James Cameron can’t wait to become a citizen of New Zealand so he can see less of Donald Trump’s face. The Terminator and Titanic director recognises a dystopia when he sees one and knows a few things about disasters caused by arrogance and hubris, too.
Trump’s re-election is “a turn away from everything decent”, he told New Zealand news outlet Stuff, and though his adopted home – where the Canadian has made his Avatar films and owned property since 2012 – is not a Trump-free zone, it does offer some respite.
“I don’t know if I feel any safer here, but I certainly feel like I don’t have to read about it on the front page every single day. And it’s just sickening. There’s something nice about the New Zealand outlets – at least they’ll put it on page three … I just don’t want to see that guy’s face any more, on the front page of the paper.”
The sense of Trump being “inescapable” in the US is “like watching a car crash over and over and over”, he said. It’s an appropriately visual simile for a Hollywood power player to deploy.
The current crisis, by contrast, has to date been fed by words. There’s the inevitable body-language analysis here, a pointed ceremonial photograph there, but it is still advanced and explained by mostly verbal means. This is, on one level, a relief. But it can make the stakes harder to fully absorb.
Before Trump and petulant sidekick vice-president JD Vance ganged up on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, I’d been struck by the strangeness of watching developments of such huge and unsettling seriousness unfold without the dramatic imagery to match.
[ US-Ukraine ties in tatters as their leaders argue in the White HouseOpens in new window ]
Neither of what were, previously, the two biggest geopolitical news events of my lifetime – the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 – lacked for potent, symbolic imagery. Quite the opposite. Both were accompanied by abruptly available video footage from which it was impossible to avert your eyes.
The visuals told the story of what was happening in that place and time, but they also clearly captured and represented something of greater meaning: the collapse of an ideology and the devastating announcement of one, respectively. The “no going back” feel was writ large.
How should Micheál Martin approach his White House visit?
Trump’s astounding love-in with Putin seems on a par with these other historic, era-demarcating events. Chilling statements such as “the US is now the enemy of the west”, the headline on a column in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf, certainly imply so. A Kremlin spokesman observing on state television that US foreign policy now “largely coincides” with Russia’s vision does the same.
But although missile strikes on Ukraine continue, as far as television is concerned, this once unthinkable shift in the postwar world order is notable for playing out in blandly ornate rooms, sterile institutional spaces and reproductions of unlikely social-media posts.
It does this in a manner that is surreally ignorable by many. Not everyone needs to move countries to swerve newspaper front pages. Not everyone recognises a car crash when they see one. Most people remain thoroughly unengaged by UN resolution votes, no matter how eye-popping they are to those with even the vaguest inkling of how they usually go.
About 10 days ago, Alex Younger, a former head of British foreign intelligence service MI6, gravely told the BBC’s Newsnight he believed we were now in a new era “where by and large international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions, they’re going to be determined by strong men and deals”. He couldn’t see a reversal anytime soon.
It didn’t feel like any old piece of sofa-bound punditry, but one of those “is everyone else listening to this?” pieces of current-affairs television that elicit utter dread. And yet deeply sombre episodes of Newsnight do not exactly guarantee that widespread attention is being paid.
This past decade has been marked by a worrying gap developing between information “haves” and “have-nots”. Interest in news has waned and news avoidance has risen across the 17 markets, including Ireland, tracked by the Oxford-based Reuters Institute since 2015. In the US, Trump-opposers started to switch off from news during his first term because of the negative effect he had on their mood, while right-wingers became increasingly convinced that everything they didn’t like was fake news. A year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war headed the list of topics that Irish news consumers reported dodging.
Last Friday was a messy watershed. Judging solely from the number of passengers on my bus who were playing clips out loud on their phones, Trump and Vance’s snarling pincer movement on the ground-holding Zelenskiy had instant cut-through. The circulating memes soon confirmed it – in one AI-generated fantasy, the Ukrainian president is depicted landing a knockout blow on Trump. This fireside chat unlike all other fireside chats was front-page news even in Cameron’s beloved New Zealand.
And yet although it was “a spectacle to horrify the world”, as the Daily Mail splashed, it was also still a chamber piece by genre – an unreal clash of blinkered playground bullying and formal, high-powered setting.
It might seem crass or shallow to discuss it in these theatrical terms, but it’s also dismally relevant to the psychology of Trump. He has to star in his own show. This raises the spectre that he will now attempt to repeat the formula each time someone ventures into his lair.
“This is gonna be great television, I will say that,” an angry but energised Trump declared after the dialogue ceased. He couldn’t have been more on brand. All you could do was hope he was referring to the shouty exchanges just passed and not the outbreak of the third World War he accused Zelenskiy of gambling with, in an apparent moment of projection.
