Donald Trump Jumped the Shark

There is an old television expression for the moment when a show goes too far. The writers have run out of ideas, plausibility has departed, and something happens that makes the audience realize that whatever they were watching before has become something else. The expression comes from Happy Days, when Fonzie, wearing his leather jacket and water skis, literally jumped over a shark.

Donald Trump has jumped the shark.

Except, appropriately enough, this time it is a tiger.

I have never expected Donald Trump to behave like a conventional American president. Nobody should. The man has spent most of his public life demonstrating that convention interests him mainly as something to violate. He insults people, invents nicknames, posts bizarre things at bizarre hours, turns political opponents into characters in an endless personal drama, and approaches the presidency with considerably more of the instincts of a television producer than those of a constitutional lawyer.

Sometimes this has even been part of his appeal. There is something undeniably refreshing about watching somebody walk into a room filled with political euphemisms and refuse to speak the language. Trump understood long before most politicians that millions of people were tired of being addressed by men and women who appeared to have been manufactured by a public-relations department. He was vulgar, theatrical and frequently outrageous, but at least nobody could mistake him for a press release.

I understand all that.

But I do not understand the tiger.

A 23-year-old British man, William Chapman, entered a tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park and was killed. His family has said that he suffered from serious mental-health problems. The footage of his death began circulating online. His family pleaded with people not to share it.

And then the president of the United States shared it.

Not merely some anonymous account with twelve followers and a Pepe-the-Frog avatar. The president of the United States.

Trump accompanied footage of the attack with the observation, “Don't ever mess with nature!” Then came videos of other people being attacked by big cats. And finally the inevitable masterpiece of our age: an AI-generated Donald Trump wrestling and taming a tiger while The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays.

I keep trying to find the point.

That is what bothers me most.

Trump is president of a country involved in a war with Iran. He sits at the centre of the most powerful military and diplomatic apparatus on earth. Every morning he has access to information about wars, intelligence operations, nuclear weapons, financial markets and geopolitical crises that almost nobody else on the planet possesses. Whatever one thinks of the phrase, he occupies the office traditionally described as the leadership of the free world.

And he is making tiger memes about a dead mentally ill man.

Why?

Political provocation normally has an object. You offend somebody because you want to expose hypocrisy. You break a convention because you think the convention is stupid. You say something outrageous because everybody else is afraid to say it. Even Trump's most grotesque political performances usually have an intelligible logic behind them. He wants attention. He wants to dominate the news cycle. He wants to humiliate an opponent. He wants his supporters laughing while his enemies become furious. One may dislike the strategy, but one can see the strategy.

Here I see nothing.

There is no political opponent being defeated. No taboo worth breaking. No hypocrisy being exposed. No argument about immigration, trade, Iran, taxes, bureaucracy or free speech hiding underneath the vulgarity.

There is simply a dead young man and a president making himself part of the entertainment.

Perhaps we have become so accustomed to Trump's behaviour that we no longer notice how extraordinary this is. Imagine almost any previous American president doing it. Imagine Barack Obama sharing footage of somebody being mauled to death and then posting an AI video of himself wrestling the animal. Imagine George W. Bush doing it. Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon, for God's sake.

The country would have wondered what the hell was happening in the White House.

And that is precisely my reaction now.

What the hell is happening in the White House?

I don't mean that as a medical diagnosis. I have no idea what is going on inside Donald Trump's head, and neither does anyone watching him through a screen. Perhaps he found the video funny. Perhaps somebody showed it to him. Perhaps he thought the AI clip made him look strong. Perhaps, after a lifetime in which outrage has so reliably produced attention, the distinction between attention and judgment has simply ceased to matter.

But there is something almost more unsettling than Trump posting it: people around him apparently allowed it to become presidential communication. The White House itself amplified the original footage. At that point this is no longer merely the eccentricity of Donald Trump sitting somewhere with his phone. An institution participated.

Presidents have always been strange human beings. It may actually require a certain abnormality to wake up one morning and decide that what you really want from life is responsibility for 330 million people and several thousand nuclear warheads. Lyndon Johnson conducted meetings while sitting on the toilet. Nixon talked to portraits. Clinton had his appetites. Reagan sometimes seemed to inhabit a movie in which he was simultaneously president and leading man.

But the office traditionally imposed a certain distance between the peculiar human being and the presidency.

Trump has spent years destroying that distance.

Usually I can at least understand why.

This time I cannot.

A mentally troubled young man climbed into a tiger enclosure and died. Somewhere there is a family who will carry that event for the rest of their lives. They asked strangers on the internet for the elementary mercy of not turning their son's death into entertainment.

The president of the United States apparently couldn't manage even that.

And I keep coming back to the same question.

Why?

What was the joke? What was the message? Who was this for? What was Trump trying to achieve? Was somebody supposed to be impressed? Was somebody supposed to laugh? Was there even a thought behind it beyond the fact that there was a tiger, there was a video, and Donald Trump could put himself into it?

I have watched Trump do outrageous things for years, and usually, somewhere underneath the noise, I could see the transaction. Attention. Power. Humiliation. Publicity. Politics. Something.

Here I see nothing.

Just a dead young man, a grieving family, a tiger, an AI video, and the president of the United States.

Why?