TMZ's Harvey Levin Hits Up Donald Trump For Tom Brady's Contact Info, As 2017 Continues

One of the signature strangenesses of Donald Trump's young presidency is that it is very easy to imagine how he spends his days. This is generally not the case with Presidents of the United States, but where we might imagine Trump's predecessors passing their days in an endless cycle of variously urgent meetings and briefings on various important topics, punctuated by reading and rumination and more reading, we know that this is not the case with Trump. He doesn't read, for one thing, or anyway doesn't really read anything that isn't about him; he seems only vaguely familiar with the bills and orders that cross his desk en route to shaping the world in which we live. The rhythms and routines of his life appear not to have been altered at all by his ascent to the most powerful political office on the planet. He plays golf every weekend. He saws through defeated flaps of ashen meat at dinner, dunks the shards in ramekins of ketchup. He sits at tables surrounded by fellow rich old men, asks them what they think he should do, and forgets each rich man's answer every time he hears the next one's.

More than that, more than anything else, there is this: if Trump is not on television, he is almost certainly watching television. For all the unfinished things about his Presidency, we can safely say, at this point, that no one elected to this office has watched more episodes of Access Hollywood than its current occupant. Television so defines and confines Trump's world, and has for so long, that everything about and around him comes somehow to seem like television. If you need proof of this, there is an article in The New York Times. It tells the story of Harvey Levin, the host and reigning svengali of the shrieking weird-eyed celebrity gossip concern TMZ, sitting down for a rare one-on-one meeting with President Trump last week. Here:

Mr. Levin, according to two people with direct knowledge of the visit, broached the possibility of Mr. Trump sitting for another interview on his new Fox News series, "Objectified," a spinoff from last fall's special. The show, which is expected to make its debut in September, is to feature interviews with celebrities who describe cherished objects in their lives.

One of Mr. Levin's ideal guests is Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback and a friend of Mr. Trump, and Mr. Levin planned to ask the president if he would help secure the athlete's participation, according to one of the people who described the visit.

One of the women that sued Trump for sexual assault during the Presidential campaign noted that Trump's attempted method of seduction involved leading her into a bedroom and saying "let's lay down and watch some telly telly;" she rebuffed him, and while they waited for room service to bring Trump the club sandwich he'd ordered, the future 45th President of the United States told this woman that "he did not think that I had ever known love or had been in love."

This is all very sordid and stupid and sad, but another striking thing about it is how easy it all is to believe, how perfectly it fits and how easy it is to imagine this deeply boring man and his bored and listlessly horny days chasing each other from one lustily air-conditioned hotel room to another, shuffling in an orderly line towards the same wan buffet, across the same deep-pile carpets. There's a video of Trump on Air Force One, shortly after his inauguration, that closes this circuit. CNN, forever helpless before its idiot reflexes, cuts for some reason to a feed of Trump sitting on his new plane, being photographed. He is muttering the usual brass-clad assertions—"nice plane," he says, as if Air Force One were a spaniel to which he'd just been introduced—and sitting behind a big desk. This is all familiar enough, but what registers most sharply is that there is a TV, just absolutely fucking blaring, right offscreen; Trump nods away and the shutters whirr and all the while the jingle for Empire Today, a carpet and flooring company, is playing at a volume generally reserved for My Bloody Valentine concerts. This, you understand instantly, is it. The image that unfolds, quite naturally, is of a lifetime spent like this: his softening form pinned and limp before a roaring television, somehow both distracted and utterly rapt, while daylight streams through large windows.

CNN cuts to Trump. TV is blasting 588-2300 Empire jingle in background. — ⓂarcusD2.0 (@_MarcusD2_)January 26, 2017

It is one of the unenumerated powers of the Presidency that the person in the office tends in ways perceptible and less-perceptible to alter the broader culture of the nation. This is not a question of policy or even really of politics, and more the inevitable result of the human tendency to mimic the things that are in front of us all the time. This mimicry is not an endorsement of that person or that person's politics, and happens without anyone ever quite agreeing to it. To remember the tumid boomer individualism of Bill Clinton's years in office, or the Wile E. Coyote triumphalism of Bush's, or the studiously cool cosmopolitanism of Obama's, you need only to look at the cultures over which they presided; even the creative work that was conceived and created in open protest against them reflects it. Trump will have this effect, too. Our culture will come to look and feel more like the world that Trump sees and sells, which is to say that it will look and feel progressively more panicked and reactive and multiply confused. Trump found a metier that works for him on Twitter—it's also driving him insane, but that's just something that Twitter does—but his true home is in front of television, and it stands to reason that the country will look and feel more and more like television as his Presidency goes on.

It will not be like this forever, of course. Nothing ever is. Maybe we are already acclimating to this new present, which is something that we will need to do in order to survive it. Look at the story of Levin and Trump and Brady, for instance. One powerful self-created celebrity monomaniac uses his audience with another more powerful one to ask for help getting a third onto his TV show, which airs on a network dedicated to the worship of power, and self-creation, and celebrity, and monomania. This is something that really happened, and will continue to happen. It's all so laughably tacky and silly and inessential; there is nothing in it, no value of any kind to find. It's the purest trash. It already feels right.