This is, like, *really* rich
By 
The Oval Office has now been fully redecorated in a kind of hybrid New Orleans brothel cum 12-year-old boy’s who is really into model planes bedroom style. (Lots of trophies naturally, including the one he stole from FIFA):
I can’t tel if that’s a replica of the Liberty Bell or of the one they ring at the Stock Exchange.
The implausible resurrection of Trump’s cratered career was engineered by Mark Burnett, the Svengali behind Survivor, the most successful of the early reality TV shows. In 2002, Burnett rented an ice rink in Central Park, to broadcast the live season finale of Survivor. The ice rink was leased by Trump, who naturally stuck his name all over it. As he took the stage to warm up the audience for the broadcast, Burnett noticed that Trump and the future Mrs. Melania Trump were sitting in the front row. Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker profile of Burnett describes what happened next:
“I need to show respect to Mr. Trump, Burnett recounted, in a 2013 speech in Vancouver. “I said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to Trump Wollman skating rink. The Trump Wollman skating rink is a fine facility, built by Mr. Donald Trump. Thank you, Mr. Trump. Because the Trump Wollman skating rink is the place we are tonight and we love being at the Trump Wollman skating rink, Mr. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.” As Burnett told the story, he had scarcely got offstage before Trump was shaking his hand, proclaiming, “You’re a genius!”
Burnett had read his mark well. He soon signed Trump up to play the part of a savvy business tycoon on Burnett’s new program, The Apprentice. This bit of kayfabe proved fabulously successful, despite its at best extremely tenuous relationship to any reality found beyond the borders of a 21st century American television screen.
Kwame Jackson, a contestant from the first season with a Harvard M.B.A., who had worked in private wealth management at Goldman Sachs with clients far richer than Trump, was not taken in by Burnett’s carefully crafted illusion. He told Keefe he was “quietly amused when other contestants swooned over Trump’s deal-making prowess or his elevated tastes – when they exclaimed, on tours of tacky Trump properties, ‘Oh my God, this is so rich – this is, like, really rich!’”
Fran Lebowitz once remarked that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” and Jackson was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. “Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe,” he recalled. “The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke.”
Keefe notes that this was “an oddly common refrain among people involved in The Apprentice.” Like smarks on a wrestling forum, they saw the show as pure camp. “The image of Trump as an avatar of prosperity was delivered with a wink. Yet “somehow, this interpretation eluded the audience.” One of the shows editors was amazed: “People started taking it seriously!”
Did they ever.
From A Fan’s Life
The thing about Trump is that Very Serious People assumed he was doing schtick, so something like making him president of the United States wouldn’t be That Bad, because guardrails plus it was all an act.
It wasn’t; this is who he is.
It’s getting worse, nobody knows what to do about it, and it’s hard to say how it’s going to end before Trümpentod at least. (Commenter Vap points out that there are STILL people in the media doing the “stop being hysterical, it’s just Trump” thing, so there’s that).
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
Mark Twain