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Saturday Night Live Wades Into the Chaos of the Mueller Report

On By admin

Last Saturday, the day after Robert Mueller released the report detailing his team’s findings about whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Saturday Night Live was wrapping up a three-week-long hiatus. There was no show, then, to offer immediate reaction to the completion of the years-in-the-making assessment from the special counsel.

The delay that resulted could’ve been a liability for a show premised on quick reactions to a dizzying news cycle; in this case, however, the schedule-enforced slowness was an asset. Quinta Jurecic noted this week in The Atlantic that the Mueller report and its aftermath can evoke the feeling of living in a state of suspended animation, with nothing fully decided or confirmed, despite the report’s official conclusion. SNL used its return to lean into the chaos and explore the consequences of that feeling—and to find humor in the ways the report has lived in American politics in the week since it was delivered to Congress. The episode was an uneven effort, but at its best it led to nuanced treatments of the Mueller report as a cultural phenomenon—aided by the fantastic guest host, Sandra Oh.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O22U8JDxGuM]

The show’s cold open played pretty much as you’d expect: Robert De Niro reprised his role as a jaded and prosthetically square-jawed version of Robert Mueller; Alec Baldwin appeared once again as a simpering, pucker-mouthed Donald Trump; Aidy Bryant played William Barr, the newly appointed United States attorney general who, in his capacity as the nation’s top lawyer, last Sunday provided a four-page-long summary of Mueller’s 300-plus-page report. (That her characterization in this case was notably bland offered its own commentary on Barr as a public official.) SNL, making use of split screens, took aim at the absurdities of the report-condensation process itself—a game of telephone, the show suggested, only with the muddled messaging coming not as the result of accidental mishearings but rather of political strategy.

“I am submitting these 380 pages,” De Niro’s Mueller put it.

“I am writing almost four pages,” Barr translated.

“I am reading zero pages,” Trump declared, “but Sean Hannity has read it and he was so excited that he texted me an eggplant.”

The sketch went on like that: call-and-response-and-response, the (still unknown) substance of the original Mueller report getting lost in the fog of determined presidential triumphalism.

“On the charge of obstruction of justice,” Mueller said gravely, “we have not drawn a definitive conclusion.”

Barr: “But I have, and my conclusion is: Trump’s clean as a whistle!”

“Free at last, free at last!” the president echoed.

Mueller: “As for conspiracy or collusion, there were several questionable incidences involving the president’s team, but we cannot prove a criminal connection.”

“No collusion, no diggity, no doubt,” Barr summarized.

Trump, at this, blew an air horn in celebration.

Kate McKinnon’s ghoulishly rodentine rendition of Rudy Giuliani made an appearance in the sketch, too, the Trump lawyer unable to resist taking a gleeful victory lap. “I will take the firstborn child of every Democrat, unless they can guess that my name is Rumpelstiltskin,” this version of Giuliani said.

McKinnon’s arrival was a relief. The scene, like many of the show’s recent cold opens, dragged on far too long. But it did manage to capture a truth that was not clear immediately after Mueller delivered his report: The document’s findings, overall, are not yet known with any precision, and they might not be anytime soon. And yet they will be weaponized. “I’ve included hundreds of pages of evidence,” De Niro’s Mueller said sternly. “Most of it provided on live television by the president himself,” Bryant’s Barr added. Which the celebrity president, using the language of an awards show, summed up like so: “Russia, if you’re watching, go to bed. Daddy won!”

The idea was further explored in a later sketch, this one detailing Russia’s own reaction to the Mueller findings. Beck Bennett reprised his role as Vladimir Putin, surrounded by deputies in an elaborately decorated conference room, as the underlings tried to process the idea that per the Mueller report, the American president had not colluded with the Kremlin.

“This—this cannot be, can it, sir? American president is work for Russia. Right?” one staffer asked, confused and crestfallen.

Another: “We look forward to report so much! You know, it was going to be Mueller Time, baby! All the world would see the power of Russia, and we were so excited!”

Another: “I was planning a party.”  

[Read: Americans can’t stop mythologizing Robert Mueller]

The joke ostensibly poked fun at Russia, but it came in fact at the expense of those who had spent the past many months convinced that Mueller’s report would find the Trump campaign guilty of collusion. Soon, Kim Jong Un (played by Bowen Yang, a staff writer on the show) appeared with an interpreter (Oh). The North Korean leader was questioning Putin’s influence over the American presidency, and Putin was attempting to assure him that he still had a troll army and so many more means of meddling—and, Putin noted, “We don’t know everything in the report yet. Plus, Mueller handed off a lot of stuff to the Southern District of New York. That’s where the real action is.”

To which Kim’s interpreter replied, “Glorious Leader says you sound like Rachel Maddow right now.”

There was more in this vein, as SNL reckoned with a report that is completed but not conclusive—and as the show explored what it feels like to live within the politics of suspended animation. The “Weekend Update” hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost compared the report to the Jussie Smollett case and to Duke’s recent men’s-basketball win. (“All the people I was told were bad guys all got away with it!” Jost said.) Cecily Strong reprised her impersonation of Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host who is just returning to the network after a weeks-long reported suspension for Islamophobic comments she made about Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. “After this Mueller report, we in Trump Nation can do anything we want!” Strong’s version of the TV personality said joyfully.

The scene was a noted contrast to Jost’s introduction to this particular “Weekend Update”—and to the tone of an episode that mourned as it mocked. (All the people I was told were bad guys all got away with it.) As Jost put it ruefully, acknowledging all that had happened—and all that had not—in the days since Mueller delivered his report to Congress: “Well, this week made me feel insane.”

I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant.

On By admin

I’m often asked why I ditched writing novels for political commentary. Usually I respond: “Because Donald Trump rendered fiction redundant.” That may sound glib, but it gets at something profound.

The aim of the novelist is to enlist others in his fantasies, immersing them in an alternative reality so emotionally compelling that they willingly suspend disbelief. Trump has dangerously conflated this sort of storytelling with real-life presidential leadership, casting himself in the role of the archetypal savior-hero, battling the forces of evil. He’s our first novelist in chief.

I’ve written several psychological novels. Unavoidably, I view Trump in psychological terms, as a character whose inner life dictates his actions, often for the worse. Others have been more circumspect. Many psychiatrists cite their profession’s “Goldwater Rule,” which bars them from diagnosing individuals they haven’t examined in person—including presidential candidates. Most journalists argue that objectivity requires them to report statements and behaviors as they occur, leaving readers to reach their own conclusions about the source of Trump’s solipsism.

No doubt their professional scruples are, in themselves, admirable. But by putting Trump in the usual analytic boxes—populist, businessman, exemplar of reality TV—most commentators have missed what is truly distinctive and dangerous about Trump. In fiction and in life, there is no question one person can ask about others more important than why they behave as they do, and how this prefigures how they’ll behave in the future. The media’s acquiescence in Trump’s fantasies—parsing his positions, pontificating about his strategy, and marveling at his intuition—has turned Trump’s inability to distinguish fiction from reality into a form of political genius.

Watching this process as a fiction writer made me sort of, well, crazy. To write a novel, I would sit down at my desk and enter an imaginary world in which, out of predisposition and necessity, I wholly believed. The characters I wrote about became, in that moment, as real to me as family. I’ve spent a bit of time pondering whether the drive to create fiction emanates from psychic scars: the need to distance oneself from reality, or to assert a control unavailable in real life, or to resolve conflicts in more satisfying ways than actual experience affords. In particular, I understood from the get-go that one of my most popular characters, an American president, reflected my human desire to somehow resurrect Robert Kennedy.

But when I got up from my desk, real people awaited me. I saw my kids as the distinctive individuals they were, not as self-projections in a tableau of wish fulfillment. My career may have reflected some form of psychic adjustment, but it was also a means of sending my daughters and sons to the college of their own choosing. Because I never confused my fictions with my life, I remained, at least arguably, sane—not least because I understood the ineradicable boundary between me and an external world driven by other people and their needs.

To me, Donald Trump was more than the prototypical protagonist of a psychological novel—he was a fiction writer run amok, the hero of his own impermeable drama, resentful of editors who would prune his imaginings. He feels little need to heed advice, or to learn anything much from anyone. Most of what he says is provisional, ever subject to change, and based on nothing but his transient and subjective needs.

But the crucial difference between Trump and a novelist is that his fancies are not confined to the page, and Americans can’t put them back on the shelf.

Like any other best-selling novelist, I had publicists who helped me. But Trump has an army: the media, particularly cable news. In the run-up to his nomination, cable gave Trump $3 billion in free media—effectively, a sustained infomercial consisting of his rallies and rambling press conferences. This open microphone made him unique among all candidates.

Trump used it like a novelist would—to re-create himself as a fictional archetype, the lonely sheriff who drives the bad guys out of town. In his acceptance speech, he proclaimed, “I alone can fix it,” then amplified this in an inaugural address in which he portrayed himself as a gunslinger rescuing a cartoon country. He evoked a national dystopia: cities awash in carnage; sclerotic schools; shuttered factories; predatory nonwhites; the crooked denizens of swampland Washington. Like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, Trump’s America was a helpless giant tied down by tormentors at home and abroad.

But at last Donald Trump had arrived, the solitary symbol of salvation. Simply by virtue of his inauguration, the supposed carnage “will stop right here, and stop right now,” and “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more.” All the problems of a complex society, however exaggerated, would evanesce overnight. As Ernest Hemingway wrote to climax perhaps his greatest work of fiction, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

For millions of Trump’s followers, this fantasy world is too pretty to relinquish. Relentlessly, Trump has induced the sine qua non for any successful novelist: the willing—indeed, willful—suspension of disbelief. On some level, Trump’s followers know that he is lying, and choose not to care. For them, his false narrative is so emotionally enveloping that it sublimates truth to what Coleridge called “poetic faith.”

He engenders this enthrallment by a classic fictional device: pitting himself, as the protagonist, against an imaginary world filled with pitfalls and peopled by antagonists who evoke fear, hatred, and contempt—the deep state, the media, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, freeloading Europeans—as well as fictionalized versions of real people such as Robert Mueller. In turn, Trump’s blustery pretense of intuitive expertise on subjects as varied as climate change, trade, counterterrorism, and geopolitics licenses the angry and insecure to spurn the expertise of a despised elite, whether they be economists, globalists, environmental scientists, in favor of bogus nostrums that corroborate what they wish to believe. By governing through seductive fictions, Trump has substituted fancy for objective fact as a basis for political discourse.

Watching this, I’m reminded of my writing mentor, a very fine novelist who called fiction “a collection of lies which are ultimately true”—by which he meant true to human nature. Trump’s lies are true to his deepest needs and those of his followers.

Among them is Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative classicist and military scholar. In a New Yorker interview, Hanson describes Trump as the tragic hero of a classic Western—Shane, High Noon, or The Magnificent Seven. “They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos,” Hanson explains. “So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves a problem, and they declare to him … ‘We don’t need you anymore.’”

For millions, Trump’s alternative reality is now a source of comfort and escape, a balm that simplifies a harsh and complex world, the gateway to an America that never was or will be. The question now is who will write its final chapter—and whether Trump’s fantasy of self will end in catharsis or in tragedy.

Joe Biden’s Campaign-in-Waiting Isn’t Ready for #MeToo Accusations

On By admin

Politics abhors a vacuum, and Joe Biden has left one for months. So it’s getting filled without him—and not in a way that is likely to help if he decides to run for president.

Biden has teased and toyed with the idea, in public and in private. He’s talked about how close he is to getting in by percentages, slowly ratcheting it up. A few aides have gone further, saying he’s as certain as 95 percent, calling up donors and trying to nudge them into early commitments and spots on what would be his finance committee.  

But still, nothing. He says his family wants him to run. Some close supporters have been told in recent weeks that, after his aides had telegraphed that he’d wait until the first week or two of April to announce a decision so that he could slip just past the March 31 first-quarter fundraising deadline, now he might wait until after Easter. That’s April 21. Three more weeks. At least.

So, observers ask: Is there some scandal that he’s afraid will pop? Is he afraid to lose? Does he not really have the fire in the belly to do it? Is he demonstrating how his age and mentality might not be the right fit for either a presidential campaign or the presidency? All those questions are going around. One prominent elected official told me about simultaneously assuming that Biden’s about to make the leap based on the public reporting and still feeling completely confused by the apparent delays.

People who assume they’d work on a Biden campaign have been stuck wondering whether they will in fact be offered jobs, what those jobs might be, when they’d be expected to start, and how much they’d be paid, not knowing when or whether they’re going to have to uproot their lives.

It’s obvious now that the work they’re not doing is taking a toll.

Friday afternoon, New York magazine published a bombshell: a first-person account from Lucy Flores, who said that at an event in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada, she felt Biden “get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified … He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.”

Biden supporters were a mix of exasperated and expecting it. Biden has a long-established reputation for his touchy-feely ways. There are supercuts online of him at the ceremonial swearings-in of senators, rubbing shoulders, nuzzling, making comments to teenage girls about how they can’t date until they’re 30. Even if the behavior is not intended to be sexual, it can come off as creepy—especially in the context of the larger cultural shift under way in America—particularly to people who want it to come off creepy, and not, as one defender put it to me, as the actions of a man who is a “human golden retriever.”

That’s not an argument that the Biden campaign was making proactively, because there is no Biden campaign to make an argument proactively—even as everyone else in the race and every reporter covering the race treats him like it’s only a matter of time until everyone gets on the Amtrak to Delaware to see him declare.

The risks of Biden’s campaignlessness are evident in other ways, too. Friday morning, The New York Times ran a story pointing out Biden’s inconsistent record on abortion, and his public struggles earlier in his career to reconcile his Catholicism with being pro-choice. Biden, of course, hasn’t been talking much about his record on abortion rights because that would require campaigning, which he won’t do.

For all the hours he’s spent talking to allies about the polling data he has that shows a path for him right down the middle of the party and the country, Biden hasn’t spent the time doing the required diligence with many of the advocates and activists who want to hear from him. And that left the NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue matter-of-factly telling the Times about his being sufficiently pro-choice, “I can’t tell you if he’s there or not,” because she hasn’t heard from him about running, or where he stands. On Wednesday night, in a speech in New York, he said “I wish I could have done something” to help Anita Hill, and was immediately mocked by many who pointed out that he was at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and had control of the hearings. For other stories about Biden’s record on the 1994 crime bill or his opposing school busing, the same general approach has applied. “Part of the issue here of only having an ongoing campaign-in-waiting is that there’s no infrastructure to adequately respond to a negative story. No political apparatus. No surrogates,” a sympathetic Democratic strategist told me on Saturday afternoon.

Here’s how an incident such as the Flores story might have played out, had there been a Biden campaign in place, in ways that are standard in presidential politics though rarely discussed publicly: Potentially even before the story ran but certainly as soon as it did, reporters covering the campaign closely would have heard from an aide, offering rebuttals and context. Maybe the aide would have pointed out that Flores was a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, and a board member of his allied group Our Revolution until resigning last year, or that she spent Saturday morning in El Paso at the kickoff rally for Beto O’Rourke. Maybe the aide would have helped connect reporters with people who were also there that day at the Latino Victory Project event in Las Vegas, several of whom have been talking with one another since the story ran and questioning whether what Flores wrote could be true, because she was never alone with Biden, according to one of the people who’s been in the discussions.

(Flores knocked back both of these arguments when we texted on Saturday. “My piece does not say I was alone with him. It clearly says Eva [Longoria] was in front of me, Biden was behind me, as we were lined up and waiting to be called on stage. Of course no one says I was alone with him because I never was alone with him and I have never claimed to have been alone with him,” she said, adding, “I have also stated many times on the record that I am not supporting any candidate right now and I am listening and evaluating all the candidates just like everyone else. I’m allowed to go to a candidate rally.”)

Or maybe a Biden campaign would have fought the publication of the essay in the first place, arguing that it was obviously radioactive politically but impossible to fact-check. Or it might have pointed to pictures that exist online of Biden with his face in Longoria’s hair at that same event, and insisted that this was proof he is just a well-meaning nonstop nuzzler.

The response was a written statement after Flores’s piece ran. “Neither then, or in the years since, did he or his staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes,” read the statement from the Biden spokesman Bill Russo. “But Vice President Biden believes that Ms. Flores has every right to share her own recollection and reflections, and that it is a change for better in our society that she has every opportunity to do so.”

Most importantly, if Biden were running already, he and his campaign would probably be on the campaign trail, talking about whatever they wanted to talk about, and taking up at least some of the attention and coverage for themselves. But Biden’s not in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina this weekend. He’s out of the public eye entirely, and all the stories are out there, generating secondary and tertiary stories of their own.

Meanwhile, Biden has left the political world confused about why he’s hesitating. It’s now been two full weeks since he appeared at the state Democratic Party dinner in Delaware and seemed to let slip that he’d made up his mind—“I have the most progressive record of anybody running,” he said, to a standing ovation in response to what seemed like an announcement. “I didn’t mean it—of anybody who would run.”

There’s a sense of inevitability among Biden supporters about the Flores allegations, and other criticisms of his long record—but there’s also a sense that none of it measures up to the seriousness of what is facing the country, or shakes their conviction that he’d be by far the strongest candidate against Trump. But the other Democratic campaigns aren’t waiting for him to make up his mind to start piling on. “I believe Lucy Flores,” Elizabeth Warren said when asked in Iowa on Friday night. “And Joe Biden needs to give an answer.”

“Democratic voters are tuned in whether he’s ready or not,” said an operative on one of those other campaigns. “Waiting in the wings means others get to define the first act of his campaign and he doesn’t have the operation to prepare or fight back.” Russo, the Biden spokesman, didn’t get back to me when I asked about the downsides of not having an operation in place to respond, or whether this really is going to stretch on past Easter.

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