It’s taken a few days to digest a certain image that one thought surely must have been the manufactured creation of Syrian legend Saint Hoax. But no, alas, ’twas not fake. Not fake news at all, this surrealist photo of Kim Kardashian standing next to Donald Trump behind his desk at the White House after appealing to him for prison reform. Her sudden interest in and motivation for the cause? Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old woman who was sentenced to life in prison without parole as a first-time offender for drug charges. The case somehow sparked the fancy of Kardashian, apparently wanting to exhibit charitableness to the world as recompense for having to constantly defend her bipolar husband–himself somewhat diminishing the implications and seriousness of the condition (even Mariah Carey didn’t announce it so bombastically). And perhaps in an attempt to prove that Kanye isn’t utterly off the rails for expressing such ardent support for our “president,” she took it upon herself to engage in this photo op. And though, yes, there is a photo of Kanye and Trump out there in the ether from the outset of this crazy journey called the aftermath of 2016, there is simply something far more ominous about this latest one with Kim, for its deliberateness in styling and staging is just so much more…apocalyptic. And, to be sure, the man in the chief’s seat of the Oval Office has flirted with celebrity before–most notably JFK with Marilyn and Bill Clinton with Jay-Z–but there has always been at least the slightest tinge of class to it. Not a total aura of skeeviness smacking of hidden agendas and sinister motives.
With Kardashian and Trump, however, reality stardom seems to have taken a sharp curve toward non-reality, with both parties utterly convinced that they’re using their celebrity to help push politics forward. Though, in order to do that, we would need to go back in time to well before 2016 to remake the potential candidates running for office. But, even the Kardashians and the Trumps don’t have enough money to build that time machine. Or buy the one Robert Zemeckis is secretly harboring. So here we are, in the throes of what modern American politics has devolved into: one tan person and one orange person with absolutely zero experience in the field of civic duty pretending that they’re trying to do right by the public when, in fact, it’s all about self-aggrandizement and the amelioration of the ego. Where Kardashian is concerned, this “opportunity” to present herself as a non-vacuous social climber who rose to fame on the coattails of a hotel heiress and the laurels of a sex tape could not have been done with any other president. For there’s no way Obama would have been pictured with her, as that would entail actually having to meet with the Kris Jenner-manufactured product and pretend he could stomach hearing any of her so-called “proposals.” And she couldn’t have done it with Bush because she wasn’t enough at that juncture. For Trump, this is at long last a little more “credibility” in the “I’m with it” column because a relevant celebrity will actually come within a five-mile radius of his animatronic body. In each case, both stand to benefit (Kim perhaps even doubly because who knows what it takes to arouse Kanye anymore apart from MAGA-related endeavors). She even played up the importance of the meeting with the later insistence, “He really understood, and I am very hopeful that this will turn out really positively.” A key phrase to underscore a smash cut to riots and trash can fires.
There are, naturally, those devotees of each party that will swear up and down that Kardashian and Trump respectively have their own aims in “using” the other for a gain that could not otherwise be achieved. Kardashian’s fans in particular, so convinced of her business acumen and foresight, are likely to believe that she is wielding the ultimate puppet as her own. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t make the haunting image of the two together–Trump all shit-eating grin and Kardashian all faux severity–go away. And maybe because, more than a “Boschian spectacle of horrors,” as The New Yorker described it, this is real life. These people, caricatures of the modern celebrity and politician, are now teaming together in a way that makes the word “safety” seem obsolete, for the very institutions–Hollywood and Washington–we once all so blindly placed our faith in are the very ones that have proven to be the sources of all evil. So, if anything, this now immortal picture is simply the work of Francis Bacon, “naturalized”–and then reflected back upon the U.S. population for an added sense of torment.
