In practice, the Trump-directed news cycle has all the notes of a horribly plotted film: narrative threads continually dead end; punchlines fail to land or arrive at all; characters don’t develop and their actions have no consequences. It’s impossible to tell which plot points need to be remembered and which ones are meaningless. And, worst of all, there’s never any closure or catharsis. There are cliffhangers from week to week like a bad soap opera, but you never figure out what’s really going on, what’s really going to happen, who’ll be held responsible.
