On
the first Saturday of this year’s Sundance, they held a protest parade, because
Main Street just isn’t congested enough during the festival. You can scoff all
you like, but it was probably necessary, or else people would have logically
assumed Amy Schumer was totally down with Trump. Instead of crying wolf on
Saturday, they could have waited for something to actually complain about on
Sunday. Just what were the action items for the so-called “Women’s Marches?”
Suspension of the Constitution? Imposition of martial law? Whether you like him
or feel ever so slightly ambivalent, Donald Trump is now president of the United
States. His unlikely electoral triumph is chronicled in Ted Bourne, Mary
Robertson, and Banks Tarver’s Trumped:
Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time (trailer here), which screened
at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, before its Showtime premiere this Friday.
Sure,
we know the broad strokes of what’s going to happen, but at least it is a happy
ending, right Sundancers? Of course, we kid. Actually, this cut-and-paste job
from the archives of the Showtime series The
Circus makes it clear media pundits Mark Helperin and John Heilemann never
saw it coming until it was too late, at which point they look like a comet is
about to crash into Earth ending all life as we know it. Frankly, the large
battery of editors make them look utterly ridiculous as they constantly
pronounce the death of Trump’s campaign, only to see him pop back up the next
day, like Freddy or Jason. Former Bush aide and “No Labels” guy Mark McKinnon
comes across somewhat better, simply because he is less inclined to make
sweeping pronouncement or snap assumptions.
Arguably,
the misery Helperin and Heilemann are unable to conceal is one of the reasons
Trump won. There is no question he benefited from a reaction against the media
and its darling, Barack Obama that was deeper and more broadly-based than
anyone working on The Circus realized.
Many people just took all the dirt and weirdness reported in the press with a
massive grain of salt.
Trumped hits most of the
campaigns greatest hits and low lights, but it overlooks Clinton’s collapse at
the 9/11 anniversary ceremony and her campaign’s instinctive response to
obscure and misrepresent the actual facts. Frustratingly, it also ignores my candidate,
independent Evan McMullen, which seems rather bizarre, since they were
premiering the film in Utah—seriously he lives half-hour an away, at most. He
also gave Trump a real scare in the Beehive State and remains one of his most
dogged critics on Twitter.
Let’s
be honest, we never should have reached this point. We all know we should have
elected Romney in 2012, which would have meant we would have re-elected him to a
second boring Steady Eddie term in 2016. Instead, we let the media intimidate
us with “binders full of women” and claims that if we like our plan, we could
keep our plan. As a result, we’re looking at four (and more likely eight) years
of Trump chaos. So, happy now?
