Trump's game: anger and outrage.

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 Joe Biden:

      "Acts of lawlessness and violence directed against police officers are unacceptable, outrageous, and entirely counterproductive to the pursuit of greater peace and justice in America — as are the actions of those who cheer such attacks on."

      

   

Donald Trump:

     "Animals that must be hit hard!"

     "When we find that person, we got to get much faster with our courts, and we got to get much tougher with our sentencing."   

Joe Biden is C-SPAN, at its worst. Donald Trump is Fox News, all the time.

For better or worse, there we have it, the emotional difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as it translates to television news and entertainment. C-SPAN is the channel you turn away from when the Senator goes on and on with his questions, not letting the witness answer. Biden was famous for that.  

It may well be that Trump better understands how Americans want their president to feel. Trump sounds angry and vengeful. Trump is a fighter. Smash those bad guys. Biden sounds like he is offering a policy statement drafted by staff.

Biden was, in fact, speaking through a spokesperson. Biden said the LA shootings of the police officer were "unacceptable" and that is his tone. His next word was "outrageous," but he doesn't appear outraged. He sounds logical and controlled, noting that the killings were "counterproductive."  One cannot say "outrageous" and "counterproductive" in adjacent words and sound like you mean it. "Counterproductive" isn't outraged. Biden sounds wishy-washy and focus grouped. Maybe a committee wrote his statement.

All in all, it is unsatisfying.

Trump has been the candidate of fully-voiced anger and contempt. Outrage at Mexican interlopers, at Black athletes, at foreigners, at protesters, at gun regulators, at supposed socialists like Biden. It is the Trump formula and the Fox formula, and it has worked brilliantly for both. The movie Network predicted it over four decades ago, when a fictional news anchor said "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" He urged his audience to go to their windows and shout it. They did, and in the movie he became a TV sensation, for a while. Then people got tired of him.

Click: 4 minutes of Trump-ish outrage

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street. . . . We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller. . . . We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be."

Roger Ailes made Fox the network of outrage, creating a network that encourages its audience to feel picked on, abused, cheated, and laughed at by Democratic elites and their coalition of woke liberals, people of color, and people who sneer at the silent majority. In the words of Alexis Bloom, who directed a film on Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News:

     “He made flamethrower TV viable and desirable. He showed us all that heat over light was the most successful formula. Take the journalism out, and put the entertainment in. And that might stay with us. He kind of divided America and created this outrage factory, and it’s still going strong.”

Trump understands that a lot of people like that, they want that outrage fix. Fox has huge ratings and is enormously profitable. Trump is interesting, even if one hates what he says. Flamethrowers are interesting. News channels switch away from policy discussions by "talking heads" to breaking news of fires and blood because they are a business, and they want to cover what people are interested in.

Joe Biden is longwinded and rambling and boring compared to the typical U.S. Senator, and senior Senators are famous for being windbags. There is no one who can tell them to shut up, so they don't. Trump plays against that when he and his ads refer to Biden's long, long years in Washington.  And Biden plays into it by being himself.

Trump is exhausting, though. A rule of thumb in entertainment and politics is that there is no bad publicity; just spell the name right. However, there is another rule of thumb; get off the stage while they are still laughing and still want more. 

Trump is milking the outrage angle for all it is worth. He is fighting mad and he isn't going to take it anymore, and Biden in comparison looks like he is concerned about things, what with ambushing policemen being counterproductive.

Biden may present as the better president, but Trump presents as the better show to watch. We are looking at renewing the show for another long, long four-year season two. There is some good hope for Democrats, though. In the movie, the anchor wore out his welcome and he was let go.