Trump’s Dopaminergic Hail Mary

Heed the Silicon Sages: When all else fails, pivot to video!

That simple strategy failed to save the hub of listicles, but it just might rescue the Party of Lincoln.

Republicans are looking at midterm elections with the same repine eyes of a cornered mouse. The red party is about to learn the true meaning of its incarnadine colorname.

What’s Donald Trump, its lame leader, doing to ward off the swelling azure typhoon? The constructor-become-President isn’t bolstering the levees, unless you count the marbled colonnades being stood for the future White House ballroom.

He doesn’t even seem concerned Capitol Hill is tipping into a depthless blue lagoon. The D.N.C could save a bundle pink-slipping its army of consultants; Trump has done its smear work for them. Sending gas prices higher than a Dominican hooker’s temperature. Peddling crypto scams when the price of beef, and not its cholesterol content, spurs a coronary. Renaming bodies of water like a kindergartner Crayola-ing a play globe. Dictating puckish rants online as his approval rating falls netherward.

Helpful, these japes and fixations are not.

October’s burnt foliage signals it’s too late to do anything meaningful about workaday costs. All the executive orders in the world won’t slice the price of bread until, maybe, Christmas. And Congress, where Republicans hold a tenuous grasp on majority power, gave up passing anything of substance after the Big Beautiful Gorge-Bill years ago. The ship has sailed, the window is shut, the bill’s past due, the date’s late, and other such idioms indicating the clock’s struck 12.

Or has it????? *DUH DUH DUHHHHH.*

—sharp silence—

The dramaturgy has reason, reader.

Trump—or, rather, his hoofing aides who scramble and duck into cramped West Wing offices trying to keep up with his capricious whim—has a plan to inject life into a moribund corpse. The defibrillator of choice: social-media clips. To be precise: a short burst of X visuals that will, if the algorithm is true, gain momentum like a snowball rolling downhill in January. We’re only a few short-form videos away from an unfilibusterable majority! dozens of elephantine sharpsuits repeat to themselves, hunched over their Macs, half-eaten Roti bowls attracting flies beside them. Mieny vaut tard que jamais!

The hail-mary shoots aren’t the typical desperate implorations from balding stock-image models, egg-blue oxford sleeves rolled up. No, no. These are cinema. Or as cinematic as a 90-second Twittervid can be.

Most crucially, they’re of a tale that tickles the cerebrum of every Republican voter: Donald Trump’s humiliation of the political class. Like Aeneas regaling Dido, reels are voiced over by the President’s bardic retelling of his rescuing the country from “crazy wokesters” and restoring dignity to patriotic, paycheck-cashing Americans. Glossier than a forward-camera address, shamelessly simpler than boob bait, with the production value of an intern’s summer project, these clips are a jump-cutted reminder of when the renegade pol defied his enemies and resumed rule on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The price of pantry staples isn’t addressed. Nor are those knotty, prosaic concerns like the cost of energy, clothing, electronics, car parts, appliances, and all those Chinese-produced doodads and boxed thingamigs you can’t help but shove into your Costco cart. “No Tax on Tips,” the Administration’s gimmick to Waffle House employees, only gets a brief callout. What the hell are you whining about your dwindling bank account for? Trump seems to ask. I saved your country, dodging a bullet and handcuffs in the process. Be grateful!

The flashing hodgepodge of patriotic imagery is pure prefrontal-cortex crack: fireworks, the Statue of Liberty, the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rushmore, Rocky Balboa, flaming Javelins, soaring F-15s, smiling kids in Old Navy flag t-shirts, sweating hot dogs, panoramic views of Washington, loving families, wheelchair bound veterans saluting. Anthemic string rhapsodies accompany the whirring nationalist impressions—with the exception of one vote-ommercial featuring the hard-rocking Linkin Park track, “Somewhere I Belong.”

(A superb, dopamine-jumping choice: Millennials, either MAGA, groyper, normie, Rockefeller Republican, loose lib, mod-Dem, tankie, or politically agnostic, are powerless to bob their heads before the early oughts angstem.)

These TikTokified emotive-snips, which were all posted during the last week of September to the 100-million-follower-strong Trump Twitter account, serve one swampy purpose: to be sliced and respliced by various dark-money groups that manipulate our neural pathways each election cycle. If your YouTube rec-stream is populated with a thousand variegated clips of the President shimmying over blurred photos of a bound Nicolás Maduro to the tune of “Y.M.C.A.”, you can thank a consultant sitting on a barstool in NoMa, bathing his gullet in Johnny Walker Blue Label.

Flooding an already oversaturated digital zone with even more “content” is a strategy. Gimcrack, last-minute, half-baked, but a strategy nonetheless. Then again, cutting checks to balloterer may prove the smarter call.