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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Bartlet=Trump?

I do not have time to write this out fully for now, so I will just throw the idea out there for discussion, since we have been discussing The West Wing:

Donald Trump is Jeb Bartlet. That is, Aaron Sorkin wrote Donald Trump as president/presidential candidate in Jeb Bartlet, in terms of the "game-on, don't stand on ceremony, tell the dummies how it is" approach to talking to everyone. Bartlet's first scene on the show had him telling a group of religious-conservative political activists to "get your fat asses out of my White House."* Can you not picture Trump saying the same thing? The only difference, of course, is that Trump is doing it in service of a conservative/populist/angry-alienation agenda rather than a '60s Great Society liberal agenda?

[*] Mind you, that scene also contained one of the great free speech quotations of all time. When one of the activists asked whether the fact that any child could buy pornography for $ 5 was too a high a price for free speech, Bartlet responded, "No. But $5 is too high a price to pay for pornography."

Posted by Howard Wasserman on February 17, 2016 at 08:01 AM in Culture, Howard Wasserman | Permalink

Comments

+1

Posted by: papertiger | Feb 21, 2016 11:56:29 PM

I don't know if Trump can make America great again, but he is making this election great! I've been laughing my ass off for the last three months.

Posted by: Bitter Clinger | Feb 21, 2016 10:58:36 PM

I could never bear to watch that show, so I don't know what Bartlet was about, but I'll bet they made his hair more believable. TV has to make at least a bit of sense, life not so much.

Posted by: Dave | Feb 21, 2016 10:44:54 PM

It's JED Bartlet. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is Jeb Clampettt.

Posted by: Wayne | Feb 21, 2016 10:17:01 PM

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