With all due respect to the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign, to those who voted for Donald Trump, and to the policies and performance of the Trump administration…
We members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, and of numerous other unions pertaining to American arts and letters implore Donald Trump to stop pretending he can be president, so we can skip to the part where artists get to lament or ridicule everything he’s done in office.
The artistic importance of the Trump White House’s shenanigans dwarfs the political or economic effects of that administration’s actions. The Trump administration isn’t competent enough to put its stamp on history by the strength of its convictions or by the novelty or relevance of its policies. The Trump family intended to get into politics only to enrich themselves or to show off. But as far as the rest of the world should be concerned, their regime will have only entertainment value and so Hollywood, for example, must be allowed to capitalize on that fact.
Decades from now, no one will associate the Trump administration with any political accomplishment, despite the need for an overhaul of the neoliberal way of doing business at home and abroad, as is plain from the rise of state-controlled capitalist countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, and from the decline of liberal democracy in Europe and North America.
Only the artistic commentaries on the Trump fiasco will matter, and these will consist of mountains of films, novels, poems, television series, plays, songs, and operas that will duly arrive at the meaning of Trumpism for the benefit of humanity.
These artistic monuments to Trump’s folly are waiting to burst forth, but the artists are prevented from starting their labours in earnest by the fact that this administration is still perpetrating its absurd pretense that it has some business to accomplish. Decorum requires that artists hold their fire until Donald Trump is no longer president or until the full farce of his time in office has unspooled.
To begin the cinematic excoriations midstream, for example, would invite Trump’s defenders to retort, “Too soon.” But we believe the majority of Americans have waited long enough. Donald Trump has no legitimate business to tend to as president. His time in high office has been laughable from beginning to end. We demand that President Trump bow out of his political fraud so that the entertainment industry can turn its full attention his way.
The dozens of movies alone that will soon enough be made about the Trump disaster will be worth more to history than everything Trump will have done while he was president. Indeed, Trump’s abominable presidency will have the sole merit of providing so many raw materials for artistic and comedic sublimation.
In effect, President Trump is working consistently only for one special interest besides that of his personal family’s enrichment, and that’s the entertainment sector. Trump’s every utterance and buffoonish performance feed artists a wealth of absurdity to challenge their respective muses. Far from working to improve America as a whole, President Trump has effectively aligned himself with the liberal entertainment industry, since it will be left to the artists to redeem the shit sandwich of his presidency.
But by remaining in office where he obviously doesn’t belong, he’s delaying that superior work that needs to be done.
Thus, we the undersigned say: Enough with the fake politics; let’s skip to the art.
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By Petar Milošević [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Fountain_pen_writing_%28literacy%29.jpg
