The President’s Apprentice
Digging deep for something healing to say, I came up with this satiric fantasy.
Hearing reports of Trump’s meeting with various members of government
as he prepares to be president, one gets a strange impression. The
person he seemed by far most genuinely thrilled to meet was …
Obama. After their meeting he said “Mr. President, it was a great
honor being with you and I look forward to being with you many, many
more times.” One might discount this as standard make-nice
boilerplate, but since when was Trump one for making nice?
One almost gets the feeling that a horrible realization is dawning on
Trump. He campaigned on the promise to “throw all the bums out.” But
even an unprecedented victory such as his does not give him the power
to throw all the bums out. In fact, it only gives him the power to
throw one “bum” out: the former president, that is to say, Obama. All
the other bums stay, and there is not a damn thing Trump can do about
it, president or no.
Of all the “bums” in Washington, perhaps Obama is the only one Trump
does not actually want “thrown out.” He loves to hate Obama, but
loving to hate someone is not the same as wanting him gone. People
have speculated that the seed of Trump’s drive to become president began
with his roasting by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’
dinner. When Trump fought for victory, what he wanted was to force
Obama to show him respect, to take him seriously, above all, to stop
laughing at him. But was that a desire to “throw him out”? Not at
all.
There is a lot of talk about how Trump will manage the transition of
power. It is a vast and complex job receiving the reins of power, and
to say that Trump does not seem to be throwing himself into the
challenge with enthusiasm is putting it mildly. He’s an unconventional
candidate with unconventional goals. It occurred to me in this highly
irregular situation it might be appropriate to suggest a
cut-the-Gordian-knot solution. Trump might think to himself: “Am I
president or am I not president? Who gets to tell me I have to
transition?” Then he could make the proclamation: “There will be no transition. Everything stays the same, with only one change. Obama is no longer president: I am president now. Obama has a new title: the President’s
Apprentice.”
“The job of a president’s apprentice is exactly like the job of a
president with only one difference. At regular intervals Obama has to
appear on a TV show with me, and I get to heckle and rage in my
beloved and inimitable fashion about everything that is wrong with
the job he is doing. And he has to convince me on television, just
like any other celebrity apprentice, why he is doing a good enough job
that he shouldn’t be fired.”
Just think, the ratings would be through the roof!
Trump would get to pawn off on Obama all the achingly difficult work
of actually running things. The Onion headline “Black Man Given
Nation’s Worst Job” comes to mind. For all that, there is something in
it for Obama too. First, obviously, he might effectively get the third
term the Constitution does not allow him. Secondly, if Obama could
pull off the reality star role with the grace, humor and style he has
shown in all his other roles, it could give him a platform to explain
his agenda and methods to the American people in a way that nothing
else could match. There is a certain portion of the electorate for whom the spectacle of a black urban-elite intellectual lecturing to them was just so humiliating, so wrong in their worldview, that they could not stop to listen or think about anything he had to say. But those same people might revel in watching a President’s Apprentice Obama deliver exactly the same message. If the black man is a challenged subordinate (or playing one on TV), suddenly it all becomes OK, and even immensely entertaining to watch.
After all, what is Trump’s mandate? If Michael Moore’s explanation of
Trump’s win is correct, at least part of it is what he called “The
Jesse Ventura Effect.” That motivation, says Moore, is voters’ desire
to play “their version of a good practical joke on a sick political
system.” Trump’s mandate may be to roll with the joke in an
entertaining kind of way, while keeping the undigested bitchiness of
the electorate firmly in the public eye. The red state people need
reassurance that the blue state people are listening. Doing something
desperately unfunny — terrifying even — like actually trying to run the
country isn’t what the voters’ wanted of him. Perhaps if he
acknowledges this mandate for what it is, he might finally get what he
craves: that people stop laughing at him.
But wait! you might exclaim. This Rust Belt Brexit was more than just
a practical joke. These voters want results. Obama has had his
chance, and just hasn’t delivered on his promise of change. It is time
for him to go, to really go.
But soon Trump may have to face the awful reality that transformed the
beloved change-and-hope Candidate Obama into the hated
incremental-progress President Obama: delivering results is hard.
Trump is now the one on the change-agent hot seat, and he may soon
discover how uncomfortable this seat can be. If he doesn’t want his
promise of deliverance to the suffering Rust Belt to go down as one of
the biggest cons in history, he might do well to admit that Obama
knows more than anyone alive about the realities of delivering on a
promise of change.
I am led to a question: would a President’s Apprentice Obama make a
better change agent than a President Obama? Imagining the show, I have
a fantasy of Trump railing at Obama about his lack of concern for Rust
Belt suffering, and Obama calmly explaining that he does care, he
cares very much, but there are no easy answers. In his professor’s style, he would lay out all the reasons the obvious solutions wouldn’t work, and perhaps even do more harm than good. He would proclaim himself out of options. And Trump would continue to fume, to rage, and in my fantasy, eventually land on the question:
“So, maybe I am forced to accept there are no easy answers. But it is
still not OK. I will not accept that you allow yourself to wring your
hands helplessly and then turn away from the terrible suffering of
your citizens to focus on liberal trivialities, like saving the rusty
patch bumble bee or making bathrooms safe for transgender folks. F–k
the bumble bee. F–k the bathrooms. Maybe there are no easy
answers. But there may be hard ones. I don’t know what they are, but
I’m not the smart one. You are. If you really tried, if you really
cared, you could find them. What is all your hoity-toity
professor’s intellectualism good for if all you ever do with it is
drop your hands the minute the easy answers leave you out of options?
I expect better than that. I require better than that. I am the
president; you are only the president’s apprentice. I demand better
than that.”
It might be the best thing that could possibly happen to the liberal
elites: to have this question in their faces week after week after week
after week. I have no illusion that a challenge like this could be
answered quickly. I have grappled with this question, and often in the face of the difficulties, I admit, I’ve dropped my hands. But for all that, the rages of my fantasy reality-star President Trump aren’t stupid or invalid. If he went off like this I wouldn’t be laughing. I could even agree that he was serving his country honestly and well.
