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Why Trump Will Be No Threat in 2024

Mark Olmsted
4 min readNov 14, 2020
He put the idiot in Idiot Box

Trump is a like a sentient AI robot who must connect himself to his power source for at least four hours each day in order to function during the other twenty. That regenerative machine, of course, is the television, infusing him with lifeblood every moment he sees and hears himself on it. He established this addiction during his campaign for President, made even more intense by the euphoria he mainlined at his rallies, which he could relive over and over again on the DVR. If his favorite coverage was on Fox, he no doubt got even more of a rush seeing the “fake news” media cover him. They may have been attacking him editorially, but he was manipulating their greed for ratings into an estimated $2 billion in unearned coverage. No greater pleasure for a con man than pulling off a con.

His ascension to the Presidency locked in this juggernaut of constant coverage. Even his most rambling, incoherent or nonsensical rants from such a perch were, by definition, news. When Covid hit and he couldn’t do any more rallies, he took over the microphone at Covid news conferences, to disastrous, bleached, consequences. Abandoning that, he barreled back to center stage by staging super-spreader campaign rallies. Even contracting Covid himself changed nothing, culminating in the horribly memorable drive around Walter Reed, all because he could not live through even one day without seeing himself on…

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Mark Olmsted
Mark Olmsted

Written by Mark Olmsted

Author, "Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir" about my time behind bars. See GQ dot com “Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” for story of how I got there.

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