He was, as one White House official observed, the first president who seemed to interpret the job as an extended tryout for the role of Mike Teavee in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the television-addicted American kid glued to the box at all hours of the day and night who persuades Wonka to transport him inside a television set. When the Oompa-Loompas sing of his downfall—he was shrunk by one of Wonka’s wondrous machines into thousands of tiny pieces and had to be stretched back like a piece of taffy—they chant about how television turns the brain into goop.
