Donald Trump is often seen as a performer, an actor, a lover of drama, attention and applause. His role on The Apprentice is frequently mentioned, as is the theatricality of his appearance: the yellow hair, the puckered lips, held high like a rooster’s beak, the displays of septuagenarian male bravura. Advice at the time of his 2025 inauguration to “grab the popcorn and sit back”, points up the performative expectations around him at the start of his second presidential term.
But dramas can defy viewer expectations, especially in their sequels. As POTUS #47 explores the full range of his executive powers, culture war angertainment gives way to global order meltdown. Possibility becomes uncertainty, and genre-discordant events upset the logic of on-stage action. When a show tanks, the result isn’t loss of data, but loss of sense. As the main narrative dissolves, replaced by disconnected dialogue, random movements and outsize spectacle, a brain-sapping effort is needed to follow it.
Trump’s current populist antics attract constant media commentary. This often seems confused by their lack of consistency beyond the common factor of Trump himself. As a theatre director, I offer here a dramaturgical analysis. Dramaturgy is the study of how plays make sense over time. The focus is neither content nor form, but the relationship between the two in the compressed temporal envelope in which drama lives. In other words, it’s about what we can expect from a stage show as it unfolds – or falls apart.
As a thought experiment, let’s shrink #47’s time in office down to the duration of an average stage play, around two hours. That’s 30 minutes in the theatre for every one year in the White House. When a show – probably a musical – is eventually made about this presidency, it will be about that length therefore representing it in this way is not entirely off-piste. So what does dramaturgy predict about the remainder of Trump’s second term?
Year One: what you get is what you get. For the first half hour of its on-stage life, a show is what it says it is. If it doesn’t make sense – and many don’t – then that’s the sense it makes. Absurdist plays do not portray realistic stories or characters. Yet patrons sit through them patiently. They’ve bought a ticket and taken their seat. It is up to the artists to determine where the night will head. Sometimes audiences want to see something new. Shows that promise a novel experience can sell long even before they open. Critics who complain that the drama they’re seeing does not resemble the drama they’ve seen before, are missing the point.
Yet after a while a show needs to make sense according to its own predicates. I call this ‘the first turn’. It happens about a quarter of the way in. It’s a delicate moment. The drama has done a deal of talking and walking. Now it must meet expectations. The ‘turn’ often involves a memory challenge of some kind. The audience must recall a detail from earlier and apply it or deduce something not shown directly. The political equivalent may be delivering on a core election promise, say, making a connection between what was said at the time of voting, and what was done when in power.
In theory, if a drama makes it to the stage, it already has a rock-solid first turn. But sometimes the celebrity of an artist is such it is rushed into production before this is fully tested. Under these circumstances, the reality hits home only when it is performed and everyone sees the horrible truth: it’s a show that doesn’t work.
Year Two. Desperate Measures. The atmosphere in the theatre thickens at this point, the audience wondering what on earth the actors will do to save the show. The answer is ‘anything’. If the script is incoherent, it cannot validate their presence on stage. They must enter the domain of fevered theatricalism. They may shout or break things. Expressions and gestures may get increasingly erratic. Furniture may be thrown, and lines not in the script ad-libbed. In extreme cases, the audience itself may be assaulted.
Dramaturgical analysis suggests it will be the start of Trump’s second year that is the time of greatest peril in/to/from his second Presidency. It will be too soon to curtail the show’s run (the Congressional mid-terms being 11 months away). But desperation will grip the cast, together with the belief that some performance option, no matter how crazy, can win the night. For example, they may decide – an unfortunate turn of phrase, given the context of my article – to ‘go nuclear’.
Year Three. It’s a l-o-n-g evening. If a show that doesn’t work somehow muddles a first turn, it must grind down the minutes until its merciful release into non-existence. The challenges of plot development, character development and dialogue now greatly increase, commonly known as ‘second act problems’. For the next hour of its life, a show is out in the open and can go any direction – a terrifying prospect if it hasn’t got a clear purpose or internal structure. As the actors lurch about hoping the pap they’re spouting will miraculously turn into sense, the audience begin to drift away.
The upper balcony and circle will empty first, those ambivalent about the play from the start, making a French exit. But spectators in the stalls – ‘the base’ – may choose to walk out conspicuously, signalling their disappointment and displeasure. For those who remain, expectations are lower. Paradoxically, this can lighten the mood in the auditorium. The show has failed. Condemnation of it is beside the point. The audience can admit they have made a mistake and wait for the curtain to fall.
But a show’s not over until it’s over. There are further strategies to be tried. New subplots and characters may be introduced. Actors previously unseen may appear, in incongruous settings and costumes. There may even be an attempt to switch genre and restart the drama with new expectations. This is rarely successful, but it does happen. Audiences then find themselves in the weird position of watching the same old story claiming to be a new and different one.
Year Four. The end. Or is it? The only thing keeping the show going at this point is audience attention itself. In the last half-hour of life, the stage resembles Gotterdammerung or the end of a Who concert. The script is entirely forgotten and the design stands in ruins. The actors make rambling, teary appeals to their fast-dwindling audience.
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But there is one more trick to play: False Ending Syndrome. After the characters give final speeches and make last, fruitless attempts to resolve their meaningless narrative, there are final, final speeches and more useless story-wraps. Retrospective explanations may be quickly written into the script to persuade the audience what it has just seen was a raging success, despite all evidence to the contrary. On and on and on the show goes, until you want to scream: ‘Stop! Just stop! This is complete s**t!’
The moment the lights come up, you bolt from the theatre into the cool night, not staying for the curtain calls, which you guess – correctly – will be endless. You vow never to see this show, or one like it, ever, ever again.
Dramaturgical analysis strongly suggests you remember your vow.
