No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more sadistic. The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion—drinking champagne in inflatable pool loungers, zipping off in limos to meet celebrities. The losing team was deported to tents in the backyard, nicknamed “Trump trailer park.” The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the “have-nots,” didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates, and slept to the sounds of howling dogs. They would peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the “haves” were enjoying. In other words, Trump and Burnett deliberately created a microcosm of the very real and ever-widening inequalities outside the show, the same injustices that have enraged many Trump voters—but they played those inequalities for kicks, turning them into a spectator sport. (There was a slight Hunger Games quality to it, though hemmed in by network television restrictions on non-simulated violence.) On one show, Trump told the tent team that “life’s a bitch,” so they’d better do everything possible to step over the losers and become a winner like him. What’s interesting about this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, is that the pretense sold to a previous generation—capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds—is completely absent. No: this is a system that generates a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you are on the winning team. This reflects the fact...