From pixabay.com / © Geralt
When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go? According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’ Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’
When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low! Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.
Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season. Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president. Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020. Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028. That is, if the USA still exists by 2028. Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.
In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low. He shamelessly sucked up to Putin. He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there. (“I like people who weren’t captured!”) He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining. He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.
He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’. He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’ He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post. Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.
The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit. In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season. And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed. How far can the man go this time? Why, far, far lower!
He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon. He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it. Makes sense, yes?
From wikipedia.org / © The White House
He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again. He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’. He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked. The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal… But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath. At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.
To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low. Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.
They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles. At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in. I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event. After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.
Today, June 14th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go? It’s Trump’s 80th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House. The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages. So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights. That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.
What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached. The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills. And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.
It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers. Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner. I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.
From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions
Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this. Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago. He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far. I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians. (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.) If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*
*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about. Phew.