Is Anyone Entertaining Enough to Beat Trump?

As we enter the heart of the 2020 campaign, that’s the only question that matters.

Illustration: Jamiel Law

There are new rules. It doesn’t matter if you want to play by them. It doesn’t matter if you believe there should be other rules. In the world of images we have entered, a world of screens, the sudden acceleration of the scope of mass media in all forms has generated, on the right, a conservative buffoonery that has taken over the major parties, and, on the left, a tendency toward political suicide by the refinement of image. As with Ernest Hemingway’s proverbial bankruptcy, the crisis has arrived gradually, then all at once. And the test is imminent: At stake over the next year or so, across the English-speaking world, is whether democracy, as an idea and as a practice, can survive in the mass media conditions of the 21st century.

The conversion of politics into pop culture is foundational. It’s not the result of anyone’s decisions, but of the changing conditions by which the public receives information. Anyone who does not accept the rise of politics as entertainment quickly becomes irrelevant, on the left or the right. Robert Mueller, schoolboy FBI agent and lifelong Republican, gave his report on Donald Trump’s involvement with Russia in printed form. He may as well have put it in a bottle and thrown it…