The Boob Tube

 My mom used to call television the "boob tube" because the assumption was that TV made you stupider. This was before smartphones came along and really made us dumber.

Donald Trump is the perfect TV president. He "generates content" for news channels at an astonishing pace. Take Biden, in contrast. He did not generate the same torrent of stories, so the one story about him - his age and mental acuity - became THE story. His many tangible achievements aren't really good TV. A solar factory that will open in four years doesn't really generate headlines and coverage the way that threatening to attack Greenland does.

As Richardson notes, though, Trump's presidency is really an effort to keep the hits coming for Fox News. The result is poor governance and illegal actions - at the very least, unwise ones. Yesterday, the FBI - at the behest of chunderheaded goon Kash Patel - arrested a Wisconsin judge at her courthouse. They did not ask her to come in and be processed, they arrested her at her place of work. The reason you do this is to send two messages. The first, of course, is to other judges. The second is to throw more content to your slavering base of Fox addled elders. 

As to the first message, I have a hunch that message won't resonate the way that they hope. This is a clear effort to intimidate a judiciary that has been refreshingly resolute in denying Trump's illegal actions, particularly on immigration, but really on everything. As Harvard and the American Association of Colleges and Universities has shown, the way to fight back against Trump is as a collective. The judiciary tends to protect its own prerogatives. 

If you were serious about running the country in the manner in which you felt was best - and there are obvious differences on that, which is what normal politics is about - then you pitch your actions as much towards permanence as you can. Trump pitches his policies towards the cameras, towards the couch of Fox and Friends. 

I tried to read the transcript of Time's interview with Trump. It is a combination of bald faced lies, repeated beliefs about trade that are fundamentally untrue and verbal incoherence. When you actually read his words, the inanity is hard to ignore.

For a mind addled on TV - a mind like his, and mind like his cultists - I'm sure it all makes perfect sense.