In a bid to shore up his appeal with Latinos, Donald Trump is considering Erik Estrada, the former CHiPS motorcycle-cop actor, as his vice presidential running mate.
If he’s elected president, Trump will travel to Russia and personally scoop up American hero/traitor Edward Snowden, grant him immunity, and arrange for Snowden to host “The Whistleblower,” a sequel to Trump’s “The Apprentice.”
And last week, Trump met with Smithsonian Institution officials to coordinate the bequest of his hair upon his next trim.
Of course, all of the above statements are flat-out false. In that way, they are reminiscent of Trump’s campaign to become the next president of the United States.
Note my restraint in steering clear of “bizarre” and “troubling” and “pre-apocalyptic” to describe Trump’s campaign.
That’s because there is a better word: “Onion-esque.” As in, “worthy of inclusion in The Onion,” the satirical publication that pokes fun at anyone and everyone, as well as anything and everything.
Sometimes people don’t “get it” and actually think The Onion is a legitimate news outlet. The same phenomenon occurs, sadly, with myriad other “news” purveyors today. While not as patently absurd as The Onion, these organizations have allowed infotainment to trump news judgment in determining whether something uttered by The Donald is actually worthy of coverage.
He must be intrigued to see how far he can go with his Mad Libs political schtick: insert insulting verb … pick a derogatory adjective … offer a trumped-up statistic. There you go — we’ve just cooked up the next far-out story revolving around Trump, with a bait-click headline for social media suckers surely in the offing.
It’s one of the curses of contemporary storytelling: The lack of restraint and professionalism that Trump displays on the campaign trail parallels so much of the cynical silliness being pawned off as journalism. It’s easier to write about the outrageous things uttered by a “media personality” than to dig into the merits of policy positions.
In the mid-1990s, during a mayoral race in the Chicago suburbs, a no-substance blowhard threw his hat in the ring. Along with the select few other media outlets who covered the campaign, the newspaper I wrote for gave him the attention that any fringe candidate merits: not much at all.
We noted his presence in the race, and let his own incoherent ramblings and ridiculous assertions make it clear that he was a viable choice only for those who were pathologically disgruntled, lacking in any sense, or simply willing to throw away their vote.
Of course, he did not have the financial means — or the savvy — to play the media the way Trump has so masterfully. But I’m counting on sanity to prevail; Trump’s money and media manipulation will only go so far.
In the meantime, we would do well to regard anything he spouts as fodder for The Onion.
A former journalist who covered dozens of local political campaigns for the Chicago Tribune and other publications, Matt Baron is an Oak Park resident and currently president of the Oak Park Library Board.
