AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

January 3, 2025

Of all the anticipatory-anxiety activating appointments Donald Trump made in the waning days of the year when — per instant conventional wisdom — the music died all over again, the most eloquent was the naming of reality-show mastermind Mark Burnett as special envoy to the United Kingdom.

More of a statement even than Trump’s appointment of vaccine-denying roadkill aficionado RFK Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, or the dearly departed $6 million duct-taped banana as Director of National Intelligence, the Burnett appointment brings the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump’s role in US politics and Burnett’s part in his evolution as a public figure full circle.

(The banana appointment hasn’t actually happened yet, but Russian reality-show crossover star Tulsi Gabbard is facing an ironic uphill confirmation battle, and of all the performative political appointments defining the Trump revival, this one is the silliest on a number of fronts and therefore entirely suited to the departed banana’s posthumous prerequisites.)

Burnett, the son of Ford factory workers raised in the East London town of Dagenham, has arguably contributed more to the improbable, reality-defying success of his former Apprentice star than any other character in the Trumpian orbit, including fellow Svengali Steve Bannon. Anyone whose CV segues, within the single year of 1982, from Section Commander in the elite “Paras” regiment of the British Army, serving in both the Falklands War and Northern Ireland, to redeployment in the bloody trenches of Beverly Hills and Malibu as a $250-a-week manny knows something about the implausible hairpins of plot-twist peripeteia.

In 2000, following a classic, elite-paratrooper-turned-Beverly Hills-au-pair-turned-television producer Cinderella arc, Burnett unleashed, with Survivor, the cultural phenomenon of fictionalized reality advertised as actual reality, normalizing, over the first quarter-century of this millennium, the consumption of storyboarded, scripted, terribly acted drama as real life.

The resulting recalibration of our collective suspension of disbelief has been an asset more indispensable to the reality show of Trump’s political career than any other narrative element of the past decade, including the global war on democracy, the propagandization of journalism and Hillary Clinton.

Of course, a reality-show presidency of the United States — with its gobsmacking dialogue, contrived, cortisol-triggering conflicts and democracy debasing melodrama — can produce far more damaging consequences than a post-rose Reno divorce. It can impact the future of NATO, of the United Nations, of Russia, of China, of Ukraine, of Canada, of American democracy, of global democracy and of humanity. The Golden Bachelor, it is not.

It may help to remind ourselves of precisely what sort of scenery chewer is looming on the outskirts of the global village, previewing the rampage to come with bursts of recoil-inducing roaring and cross-border atomic breath.

Indeed, it’s really more of a Japanese kaiju film, with the monster as a metaphor not for nuclear weapons but for an aspiring, post-democracy world order with an unseemly penchant for commodified cruelty and a contempt for humanity expressed across a range of behaviours from systematic disenfranchisement to profligate Faustian bargaining to unfettered strategic corruption to proxy weaponization to a frattish affection for operationalized flim-flam and terrible, terrible jokes.

So, as we brace ourselves for the Season 2 premiere 20 days hence of The Golden Godzilla: Democracy Dies in Deception, with all its familiar tropes of tariff terror, bilateral bullying, lunatic tweets and other fear-based performative propaganda, it may help to remind ourselves of precisely what sort of scenery chewer is looming on the outskirts of the global village, previewing the rampage to come with bursts of recoil-inducing roaring and cross-border atomic breath.

We have seen this movie before.

This Godzilla, which, like all Godzillas, is just a careening, remote-controlled creature in a B-movie horror script, will catalyze a series of choreographed scenes of panic, mayhem and destruction.

Some will involve previously unthinkable immigration changes that will seem arbitrary and racist but which will actually be much worse for corresponding to similar, border-hardening, mobility-restricting, sanctuary-obliterating changes elsewhere in an increasingly human rights-assaulting, control obsessed, autocratic world.

Others will involve changes to 80 years of multilateral trade norms executed under the guise of protectionism and “allyshoring” but which will correspond to an agenda of economic dis-integration, status quo annihilation and supply chain colonization.

Still others will involve the threatened unilateral annexation and possible invasion of peaceful neighbouring countries with names that rhyme with Canada posing as oafish, dictatorial ribaldry but which will serve to desensitize indignant re-posters to the eventual airlifting of the entire populations of every state below the post-2040 “human fry line” to Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the re-opening of the Keystone pipeline to transport free water to the Motherland.

(Granted, much of that last bit is sheer speculation, but I’ve found it’s always best to err on the side of creative extrapolation in matters of new world order narrative warfare, if only to be proven wrong in the event for having underestimated its capacity for chaos.)

In the end, amid all the debates about how to respond to Donald Trump, the most important thing to know is that you’re not really responding to Donald Trump. You’re responding to interests whose worldview is the product not of ideology, philosophy or even utopian fantasy, but of a war against all the things at which they’ve failed, including truth, democracy, and, above all, reality.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.