Trump and RelevancePart 14: Mystery Science Theater

The irresistible appeal of bad movies is the joy of being in on the joke. It is what makes them relevant. It makes you part of a community of like-minded souls who understand that the bad movie is so bad you can have fun with it together.

This is the dynamic behind the current explosion of bad movie podcasts and websites — new media outlets devoted to helping people laugh at the ways filmmakers often trip over themselves in attempting to tell their stories.

Although not the first “bad movie” compiler, certainly granddaddy of them all was Mystery Science Theater 3000, still an amazingly funny show, which began in 1988 on local TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul before a decade on Comedy Central and the Sci Fi Channel.

Bad movies are as addictive in their own way as the Donald Trump show is in its way . . . and perhaps by way of many of the same mechanisms. A mediocre movie simply fails to connect at all. You get the feeling of a director or production company “phoning it in,” offering up something bland and ordinary simply to create a product. The vast majority of films (like political candidates) are not really “bad” enough to be “bad.”

But every once in a while, a film is so horrible in every way, that its horribleness becomes a kind of magnificence. It goes from being a bland waste of time to being an iconic (and deeply relevant) must-see that draws viewers with extraordinary power.

Such a film is the 2003 masterpiece, The Room by writer/actor/producer/director Tommy Wiseau. It is a film so bad in all its particulars, that it has become a beloved cultural emblem, showing to packed houses on college campuses and on the midnight movie circuit around the country.

The phenomenon of The Room is summarized brilliantly in the 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (a member of the film’s cast) and co-author Tom Bissell. At one point, Sestero discusses one of the movie’s more well-known takes and the reaction to it from future audiences:

One of The Room’s more amusing audience rituals concerns this scene. There’s a moment right before Johnny makes his announcement in which he seems to look down and to the right and wave at someone. Consequently, some audiences send a small gaggle of people to converge in the bottom right-hand corner of the movie screen, where they gleefully return Johnny’s wave. So what’s really going on here? Well, after so many blown takes, Tommy is signaling to the cameraman that he’s ready, he’s got it, let’s roll film, motherfuckers. And yes, a take in which Tommy annihilates the fourth wall by motioning to the cameraman was the best take they got.

In other words, watching The Room has become one of those movie watching experiences (like The Rocky Horror Picture Show before it), where people literally get out of their seats to interact with the film, throw things at the screen, cheer at and mimic iconic lines. Citizen Kane never did that.

Near the end of The Disaster Artist, Sestero recounts showing The Room to his family for the first time during a private viewing in their living room:

With popcorn popped, my family and I settled in to watch the film. Within the first few minutes, everyone was laughing so hard they could barely breathe. . . . . My father — a dear, restrained, altogether good-hearted man who enjoys the daily newspaper’s crossword puzzle, Seinfeld, and going to bed at 9:00 p.m. as laughing so hard he had to take off his glasses every few minutes to wipe the tears from his eyes. . . . It was striking to see my family loving this cinematic abomination as much as they were. The room was filled with laughter from beginning to end — huge, bright, joyful laughter. We finished watching it at 1:00 a.m. Our cheeks hurt, our stomachs ached, and we felt closer to one another than we had in a long time.

To some people, The Room is just a really bad movie. Why would you waste your time with it? How could you possibly have fun with it, engage with it, enjoy it? Are you stupid?

But to certain slices of our culture, it is intensely fun, relevant, interesting and engaging. This slice tends to be the group that enjoy the fun of seeing how cultural sausage is made and find it exciting when it’s made badly precisely because you can see the way the strings are being pulled (or, rather, how someone is attempting but failing to pull them) and the way the gears are turning (or, rather, how someone is attempting but failing to turn them). To some of us, this is really fun and relevant.

Maybe this is the Trump story. To some of us, you would have to be a complete idiot to find anything Trump says or does to connect properly to what a United States president is or does or should be. To this group, you would have to be a clueless fool to find Trump relevant to that narrative.

But to others, maybe, there is a kind of connection that creates pleasure and even passion in imagining Trump in that role — a completely disruptive and unorthodox force calling attention to the arbitrariness and artificiality of stings and gears while every candidate is somehow working to pretend they’re not there.

To some of us, given the choice between watching a mediocre movie and The Room, picking the mediocre film seems like the obvious, sensible lesser of two evils. But others of us will pick The Room every time. It makes us laugh. It brings us together. It connects us to a common point of view about movies. It's more relevant to us because it makes us feel a little smarter and a little less cheated than a mediocre movie would leave us feeling.

Trump and RelevancePart 13: Trump’s Mouth and the Relevance of Disgust

I dare you to look at Trump’s mouth for more than 30 seconds. It’s upsetting.

Once again, it adds to Trump’s iconography of relevance because, no matter what you think of him, the mouth begs to be stared at owing to its strangeness, its uncanniness.

It is a mouth that is radically different from other human mouths. It is, to use a word found frequently in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, “eldritch.” It has an eerie otherworldliness.

Next to Trump’s hair, it is his most parodied and commented upon physical feature. In photos online, his face is frequently Photoshopped and caricatured in ways that make his mouth huge or emphasize its strangeness or even — most disturbingly — replace his eyes and nose with identical mouths.

When at rest, the mouth does often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that has been described as an “elongated Cheerio,” suggesting that it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.

Why would this mouth attract the attention of a significant segment of the electorate? Precisely because of its eerie difference. Trump’s mouth is relevant because satisfies the appetite of some people for a completely different political mouth. And it seizes the attention of others because, like a bloody car accident, we can’t look away.

To those enraged at the falseness of other mouths (the mouths of the political, media and economic elite that have let them down), Trump’s mouth is hyper-real and in its weird fleshiness, suggests an authenticity, the way a blood rare steak suggests “real food.”

The mouth also has an anal quality to it. Is always pantomiming an expulsion of waste. It is always conveying expulsion of impurity, mirroring Trump’s promises to eject things and people — Mexicans, Muslims, protesters at his rallies and so on.

The shape of the mouth as an emblem of disgust and expulsion is also connected to Trump’s frequent interest in what comes out of human bodies, especially the bodies of women. It enacts his revulsion at excretion (see his comments on Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate), menstruation (see his comments on Megyn Kelly’s question to him at the first Republican debate) and breast feeding (see his remarks related to breast pumping from 2011).

He consistently uses the word “disgusting” . . . a word that in its origins suggests the expulsion of a thing based on taste, an operation of the mouth.

But Trump’s lips are not pursed in a disgusted frown against entry of the disgusting thing. Trump’s mouth is always open in an odd cloacal circle, doing two things at once, taking in (in order to judge on the basis of taste) and spitting out.

He is unlike other Republicans who are characteristically “tight-lipped.” Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney are classic examples of this, Republicans with small mouths pursed tightly against the entrance of the disgusting thing. Trump’s mouth is different. It tells people, the disgusting thing is already inside — not yet inside the stomach, but inside the mouth — and must be ejected.

Trump’s mouth is not a mouth of unequivocal rejection, like Cruz’s mouth or Romney’s. It is a mouth that says, “I tried that and it’s disgusting. It has to be spit out.” So, among his supporters, when Trump “talks shit,” he is symbolically given a pass because it has the physiological status of a counterpunch. He can get away with saying the “disgusting” thing because he is “spitting out” the disgusting thing that almost — but not quite, thank goodness — got into the body.

Trump and RelevancePart 12: Trump’s Eyes and “The Uncanny Valley”

The eyes are of a piece with the skin. They provide context for each other. Each of Trump’s eyes is encircled in a corona of pale white, reflecting the place where the eye covering goes during the spray tan process or what he wears over them in the tanning bed.

The eyes are distinguished from other eyes by virtue of their separateness from the rest of him. They speak to the possibility of an “inner Trump” . . . not the exterior, golden, audacious skin-suit, but the pale, sun-starved cave-dwelling Trump within.

And, for the purposes of relevance iconography, like all Trump features, both physical and stylistic, they draw us in — either affirmatively, asking “I wonder if there’s something here for me to pay attention to?” or negatively, asking “What unearthly thing is going on here that I need to be on guard against?”

Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at.

Again, we can only conclude that it is this way on purpose. The stark contrast between the skin and the eyes — the gold and the white — is something he could be easily fix if he wanted to. For most spray tan customers, the goal is evenness, continuity, naturalness — creating the illusion of something that has been achieved as the result of healthy, active living, not purchased. For Trump it is the opposite. It is discontinuity, calling attention to the purchase, to the transaction, to the disruption between presentation and reality.

The eyes say don’t send a straightforward message. The eyes ask a question of us about themselves. They say, “I have done something to create eyes that are this way. What do you think I’m up to?”

Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at . . . not because they have a message for you, like, say, the eyes of your Labrador retriever when he wants to go outside and play. Your dog’s eyes are silently telling you something precise and charming. Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at because they are telling you nothing except “I have a message for you if you stare a little closer.”

They convey shallowness masquerading as depth, two dimensions masquerading as three-dimensions like the op art you could find at the mall in the late 80s where, if you stared long enough and in the right way, a dolphin or shark would appear.

Memento Mori

Through the agency of his eyes most of all, Trump is a representative of the phenomenon known as “The Uncanny Valley.” This is a term coined by Japanese robotics scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe his observation that robots become deeply disconcerting to human observers at the point where they come closest to mimicking human features.

Mori observed a steady increase in human appreciation of and connection to robots the more human they appeared, but identified a precipitous drop in acceptance and comfort at the point where robots are almost but not quite fully human in appearance. Beyond that point, Mori surmised, robots could climb back out of the Uncanny Valley as they became not just “uncannily” similar (but still recognizably different) from humans toward the point where they were indistinguishable from humans.

From this perspective, Trump’s eyes explain a lot. They tell us that, for some observers (those of us who can’t imagine supporting him), he lives deeply in the bottom of Mori’s Uncanny Valley. But for other observers, he lives on either side of it, either on the pre-valley side (where we recognize him a non-human fiction who is nonetheless engaging and charming) or perhaps on the post-valley side (where his robotic strangeness is indistinguishable from actual humanity).

In either case, he presents as a puzzle to be figured out, a mysterious object to be inspected, like an exotic zoo animal or a painting by Klimt.

Trump and RelevancePart 11: “It sprays the bronzer on its skin . . .”

Trump’s skin, like many of the fixtures around him — items both organic and inorganic — is gold. Or aspires to goldness.

On the one hand, this bears almost no explaining. Trump surrounds himself with gold, even enwraps himself in his own gold skin, to convey in the most primitive way imaginable, that he is gold, that everything he touches turns to gold, that he cannot escape how gold rushes in upon him, following him like a cloud of gold dust seeking the man who is both its source and its final destination.

But there is something more about this skin and that something is its obvious artificiality. Trump’s skin color obviously comes out of a can and is applied badly. It is impossible that Trump would not be able find the right kind of professional help with his bronzer application, so we can only conclude that Trump’s skin is the way it is because he wants it to be that way.

With his skin, he is sending us a message . . . and it’s not just a message that says “I am a golden child.”

The message also says, “I am wearing a Trump-shaped golden suit. I am comfortable in my own skin because I am only my skin. Isn’t it something?”

Trump’s skin almost forces you to stare and invites you to imagine an inner Trump, offering you the promise of an ingeniously active political and social agent operating from within the golden skin-suit.

It’s an impression that is reinforced by the words and ideas that emerge from the skin’s interior that achieve the same simulacrum of humanity, sometimes almost but just not quite what a real person might say or think.

All in all, everything is just a little “off” visually . . . and I think that’s the point.

To those for whom Trump is negatively relevant (“fascinating” in a bad way), the skin is a flashing alarm light alerting them to the dangerous duplicity of a demagogue. It says to them, “Look, look, look, he’s conning you! Don’t be fooled!” This is not a great strategy for winning the votes of those people, but it is a very effective strategy for occupying a permanent place on their radar screens, where all flashing alarm lights properly belong.

For those who dislike Trump, the skin serves a practical purpose . . . the way the warning coloration of certain animals alert other animals not to eat them.

To those for whom Trump is positively relevant (“fascinating” in a good way), the situation is more paradoxical and complex . . . and in many ways more magical.

For this group, the skin is an emblem of reassurance as compared to the reactions prompted by the “establishment” candidates he is competing with. Those candidates (let’s say Sen. Marco Rubio, to pick one) are unsettling to people who are sensitized to the idea that “all politicians are phony” because, although they accept this reality, in Rubio’s case, they can’t precisely identify the ways in which he is “phony.” Rubio’s mask is “too good” . . . which is upsetting to people conditioned to believe that Rubio must be “just another politician.”

Trump’s skin, on the other hand, provides people with easy access to the seams and discontinuities between the “real Trump” and the skin-suit. Because it’s obvious and easy to see that Trump is inhabiting an exterior unreality, it paradoxically makes Trump more attractive and relevant to people whose primary goal is to affirm the fundamental duplicity of all political types.

In other words, Trump’s skin is a both a transparent and cynical communication to those who view him favorably. It is transparent ABOUT its cynicism. It says to people, “Yes, we’re all wearing masks and enacting a kind of deceptive theater when we talk to you . . . but my costume is less well constructed, you can see it’s a costume and therefore, I’m more ‘real’ than those other guys.”

It is paradoxical, because in a brand environment of believed falseness and duplicity, where people by default assume “all politicians (brands) are lying to me and will betray me,” Trump’s skin does two things at once. First, it serves paradoxically as camouflage, allowing him to blend in with the other political brands, even though politics is not his natural ecosystem . . . like certain poisonous toads blend in with a pile of leaves in the forest.

But secondly — a double-paradox — Trump’s skin is a camouflage that calls attention to itself as camouflage and therefore provides a basis of assurance and trust . . . as if he were a leaf in a pile of poisonous toads.

Trump and RelevancePart 10: Who’s Your Daddy?

“You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s six feet tall. She’s got the best body. — Trump on the Howard Stern show, 2003

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. . . Is that terrible? — Trump appearance on ABC’s The View 2006

“Yeah, [Ivanka] is really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father . . .” — Trump to Rolling Stone magazine, September 2015

 Um, yeah . . . So there’s that.

Trump periodically jokes about getting busy with his daughter. It is, on the one hand, par for the course. And Trump clearly enjoys trotting out that scandalous little tidbit every so often just to remind the world what a roguish little rapscallion he can be, apparently oblivious to the distinction between, say, jokes about screwing your friend’s wife (“oh, Donald, you’re SO bad”) and jokes about screwing your own child (“no, seriously, dude, that’s very bad”). In the audio and video from each of the times he’s said it, there’s that “not really . . . really” quality to the whole business.

What’s interesting here from the perspective of relevance is not that he says it. (I certainly don’t want to get into or care whether Trump does or doesn’t really want to um, “date” his own daughter.) At a minimum, it is unquestionably true that it is the the younger Ivanka (age 34) rather than his slightly older wife Melania (age 45) who is Trump’s campaign arm candy of choice.

But what’s most interesting is how the media through which he says these kinds of things process them and digest them into fabric of their various rules and formats.

On the View appearance of 2006, the ladies all clucked and tittered exactly as they would have if Trump had said he wanted to date one of them. Joy Behar pivoted to something about Woody Allen and smiled as if she had just thought of the cleverest thing in the world.

There’s a lot to be said about Trump’s iconography . . . from the micro details (skin, eyes, hair) to the bigger picture iconography (how he interacts with audiences, speech patterns, framing his life story). How does Trump assemble these pieces of his self-presentation, big things and little things, to enhance the likelihood a person will find him relevant in a given moment in time.

But it makes sense to start with this one very unusual piece of the Trump iconography — is it a theme? is it a meme? — the part where he jokes about sex with his daughter Ivanka.

On the face of it, what could be more guaranteed to alienate people of all kinds than this kind of distasteful kidding around. If, say, Chris Christie or John Kasich were to kid around about dating his daughter, they’d be toast.

Why does Trump get a pass? Or, even more astonishingly, why does this kind of shit seem to help Trump somehow?

Part of it must simply be this: if you define yourself, winkingly, jokingly as a person for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply, you desensitize your audience to the fact that you are consistently a person for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply. And, in an election cycle where the “ordinary rules” are precisely what’s on the table for discussion, people who want to sweep away the ordinary rules (rather, than, say reform them, improve them, retool them) . . . these people are going to be attracted to the guy for whom the ordinary rules don’t apply.

So that’s at least part of it. And Trump’s signal that he’s an ordinary-rules-don’t-apply-to-me guy have to be big enough to matter (he can say things like “my daughter has the best body”) but they also have to be re-domesticated in a way that make the rule breaking seem not so terribly bad after all.

As a result, from a relevance creation perspective, we are roped into an interesting double play. The first involves exploiting the relevance of outrageousness. This is a common Trump motif. The weirder the thing he says, the more people are keyed in to waiting with a kind of eager anticipation for the next weird thing he might say.

But the second part involves encouraging people to believe that the weird thing they were waiting for isn’t really so weird after all. Or at least is nothing more disruptive than an off-color joke. He accomplishes this by saying his weird things in forums and via media that are the most conventional he can find.

We live in the world Marshall McLuhan described and foretold, a world where “the medium is the message” . . . where, for example, The View provides the non-threatening guardrails within which any statement made on The View can be understood and contained.

So Trump can do a segment on The View and say anything, up to and including “In a slightly different world I might date my own daughter” and the outlandishness of the statement is buffered by the audiences confidence and certain knowledge that anything that happens on The View will fall within certain, carefully defined and non-disruptive parameters.

Anything said on The View is automatically contained within the set of utterances we know The View must contain and is defined in the viewer’s mind first in those terms.

As a relevance cultivation savant, Trump is, interestingly, doing several things at once.

• As we’ve seen, he’s signalling to his audience that he lives beyond the rules.

• Like an old elastic waistband he’s also stretching to the point of distortion what the rules might be (or at least making people question whether they’re just old fuddy-duddies for not thinking it’s cute that he talks about sleeping with his daughter).

• He’s re-domesticating his out-of-bounds thoughts and ideas by delivering them via the most conventional and declawed mainstream communications channels imaginable. Trump loves him some Barbara Walters interviews, some Live with Kelly and Michael, some Wendy Williams Show and so on.

• Then, finally, he is, by virtue of his own bizarre shamelessness, the only person in the world capable of occupying the new out-of-bounds field of play he has just created.

In other words, part of how Trump stays relevant is by being a reliable source of shit no one should ever say . . . then making people think, well, that’s kinda weird but not so bad. I wonder what he’s going to say next.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “It sprays the bronzer on its skin . . .”

Trump and RelevancePart 9: “I know nothing . . . Nothing!”

From 1965 to 1971, Americans were treated to the madcap goings-on inside a Nazi-era German POW camp. The CBS sitcom(?) Hogan’s Heroes featured a plucky band of Allied POWs who, every week, ran circles around the bumbling Colonel Klink and assorted Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht and Gestapo soldiers from inside Stalag 13, the wackiest Nazi prison camp ever.

But no member of the Hogan’s Heroes cast was more lovable than the rotund Sergeant Schultz, whose catchphrase was “I know nothing . . . nothing.”

It never failed to get a laugh, by which I mean they turned the laugh track all the way up every time he said it.

For those of us not old enough to remember, Sergeant Schultz’s MO was to turn a blind eye to the secret doings of the prisoners who were, during every episode, fighting the Nazis from inside the camp, having made it, essentially an underground base from which to execute Allied sabotage operations against the Germans.

In radio promotions during the first season, they used the tagline, “If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes!”

But back to Schultz.

Sergeant Schultz was a man in a bind. He had a job he didn’t want. (Interesting Hogan’s Heroes trivia: Schultz was a professional toymaker before the war. He was, in appearance and occupation, just like Santa if he were a lovable Nazi prison guard!) He saw things that demonstrated he was doing a bad job. And he knew it was hopeless to try to get Hogan’s men back under control.

And so, Schultz’s perspective shifted from efforts to rebuild his control over the barracks to seeking simply to hide and survive the recriminations that would inevitably follow if they were to become known to Colonel Klink and the military higher-ups.

He “knows nothing . . . nothing” because, according to his inner calculation, he looks less incompetent if he’s tricked than if he’s passive. If he’s just a boob, he’s less likely to face a firing squad or get “sent to the Russian front” (the show’s ultimate punishment for German characters) than if he is actively allowing Hogan and the boys to continue their sabotaging ways. Or, God forbid, secretly on the side of the good guys.

Turning a blind eye to trouble is related to (but not identical to) the act of screening out irrelevant noise. The relevance spam filter we each deploy is our customized algorithm for coping with the barrage of unwanted information the world is throwing at us — allowing to pass through only those with something useful to share with us.

The Sergeant Schultz filter is a little different. In this case, something you wish weren’t true gets through (“The enemy is digging tunnels from inside my stalag”) and you position yourself in relation to this unwished for information.

Trump rhetoric capitalizes on the Sergeant Schultz filter phenomenon perfectly.

For a portion of the electorate that has been conditioned consciously or unconsciously to respond to reality by turning a blind eye (“I know nothing . . . nothing”), the candidate will win who most thoroughly and completely honors that foundational fiction. The candidate or brand will lose that tells people “You’re ignoring something that’s right in front of your nose.”

This portion of the electorate has already adopted a point of view that says, “There are tunnels under this POW camp? I don’t see any tunnels. And I would know. I’m the prison guard.”

The irrelevant candidate tells them they are idiots or traitors for not seeing.

Trump says you’re absolutely right. He channels their sustaining fiction, helps them deflect accountability in precisely the way they are trying to do themselves, in a sense gives them the microphone and then broadcasts their weak fiction until it becomes something that passes for fact by dint of repetition and groupthink.

The other members of the Republican field come close but they mess up the message in the end. They say, “On the whole, you’re right. I agree with you. But there are some nuances and intricacies I have expertise in by virtue of my experiences that can help shape your ideas into something that will work for the country. Let me add a little of my own value to your righteous anger, not to correct it, but to make it workable in the long run.”

It’s that little bit of promised “added value” that gets those messages stuck in people’s “blah, blah, blah” filters and ultimately make those candidates irrelevant.

Trump gets through the filters by saying, “You see nothing . . . Nothing. You couldn’t have known. You’ve done your best, sergeant. It’s not your fault.”

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Who’s Your Daddy?

Trump and Relevance(Part 8: Of Dog Whistles and Dread)

Observers have said Trump (and many in this year’s Presidential field) are exploiting voter fear to establish their campaign brands. But I think that’s not exactly right.

Fear is what you feel when you’re hiking in the woods and a bear appears in your path. Fear is that animal-level, fight or flight response.

What this year’s candidates are exploiting is not fear, but dread . . . Dread is the feeling you get when you’re hiking in the woods and you realize you’ve lost the trail and have absolutely no idea how to get back home. All animals can feel fear, but only a human being can feel dread.

The answer to fear is practical and immediate: to fight or flee. The relevant pieces of information are answers to questions like, “Am I stronger than this bear?” or “Am I faster?” or “Can the bear climb a tree better than I can?” The relevant information is about what you can do to solve the problem you’re suddenly in.

The answer to dread, on the other hand, is often magical thinking . . . It’s putting yourself into the hands of a power outside your own control. The relevant pieces of information are answers to questions like, “Is there a secret word I can say that will transport me back to my campsite?” or “Will the ring in my pocket make me invisible?”

As ham-fisted as it may be, Trump’s quasi-magical bluster is dread-relevant, not fear-relevant. It promises easy answers for which the mechanics are not just simplistic and invisible . . . but non-existent. In fact, for Trump to even suggest there are mechanics would be to break the spell.

As a result, we get gems like these:

On getting Mexico to pay for a border wall: ”I would do something very severe unless they contributed or gave us the money to build the wall. I’d build it; I’d build it very nicely. I’m very good at building things.”

On how to pay to put Social Security on sound financial footing: ”Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.”

On how to defeat ISIS: ”They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. . . . I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them, but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”

On dealing with Mexican drug kingpin, “El Chapo” Guzman (Tweeting about himself in the third person): ”Can you envision Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton negotiating with ‘El Chapo’, the Mexican drug lord who escaped from prison? Trump, however, would kick his ass!”

On what to do with Obamacare: ”Repeal and replace with something terrific.”

Or consider this bizarre exchange from the second Republican Presidential debate with CNN's Jake Tapper on how to control the actions of Russia in Syria:

Tapper: Russia is sending troops and tanks to pop up Bashar al-Assad. Russia represents the greatest threat to national security. Mr. Trump you said you’ll get along well with Putin. What would you do now if you were president to get the Russians out of Syria?

Trump: Number one, they have to respect you. He has absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero. Syria is a mess. Look at what is going on with ISIS and think we’re fighting ISIS. ISIS wants to fight Syria. Why are we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other. I would talk to them, get along with him. I believe and I may be wrong in which case I’d probably have to take a different path but I’d get along with a lot of the world leaders this country is not getting along with. We don’t get along with China, the heads of Mexico. We can’t get along with anybody and yet, at the same time, they rip us left and right. They take advantage of us economically and every other way. We get along with nobody. I will get along, I think, with Putin, and I will get along with others and we will have a much more stable, stable world.

Tapper: So just to clarify, the only answer I heard to the question I asked is that you would reach out to Vladimir Putin and you would do what?

Trump: I believe that I will get along, we will do between that, Ukraine, all of the other problems, we won’t have the kind of problems that our country has now with Russia and many other nations.

To people experiencing dread he is heard to say “Yes, there is a magical solution.” To others, his answers to the challenges we face as a country sound like ridiculous, weirdly circular, unsubstantiated and, most of all, impractical cliches.

If you’re hopelessly lost, the promise of a magic ring may start to sound appealing. If you’re face to face with a bear in the woods, it can only sound like an idiotic, empty waste of time . . . and a dangerous distraction from the immediately important fur-bearing matter at hand.

The promise of magical answers is such a standard part of the grammar of brand communications that it occupies a special place in the marketing vocabulary. So we have more than 17,000 registered products and trademarks in the U.S. that play on the words “magic,” “wizardry” and so on.

But the promise of magic is only relevant to an audience if they are receptive to the idea it might work . . . either as a shortcut answer to the problem of dread or as an answer to dread’s less ominous cousins, the desire for beauty, wealth, leisure, status and so on.

“Can you hear me now?”

Many have said  — most notably Jeb(!) Bush — that Trump is practicing “dog whistle politics.” As a reminder, dog whistle politics is the subtle art of saying things a responsible politician “shouldn’t say” by using a coded language that only his or her constituency can hear.

As a result, dog whistles are intensely relevant to their targets but are easily ignored or filtered out by others. In fact, they’re only working well as dog whistles if they are filtered out as innocuous background noise by those who are not the target.

So, for instance, when in 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi to talk about “states rights,” . . . he was “dog whistling” his support for his white constituency’s resentment and opposition to civil rights. Both the site of the speech — close to the location of the ruthless 1964 murder of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner — and the coded language of “states rights” that had been used since before the Civil War to signal opposition to racial reform — were the candidate’s way of signalling to his audience the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say outright.

But dog whistles are tricky things. When they’re working the way they should, the people who can hear the whistle hear a message that the rest of us can’t hear. In that sense, they represent a kind of sleight of hand that can be interpreted either as duplicity or as a kind of magic, in their own right . . . depending on how you look at them.

They are duplicitous because they are a way of saying two things at once. But they are also magical because they allow a candidate (or any brand) to be in two places at once. To the people who can hear the whistle, they say, “I’m with you.” To the people who can’t hear it, they say, “I’m with you (or at least not against you).”

But, say what you want about Trump, there doesn’t seem to be much dog whistling in what he has to say. He’s not hiding his “real views” beneath a secret code only his target audience can hear.

Rather (as others have observed) he is the Republican party id unleashed. If he wants to say someone is ugly, disgusting or dangerous, he doesn’t say it in code. He just says it. His play for relevance isn’t a sneak attack.

Trump is full-frontal.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “I Know Nothing . . . Nothing”

Trump and Relevance(Part 7: “Little pig, little pig, let me come in”)

In an era where consumers, voters and other audiences have much more control over the messages that come into (or are blocked out of) their lives, brands, people and their advisors (including their agencies) must do a better job of understanding the factors that are most likely to add up to relevance.

Companies, governments, organizations, educators, employers, political candidates and every other kind of “content creator” in the world spend literally trillions of dollars every year to reach people who are, by and large, actively screening out what they have to say.

Like the smartest of the three little pigs, we have all built our houses out of increasingly impenetrable bricks, specifically to keep out the Big Bad Wolf of irrelevant, unwanted messages and content that, in turn, are being huffed and puffed louder and harder to blow our houses down by the brands that want to get in.

Yet it’s unusual for communicators and marketers to measure the likelihood of a message, idea or brand getting through an audience’s filter. Typically, brand or political message- or concept-testing jump right to the question of how audiences respond after a brand or idea has broken through. This is a bias embedded in almost all quantitative testing, focus groups, shopper marketing and other forms of market research.

But this is the wrong first question to ask. This is asking the question, “What would happen if the wolf got in?” Everyone knows what happens when the wolf gets in. It often comes honey glazed and spiral-sliced.

Even if the unwanted message isn’t deadly, it is, at best, clogging up our field of vision, making life a tangled mess of clutter that prevents us from living our best lives. That’s why we create ways to avoid and ignore them: spam filters, TiVo, caller ID, web ad blockers. These are our houses made of brick.

So, if you’re a wolf, the best first question isn’t what happens when the you get in, but how do you get in at all? Why do some brands (or candidates) succeed at capturing public attention while others fade into white noise? What specifically makes some brands more relevant than others?

Even today, too many campaigns take a Three Little Pigs approach to the task of trying to get to audiences by trying to bash down their front doors with saturation marketing of various kinds: TV ads are the most well-known example, but don’t forget about the massive amounts of telemarketing, direct mail and email marketing that hit you every day.

That approach has inevitably led to people building more impenetrable doors and brick houses and a more adversarial attitude toward marketing of all kinds. Being relevant, on the other hand, is like having a house key entrusted to you by your stakeholders.

Or, to use the object lesson at hand, how has The Donald been able to huff and puff and blow our collective houses down (no matter what we think of him) while, say, Jeb(!) Bush has not . . . despite that exclamation point? And, when I say “us,” I mean all of us, liberals and moderates as well as the brand of angry conservatives who are telling us they want him in the house, who have given him the key.

About 30 to 40 percent of the Republican electorate have given Trump their house keys, apparently because they believe he “is unfiltered,” because he “tells it like it is” and “speaks his mind” . . . because he “isn’t afraid to say what everyone is thinking” and so on. They want him in the house.

But many of the rest of us (myself included, obviously) have given him our keys, too. He gets into our ordinarily sturdy brick houses because we believe he is something in between a “outrageous carnival freakshow” and a “possibly dangerous demagogue who must be stopped.” We may not want him in the house, but we think it’s important to let him in so we can keep an eye on him.

In either case, whether we think he’s “demolishing the phony facade of political business-as-usual” or just a trainwreck, almost no one seems to be able to look away. And he’s accomplishing this not by forcing his way uninvited into our field of vision (in the way mass advertising does), but by making himself easy to find when we are searching for him.

For Trump lovers, this ubiquity is a shortcut to organizing our complicated and chaotic thoughts about what we’re thinking and feeling about politics-as-usual. They are searching for an emblem to embody that frustration . . . and Trump’s reward for being that emblem is his relevance to this group.

But for those of us who are not Trump lovers, it’s the same basic mechanism. We, too, are looking for an emblem to serve as a shortcut for all the messy, complicated and sometimes contradictory things we’re seeing and feeling. Trump’s relevance to us is simply the other side of the same coin, a shortcut telling us not what to embrace but what to avoid.

But relevance doesn’t care about embracing or avoiding. Relevance only cares about whether you’re paying attention.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Of dog whistles and dread

Trump and Relevance(Part 6: Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam)

Relevance always sprouts from a foundation of comfort, trust, familiarity and confidence. It doesn't have to be confidence that a person or brand is good. It can be confidence that he, she or it is a jerk. But it's impossible to be relevant without it.

In order to be relevant to me, you must first have to occupy a space. 

In the world of mass advertising, occupying a space is often confused with a “saturation bombing” approach to entering the public’s mind . . . saturation not only in terms of the number of exposures, but also the intrusiveness, visual stimulus, loudness and overall invasiveness of the creative.

But that’s dumb.

In the relevance game, the strategy is not to out-shout the person shouting the loudest. That only leads to people raising their shields and spam filters, eliminating all unwanted noise.

Depending on which study you consult, the average adult in any industrial or post-industrial society is exposed to between one million and seven million communications messages every year: marketing messages, political messages, images, instructions, warnings, temptations, diversions, entertainments.

The vast majority are delivered without our advance permission.

Faced with this unimaginable flood of communications seeking our attention and engagement, we would each be driven quickly insane if we had not all developed the most important skill modern survival skill: the ability to block and ignore the ones offering us nothing we care about. Conversely, we each have an almost instinctive system for allowing in the tiny fraction promising something meaningful, useful, helpful or delightful.

This is our great neurological spam filter, deleting irritating messages without being seen. We block the irrelevant and let the relevant ones pass through.

As everyone with an inbox knows, the most ingenious and unethical spammers have devised tricks to circumvent the filters and get through. When it arrives in your field of vision, you still know the message spam, of course, but it forces you to spend the three seconds (or whatever) to think about it and delete it.

Or maybe it contains a virus that will destroy your laptop. Or maybe, in a few cases, it contains a message you’ve been desperately longing to hear . . . like a Nigerian prince wants your help in getting his inheritance and is willing to pay you handsomely for your services, or maybe:

We’re going to take money back from other countries that are killing us or

We’re going to make Mexico pay for a wall or

 The President’s birth certificate is a fake or

Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated on 9/11 or

It’s fun to ridicule the disabilities of people you disagree with or

We shouldn’t let any more Muslims in or

It’s disgusting when women go to the bathroom

Or . . . or . . . or . . . 

For most of us (thankfully), this is just spam that got through. It’s an annoyance. When it happens too frequently, it’s a problem. When it seems to threaten to destroy your laptop or hack into your bank account, it’s a crisis and you need find a way to eradicate it. These are the various echelons of relevance it may achieve within your field of vision.

But for some of us (at the moment, it appears to be one-third of one-half of us), it’s not spam after all. It’s exactly the message we’ve been waiting so long to hear, a signal of intense relevance and meaning, to be absorbed, amplified and rebroadcast, not removed. For those of us in this group, it turns out the spam filter wasn’t inside us screening out the irrelevant pollution. It turns out it was outside us, preventing “the real truth” from getting through.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “Little pig, little pig, let me come in”

Trump and Relevance(Part 5: The Long Con)

So why not just out-Donald The Donald?

Because you can’t.

Let’s look at the field and imagine if they tried.

In our hypothetical thought experiment, let’s take a minor corner of Trump’s pastiche of strange, vague, always-aggro ideas. This is from his 60 Minutes interview last September with Scott Pelley of CBS News:

Pelley: In your book, “The America We Deserve” you proposed raising the social security retirement age to 70. Is that still your plan?

Trump: Yeah, not anymore because now what I want to do is take money back from other countries that are killing us and I want to save social security. And we’re going to save it without increases. We’re not going to raise the age and it will be just fine.

Pelley: How are you going to do that? It is a basket case.

Trump: Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.

Pelley: You know, the heart of all of your plans seems to be we’re going to be rich.

Trump: We are going to do great. As a country we are going to do great.

In the catalog of Trump nonsense, this is relatively innocuous, mostly devoid of offensive personal or racist attacks (although he gets close by advocating “taking back money from other countries that are killing us.”)

Now imagine (for example) Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — or any other human person — offering up the same pile of garbage. It’s not that they wouldn’t or don’t try. It’s rather that they haven’t laid the foundation for the context of relevance that would allow that kind of gambit to get off the ground.

Senators Paul or Rubio might say it, but could never get away with it. The minds of even viewers predisposed to believe would grope to find the foundation from which the statement would make sense.

Remember, relevance is comfort plus surprise.

Pick a Card, Any Card

Think of it as a card trick. When the magician shows you the ten of diamonds in the sealed envelope in his pocket, it is irrelevant — in fact, it’s not a trick at all — unless you KNOW you just put the ten of diamonds in YOUR pocket a few seconds ago. That’s your comfortable foundation of assumed truth. The trick becomes hyper-relevant when you look in your pocket and find not another ten of diamonds but, somehow, a card with the name of your childhood cat written on it instead.

That’s when you know it’s magic. Rubio or Paul might show you what’s in the sealed envelope, but by itself, it can’t matter without the full context of the trick.

Look at the faux Louis XV chairs, the marble floors and the opulent gold decor. They are stylistic cousins of The Apprentice boardroom, a place where things happen arbitrarily by fiat. They bring the viewer back to a place where Trump is called upon not to explain, but declare. The décor is a superficial but essential part of the communication.

That décor and the many other elements of Trump’s personal presentation style are the ten of diamonds in YOUR pocket. You just know this is the way things are (i.e., this is “just the way he is.”) You may love it (one-third of Republican voters say they do) or hate it (virtually all the rest of us), but almost all of us just accept it as a long-established reality.

Trump’s foundation of relevance — the context within which he is understood and has developed permission to play — has been prepared and sculpted for more than a generation. 

Trump’s relevance has been cultivated over years, just like the water hyacinth’s evolutionary advantages have been created by eons of natural selection. Trump’s immunity against punishment for outlandishness derives from decades of behavior that has desensitized people to outlandishness from him. His immunity to accusations of ignorance or narcissism derives from decades of people accepting Trump as an ignorant narcissist. It’s in his DNA and people accept it (even, or perhaps especially, Trump haters) as a natural state of affairs.

A card trick is a cute, clever “short con” and it’s fun and no one gets hurt. But it operates by the same rules as Trump’s deeply destructive “long con.” The first rule of any con, long or short, is that the person being conned (the “mark”) wants it to be true.

We want the ten of diamonds to be somewhere other than where we thought we put it. And, for some of us, we want it to be relevant when a cartoon billionaire says we will fix social security “Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.”

Some of us (one-third of one-half of us) want it to be relevant because it’s authentic magic. The rest of us accept it as relevant because it’s dangerous deception that must be exposed and purged for the good of us all.

People think Trump is relevant because he offers simple answers to complex issues and problems and people are too dumb to realize how shallow these answers are. But that’s only part off the story. That’s the card in the envelope at the end of the trick. If simple stupid answers were the only thing required, other candidates offering equally shallow simple answers (the Rubios and Rand Pauls and others) could simply mimic Trump. And they often try.

It’s not just that the answers are ridiculously simple. In fact, they’re less than simple, they’re just restatements of an unevidenced promise. (Q. How are you going to fix social security? A. Through capability.) 

Rather, it’s that Trump has made them relevant to a small but significant constituency by re-rooting them in a context (his own mythology, his own brand), that this constituency accepts as comfortably true. That’s the card in your pocket . . . or, rather, the card you THINK is in your pocket.

The long con does not involve going to someone’s house and saying “give me all your money . . . trust me, you won’t regret it.” That’s just robbery. The long con involves going to someones house and saying, “Hi, remember me, I made some money awhile back on an insider stock tip. If you give me all your money now, I’ll do the same for you.”

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam

Trump and Relevance(Part 4: Invasive Species)

The water hyacinth (eichhornia crassipies) is native to the Amazon and has a habit of completely covering the surface of bodies of water, pushing out native species, clogging boat engines, and literally sucking all of the oxygen out of the water it roots in, killing all fish, water creatures and other plants in the area. In Papua New Guinea, it has indirectly caused many deaths by cutting off boat travel along the Sepik River – snakebite victims that could not reach the hospital, farmers who starved since they could not reach their markets or gardens, and malaria victims infected by mosquitos breeding in the slowed water.

Water hyacinths were introduced to North America at the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans by a group of Japanese visitors who gave plants out as gifts. The problem became so bad that an organization called The New Foods Society pushed for a bill in Congress to import hippos from Africa and release them into the swamps of Louisiana to eat the plant. The measure fell short by one vote.

The water hyacinth is the Donald Trump of plants. Trump is the water hyacinth of political candidates.

You can see what I’m getting at here. The water hyacinth is adapted for one environment, the Amazon. In a different environment, it becomes hyper-relevant, sucking the oxygen out of the ecosystem and choking the ability of the native species (including humans) to thrive.

Water hyacinths make every other plant in the pond irrelevant in the same way a massive traffic accident that shuts down the interstate makes every other car on the road irrelevant.

So it is with The Donald.

Only the longest of long cons can explain how Trump’s series of offensive and outlandish statements this Presidential election season seem to have increased, rather than torpedoed, his support. As a refresher, here are the most headline-grabbing Trump moments this year:

• Trump asserts undocumented Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

• Trump attacks and insults Sen. John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

• Trump suggests uncomfortable questioning from FOX News moderator Megyn Kelly during the first Republican debate — a question specifically related to his treatment of women — was the result of menstrual moodiness: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes . . . blood coming out of her wherever.”

• Trump insults fellow candidate Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”

• Trump falsely asserts that “thousands” of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001 following the collapse of the World Trade Center, a position he continues to hold despite categorical proof it never happened.

• Trump publicly mocks the physical disability of a reporter by offensively pantomiming the fitful muscular difficulties that are the symptoms of his condition.

• Trump indicates his support for the development of databases that record and monitor Muslims in the U.S. and considers that mosques should be “shut down.”

• Trump calls for a religious test against Muslims for permission to enter the U.S. for any reason.

I know I’m badly mixing metaphors, but in all cases, Trump is using the hyper-relevance of his trainwreck of an identity (carefully cultivated over decades) to suck the life out of the pond.

So why can’t anyone just be a water hyacinth? Why can’t anyone just trainwreck their way to success? It’s because within the dynamics of relevance, you have to operate from a foundation where, first, you are “in the pond.” Donald Trump has been accepted as a comfortable presence in our pond — by which I mean our living rooms — for more than 30 years.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Long Con

Trump and Relevance(Part 3: What is relevance, anyway?)

When you ask someone to define “relevance,” you often get one of those Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart answers. Famously, when asked in 1964 to define “obscenity,” Justice Stewart responded “I know it when I see it.” So it often is when someone is asked to define relevance.

But relevance can be defined. And even measured. Relevance is about the willingness of people to pay attention. To be curious about you . . . even if their curiosity is essentially pointing in the direction of their rejection, hate or disgust. Relevance is the quality of a person, organization or thing that makes it irresistible to look away from it. Relevance is what draws you in, sometimes to support, sometimes to rebuke.

A car peacefully passing you on the highway is almost completely irrelevant. A car weaving in and out of traffic to pass you is more relevant. A car exploding in flames into another car (maybe even your own) is intensely relevant. The peaceful passer is the good driver. But the reckless driver or crasher is the relevant driver.

The thing about the crasher, however, is that he changes the rules for everyone on the road until the crash can be cleared away. He causes traffic to stop. He changes the ETA to your destination. He makes it impossible for anyone else on the road to approach the same level of relevance he has.

How do you spell relief?

It’s useful, perhaps, to think about where the word “relevance” comes from. We all know that it means something like “the condition of being connected with the matter at hand.” A relevant thing is a thing that matters in the moment. When you are tracking an escaped prisoner whom you know has fled on horseback, the hoof prints of a horse are relevant. The paw prints of a dog, less so.

In information science, relevance is a measure of how closely a given object (file, web page, database record, etc.) matches a user's search for information. If you want to find a great steakhouse to go to for dinner, a positive online review by a respected food critic is perhaps more relevant to you than a restaurant’s website declaring itself “world’s greatest steaks” . . . for obvious reasons.

But the word “relevance” has ancient and important roots in Latin that do not simply mean the quality of being “on point” to the matter at hand.

Rather, the word comes to us from the Latin word relevare meaning “to raise” or “to lift up.” Our word “relevance” is a cousin of the words “relief” and “relieve” . . . In that sense, something that is “relevant” relieves us of anxiety, fear, pain or doubt by helping us lift the burden of deciding what to think or do.

A relevant thing says to us something like this: “Of all the things you might pay attention to in your quest to make a good decision, pay attention to me. I will give you the most beneficial guidance and provide the most relief from doubt for the least amount of your expended mental effort.”

That guidance may be affirmative (follow the hoof prints of this horse). But it may also be negative (avoid that guy weaving in and out of traffic). It may be guidance about what to do or think. But it may also be guidance about what not to do or think.

Relevance is not always about love or admiration (although it can sometimes be). Relevance is about what to pay attention to.

And today, Donald Trump (God help us) is intensely relevant.

For the approximately one-third of Republican voters in his camp, he is relevant because he is “saying things other politicians are too afraid to say.” He is “telling it like it is.” He is avoiding the mush-mouthed equivocation of “political correctness.”

For much of the rest of the US electorate (and, by all indications, most people around the world), Trump is relevant because he is the dangerous crazy driver that we, as drivers presumably trying to drive sanely and safely, would be foolish to ignore. This accounts for the phenomenon that even among dyed-in-the-wool progressives in the media (I’m looking at you, Rachael Maddow), the Trump sideshow is grabbing as big a slice of the attention pie as he is in conservative circles.

It's catnip. It's crack. It's the perverse but irresistible appeal of rubbernecking. Choose your reflex or addiction metaphor or choice, we're all hard wired to pay attention. We're all vulnerable to the ways Trump provides us with lessons and guidance . . . And perhaps that applies most of all to those of us who find him a despicable lesson in what to avoid.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Invasive Species

Trump and Relevance(Part 2: “You’re fired”)

A brand is “relevant” to its audience when it delivers two important things at once: comfort and surprise.

In the Republican Presidential contest, Jeb(!) Bush has begun calling Donald Trump a “chaos candidate.” But, in a sense, Bush is missing the point because “chaos” (i.e., the “surprise” part of the relevance equation) is only half of the formula. Jeb(!) is forgetting the comfort part.

Among the many examples of Trump brand and business absurdities that have appeared over the past 30 years, there have of course been successes. And the biggest success of all, from a brand relevance perspective, is unquestionably Trump’s 14 years as host and co-producer of NBC’s “The Apprentice” (and later the equally successful “Celebrity Apprentice.”)

The premise of “The Apprentice” is the essence of the Trump meme brought to life. It includes every element that The Donald is currently developing in this year’s Presidential conversation. Trump is unquestionably “The Boss” . . . making decisions by fiat at the end of each episode as contestants scramble in deference to that authority to win his approval.

If you achieve his approval, you are a “winner” . . . or a “good person.” If you fail to win his approval, you may be treated either decently or harshly, but you are a “loser.” In the Apprentice, you are, by definition, a loser if Trump says you are.

In his decisions, Trump is tough, no-nonsense and ruthless, but, in the end, nothing more than a contestant’s feelings get hurt. The storyline of every Apprentice episode is the story of a well-functioning, get-things-done relationship between a man who can make things happen by fiat and a team of contestants who compete tirelessly to anticipate his wishes and fulfill them.

It presents Trump as both vigorously powerful in judging performance and, while all contestants but one ultimately have to face Trump telling them “You’re fired,” the show gives us a Trump who is essentially non-threatening. He’s non-threatening first because all involved (including the viewer) realize this is a game; but more importantly, he is non-threatening because no action Trump may take on the show can disrupt the fundamental simplicity of the narrative.

The basic story re-enacts an essentially soft-focus version of the story many viewers need to be true . . . of working for a tough-but-smart, but often unpredictable autocrat, within a system that rewards the performers judged by that autocrat to be the best in ways that are often invisible to the average person, in a world where most people are weeded out from receiving the ultimate prize.

The Apprentice told us this was all ok. If we ever expressed discomfort with the arbitrariness or potential unfairness of Trump’s judgement, it reminded us that “this is just a game, just an entertainment.” But if we wanted to draw conclusions about the game being a helpful guideline for what to think in and about real life, the Apprentice and Trump told us that was ok, too.

The voted-off-the-island format was not invented by The Apprentice, of course. Survivor and The Bachelor pioneered the trope. But The Apprentice was the first to migrate it toward the unilateral judgement and decision of an autocrat. Survivor is an exercise in democracy (flawed by “alliances” but still based on “votes”). The Bachelor/Bachelorette is the narrative of a competition for winning someone’s heart (where each of us is allowed to be his or her own autocrat anyway).

But the repetitive structure of the narrative may not be as important as the fact that the face of this story, organized behind the face of Trump, came into the homes of millions of Americans regularly for more than a decade. Even if we didn’t watch, we all know how it works.

In other words, we are all tacitly ok with what’s going on here. The Apprentice gives us the repetitive experience of a domesticated form of autocracy, where we little by little learn to accept that, while Trump may be a tyrant, he’s the kind of tyrant we can be comfortable with . . . he’s the kind of tyrant who “tells it like it is” and “gets things done” and “doesn’t fall for ‘spin’ or equivocation and “is focused on results,” all while we the viewers can sit peacefully in front of the TV and experience no distress related to Trump’s behavior.

The result: Unlike any of the other 2016 Presidential candidates, Trump is as familiar to us as the blowhard uncle or nutty aunt at Thanksgiving. He is part of the family. You can love him or hate him, but you can’t help talking about him. You just can’t. If you think you can, you’re not being honest with yourself.

If relevance is comfort plus surprise, it’s worth remembering that neither “comfort” nor “surprise” always mean delight. When comfort is bad we call it “resignation.” When surprise is “bad” we call it, following Jeb(!) “chaos.” Comfort without surprise is invisible. Surprise without some foundation of comfort is unprocessable noise and typically filtered out.

Over decades, the Trump phenomenon has created the perfect admixture of comfort/resignation and surprise/chaos in a way that no other Republican candidate can begin to match.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: What is relevance, anyway?

Donald Trump as Relevance Object Lesson(Part 1: Trump — The Game)

In 1988, Donald Trump licensed his name and likeness to a board game called (not surprisingly), “Trump: The Game.”

Among the menagerie of Trump brand extensions, the game was small potatoes, lasting a few years, then relaunched in 2005 and ultimately abandoned, as most Trump licensing ventures ultimately are.

In addition to the board game, there are (among many others) Trump University (failed under a cloud of scandal 2011), Trump Vodka (discontinued in 2011), Trump Ice bottled water (discontinued in 2010), Trump Magazine (closed in 2009), Trump Steaks (date of death unknown), Trump Mortgage (shuttered in 2007), Trump Tower Tampa (bankrupt in 2007), GoTrump.com, a search engine for luxury deals (closed in 2007), Trump Airlines (closed in 1992), Trump Entertainment Resorts (four bankruptcies since 1991) and Trump’s first high-profile failed venture, the New Jersey Generals of the defunct USFL (failed in 1985).

What’s remarkable about these failed business ventures and licensing gambits is not their quality or longevity, but their sheer number. They speak to the temperament of a man who knows how to lose . . . or rather who knows how losing contributes to winning in certain environments and under certain circumstances.

As with all kinds of winning in all areas of endeavor, effective “winning” means controlling the definition of the things that constitute winning.

If you’re playing a game where winning is measured in dollars or units sold, clearly “Trump: The Game” or “Trump Steaks” is a loser. If you’re playing a game where winning is measured in love or passion, it’s not much better.

But if you’re playing a game where winning is measured in your audience’s appetite for paying attention to you (for good or for bad), Trump’s brand extensions begin to add up over time.

This is the relevance game.

And for Trump’s history of creating garbage of various kinds, it is obviously true that Donald Trump is worth multiple billions of dollars (although the exact tally is in some dispute). This means (a) not everybody agrees with me about the definition of “garbage” . . . and (b) among the many stinkers, there have been financial and brand-building winners for Trump, perhaps none more important for Trump’s relevance during his current Presidential gambit than his 14-year run on NBC as co-producer and star of “The Apprentice.”

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “You’re fired”