The Entertainer in Chief

When President Trump began the longest speech of his presidency by giving a full-body hug to an unsuspecting American flag at CPAC, it was one of the most cheerfully photogenic moments of his political career. What can top a president giving a PDA to Old Glory? It was wacky, it was unexpected, it was essentially unimaginable in most other countries. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron to follow suit.

The responses from the left were confused, disbelieving, snippy. “What the hell was that?” asked Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.”

You would think the point would not need to be explained to a professional entertainer, but in the Trump era many elementary things need to be explained, very slowly, to people suffering acute Trump-related loss of cognitive function. What the hell that was, was entertainment. It was fun, and it was funny. It came across as spontaneous and endearing and very, very American. And it was a reminder that in our two-party system, the more entertaining candidate pretty much always wins the election. Be a boring scold, and your chances fade.

Will the Democrats nominate anyone nearly as entertaining as Donald Trump next summer? I doubt it. Nick Gillespie of Reason, by no means a member of Trump’s MAGA posse, wrote of the speech:

There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn’t be absolutely blown off the stage by him. I say this as someone who is neither a Trump fanboy nor a Never Trumper. But he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations.