That 80s Show

His gold toilet may be our silver lining

First, a little background. #1:

[White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan] Scavino, 50, posted what appears to be an AI-generated video showing him popping champagne with what seems to be his second wife, Erin Elmore, and the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump. The video is set to the tune of Pitbull’s hit song “Don’t Stop the Party.”

In the caption of the video, he wrote, “This is not an intended for the Dems heads to explode—Being some of the post State Dinner party has gotten out, I felt inclined to share mine as well, in complete transparency, with the American People. GOD BLESS THE USA!!!♥️🤍💙🇺🇸🦅🚀”

Scavino is referring to posts that portray Trump’s luxe dinner with Chinese President Xi as insensitive at a time when consumers are experiencing high prices.

#2:

The Trump administration is using public dollars to pay for a television ad that features President Donald Trump urging Americans to “defeat communism,” while touting his economic record and personal resilience, as a choir in the background recites the verse “Love me.”

A White House official confirmed the ad, which reads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end, was produced by the administration and funded with federal dollars. It appears to mark an extraordinary breach of White House practice under previous presidents separating public funding from political advertising.

We’re used to talking about the Trump administration’s public relations as some kind of magic jiu-jitsu that inevitably confounds opponents.

This was thought to have misfired in 2020, because of COVID and BLM, but to have been reinvigorated in 2024 in what people like Jonah Goldberg called a “vibe shift” that exponentiated Trump’s tiny victory margin into a mandate that swept away the moral arguments of liberal fuddy-daddies.

Accordingly to this reading, Trump et alia do outrageous things, like celebrating their wealth and power and posting cruel, brutal imagery about their opponents, and it’s not an outrage but rather a brilliant application of the vibeshift against gloopy oldsters who find it offensive — like Ke$ha making her mom drop the pancakes with her deshabille.

Yeah, I know that’s a dated reference. Which is partly the point. And, I hope, a good omen for the midterms.

Let’s fast forward to what actual pop-cult mishegas we have in 2026. No one’s titillating the teens by coming to the breakfast table hungover, or spraying champagne at the White House.

Sydney Sweeney’s naked sports gambling ad is supposed to be a big PR win for rightwingers — haw haw, liberals don’t like tits! So is that stupid lesbian masking bar story. But no one who isn’t a conservative columnist or a centrist columnist (but I repeat myself) really cares.

What does have some actual non-editorial-employees heated is Ed Sheeran kicking Macklemore off his tour at the behest of evil billionaire creep Robert Kraft because he opposed the genocide in Gaza. And on that one your average punter is more inclined to side with Macklemore — not to mention the many other artists who are supporting Palestinians (including his former support acts).

MAGA can’t even get Bill Burr to cape for them anymore (here, enjoy the Washington Examiner crying about it).

Once upon a time Trump’s boorish anti-politics could be stretched to connect with Americans’ anti-authoritarian streak; he was sort of a malevolent Adam Sandler character, acting stupid and crude but giving his fans a big cheer at the end. And I have no doubt some of his boomer adherents still think he’s sticking it to The Man. But after a year and a half of his second term rampage, for most people the act has worn thin.

Now you might look at what Trump and his crew are using to represent him and wonder: Why can’t they just update it? After all, the foundation of all MAGA is that nothing is real and image is everything — it should be the easiest thing in the world to tweak the act to make it palatable to current audiences, if not convincing. (Using a 2012 Pitbull tune doesn’t do it.)

First of all, as I’ve written, Trump doesn’t really care what people think anymore. Rather, he believes that anything he wants to happen will happen. So the affection of the people is something he can easily call up the way he first set it off — by being his usual scumbag self.

He does these weird things because he thinks they’re cool and assumes we will too. And what Trump thinks is cool is based on what he thought was cool when he was playing “John Barron” and getting his name in the tabloids back in the 1980s.

John Podhoretz speculated in 2016 that Trump was getting over by reviving a Rat Pack sensibility. But that was too flattering; if anything, 80s Trump was a degenerated Xerox copy of that. (Frank and Dino and Sammy, for one thing, had actual talents.) He lacked the chops but he had the bluster and the eternal self-regard that reads to some people as confidence and leadership. (Not to mention casual misogyny and racism.)

That’s why he felt comfortable going to Republican debates and yammering stupid, offensive shit that everyone else on the dais was too scared to say out loud, and why people who didn’t know better went for it.

Now look at him, as he sinks in polls, pushing out that bizarre commercial. Why does he think anyone cares about communism? Because they did in the 1980s. Why does he push “the largest tax cuts in history,” which were minimal for most people and might feel like a cruel joke to them as the economy tumbles? Because tax cuts were big in the Reagan years. (That Reagan was smart enough to delay the damage of his cuts to the economy doesn’t occur to Trump.) Why does he push law and order and the police when so many of us associate that with his cruel ICE raids? Because law and order was surefire back when his buddy Rudy was going on drug raids with Al D’Amato, so it must be now.

Tuxedo swagger. Gold toilets. Women as accessories. The 80s, baby! Everyone he knows thinks it’s still happening.

That’s also why Scavino thought his champagne stunt — flaunting wealth and power, acting like an old-school corporate Master of the Universe — would be a tonic for the troops. And it might as well be, as far these people are concerned, so thickly insulated as they are from the reality the rest of us share. I don’t think even a landslide midterm defeat can reach them, at least not at first. But like Boss Gettys told Charles Foster Kane, they’ll need more than one lesson, and they’re gonna get more than one lesson.