Abcarian: In that racist leaked recording, L.A. sees its true reflection — and it’s ugly.
When the music stops and the lights go out, we all know where the real fight is being waged. It isn’t the election. It isn’t the border. It’s not even, for once, what’s inside the White House. It’s what’s being televised. In 2017, America is at the center of the fight for our shared future. When politics has outworn its usefulness, you turn to television to find the next narrative. And in the year of the Trump presidency, television, in both the popular and the highly partisan sense, has found a new narrative, one that has the potential to become the new narrative of politics.
It’s one that, at the very least, should be of concern for everyone on the right.
The story is the one that has played out on the screen of our lives over the past 12 months. Donald Trump had his first win as the president of the United States; in the process, he single-handedly made the 2020 presidential election not just about him, but about his political party and his voters. Trump was the president of the United States when he broke the rules. And he held the American people, in a way, accountable — the only way he could. His reelection campaign became so defined by this, his party’s and the nation’s embrace of him as its leader that, in the end, his party and the nation backed him.
But, of course, this story doesn’t end with his inauguration. In the wake of his win, this story didn’t simply end. From the moment his campaign became defined by its embrace of the most polarizing figure on the right — from the moment when Trump claimed that Barack Obama “should have never been president of the United States,” to the moment when he suggested that Michael Cohen might have lied about hush-money payments to women he was allegedly sleeping with, to the moment when he said that he’s looking at legal options to stop
