News Reporter: Act Four: Why I'm covering Donald Trump as if he's fictional

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

President Trump listens during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the June 12 chat here and submit questions for the July 19 chat here.

We got through most readers’ questions in a zippy fashion on Monday, but there was a bit of a debate among the chatters that I wanted to take some time to address here. One reader expressed some consternation over a new recurring post I’m writing, recaps of what we’re calling “The Trump Show.” The concern was that I’m treating a real presidential administration, which is making policies that have impacts that range from substantial to grave, like it wasn’t real.

There were two impulses for that initial post, and for the ones that will follow it. The first is that many, many people have said over the past year or so that developments in American politics make them feel like they’re living in fiction, complete with wild plot twists, heavy-handed ironies and character names so blunt that it’s hard to believe they’re actually real. The second is that the Trump administration appears to make decisions with an eye to how they’ll play in the media or how fictional narratives work. Trump has been behaving like a character for so long that he doesn’t make the same calculations that career politicians do. That was the basis of his appeal for some of his supporters, but it has left a lot of other Americans grappling with feelings that politics don’t always generate.

Thus, my goal with these recaps isn’t to say this is all a joke. Instead, it’s to come at the Trump administration from a new angle and hopefully understand more about why this era in politics is making us feel and act the way we do. Maybe the best reference point for Trump isn’t Nixon but Tony Soprano. Maybe the debates we’re having aren’t really about a presidential administration but about an anti-hero drama. If that first installment felt frivolous to you, I’m trying to understand the frivolity with which the Trump administration has approached this whole undertaking. Understanding the extent to which the president is running his administration like a television show isn’t an attempt to be frivolous. It’s an effort to explain just what it means to live through such a thing.