Mr. Obama’s election. (Much Trump-adjacent culture — the manosphere podcasts, the U.F.C., the various subcultures around crypto — tends to exist intentionally outside whatever legacy monoculture still stands.)

As for anti-Trump culture, we might be better off, aesthetically and politically, without the cringier elements of Resistance Hollywood. Politically, who knows if a Kathy Griffin protest or Robert DeNiro tirade ever moved a single vote — at least, in the direction that the performers intended.

Some of the most dynamic work of the first Trump term felt of the political moment without directly referencing the president. “Succession” followed a corrupt family of media oligarchs cutting deals for influence and playing footsie with the alt-right. “Yellowstone” probed the culture war (and often shooting war) between urban elites and rural landowners who believed they were making a last stand for their way of life.

If the present feels truly exhausted, often the best pop culture will instead intuit the future. “Friday Night Lights,” premiering in 2006, was a product of the second George W. Bush term, but in its spirit— optimism about common ground between red and blue values — it feels like one of the first shows of the Obama Era.

Likewise, if you looked closely at some Biden Era works, you might have seen the seeds of Election 2024: “English Teacher,” which tried to suss out the contradictory post-Covid mind set of Gen Z; “Beef,” the road-rage drama that painted a stressed-out, perpetually angry America; and the prescient finale of in the satire-drama “The Good Fight,” which closed with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign announcement (days before it happened in real life) and images of him shimmying onstage to “Y.M.C.A.”

We don’t know what will come of these next four years. But what comes after them? We may just see it first on TV.

 

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. More about James Poniewozik

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/arts/television/trump-tv-triumph-tragedy-farce.html

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

 

 

 

kimmel.....

 

Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.

Special to Consortium News/

 

The Biden family of liars    By Patrick Lawrence

 

This is the sixth in Consortium News’s series on the extensive criminal allegations levelled at Hunter Biden in the course of the past year and President Biden’s apparent involvement in his son’s influence-peddling affairs. We conclude the series with this commentary on Joe Biden’s announcement last weekend that he has granted his son a full pardon. Our earlier reports can be read here, here, here, here and here .

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word.

Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.”

Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.

“President Biden was deeply concerned,” Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realise there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.”

No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter.

The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.

The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.

Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicised.

From the president’s statement:

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.” 

You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.

The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court.

The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded.

Special Treatment

Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.

This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:

“Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offences charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…”

As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.”

The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.

The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations levelled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption.

As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful.

It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.

And given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings — as an enabler and a beneficiary — it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself — that is, to protect himself by immunising the master of all the malign ceremonies from prosecution.

It was more than a year ago, in September 2023, that the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, authorised the Oversight Committee to open preliminary hearings to determine if the full House should begin impeachment proceedings against the president for his alleged involvement in Hunter’s corruptions.

Plenty of evidence

Evidence had already begun to accumulate. It was obvious Biden was headed into increasing political peril. And it was obvious that the White House and the Democratic machine, having concluded neither Biden nor his son could win at trial, would fight their corner in the media.

Evidence? What evidence? There is no evidence. This was the Democrats’ rather pitiful counter as the case against Biden mounted.

In mid–December 2023 the full House voted to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged involvement in Hunter’s affairs, based on the accumulating evidence, implicating the president as a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving during his father’s years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post–Obama interim before Joe was elected president in 2020.

This evidence was formidable. It included very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Departments “suspicious activity reports,” which cover irregular international bank transfers. There was also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings.

The investigators’ inventory included records of gross payments to the Biden family, chiefly Hunter and Joe’s brother James, of more than $20 million during the years (2009–2017) Joe was vice-president. Investigators also uncovered a network of more than 20 shell companies the Biden family set up to disguise payments received from influence-peddling schemes Hunter conducted in Ukraine, Russia, China, and elsewhere.

At that time of the House vote a year ago, Oversight made clear those areas where it would further focus its attention. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Joe met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department had obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

Among the most significant findings of F.B.I. and IRS investigators was a payment of $10 million Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly extorted from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.

As the stonewalling at the Biden White House continued, mainstream media began reporting, again in unison, that the House hearings had reached a dead end. But the propaganda operation against the Oversight Committee was failing.

More than two-thirds of Americans, according to a poll conducted earlier this year, thought the House hearings should continue; half of these respondents — 34 percent of those surveyed — “think Joe Biden is guilty of corruption and should be impeached.”

Hunter Biden agreed to testify under oath last February, an appearance he refused until he was threatened with contempt of Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee, which also had an investigative function in the Biden case, voted on May 22 to release 100 pages of new evidence showing that Hunter Biden lied three times during that testimony.

The evidence of this was provided by Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, the two IRS investigators who had previously presented the Oversight Committee with evidence of the Biden family’s corruption.

It is a family of liars, we can now conclude. Joe Biden, having denied any involvement in his son’s businesses on multiple occasions, was proven to have lied on just as many. He went on to assert numerous times that he would not pardon his son.

Strangely enough, he said in the official statement issued last Sunday, “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word… .” This is Joe Biden. He has operated for half a century on the understanding that people believe his lies if he repeats them often enough.

It is likely that the case against the Biden crime family, as various commentators have taken to calling it, is closed, but it is too early to conclude this with certainty. Biden’s pardon is perfectly legal, but a court challenge would be legal, too, if the House or another entity chose to mount one.

While Biden’s intent appears in part to have been to protect himself a well as his son, it does not automatically follow that he cannot be investigated after he leaves office.

How far the House investigations would go, where they would lead, always hinged partly on political will: Oversight and Ways and Means had sufficient evidence to try Joe Biden, but it was never certain the full House would advise the Senate to do so. And it was highly unlikely the Senate, with a Democratic majority until last month, would proceed to trial.

The damage the Bidens have done to an already failing republic is very formidable. This is chiefly due to the gross corruption of the Justice Department, from attorney general on down, and straight through the F.B.I.’s leadership. As I have written elsewhere, when the judicial system decays, the road to failed-state status opens.

Democrats are fond of asserting that Donald Trump, in his second term, will politicise the Justice Department as a matter of avenging his enemies. One hopes not, although Trump has plenty of cause to seek revenge for actual politicised prosecutions against him.

It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice, in large measure to protect Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. And this will be the deepest, most enduring scar they leave on the American polity.

 

Republished from Consortium News, 5 December 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/the-biden-family-of-liars/

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/35235

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/48411