Showtime’s The Circus Presents The Deferential American Political Media at Their Laziest

McKinnon, of the white cowboy hat and many-layered scarves, tends to avoid asking questions altogether, apparently convinced that his conspiratorial asides, muttered to the camera before, during, and after various coffee klatches and Rotary Club meetings, are sufficiently astute to suggest his political acumen—and then proceeds, in the days leading up to the Nevada caucuses, to say, “When you talk about the idea of confidence, Donald Trump has an extra chromosome.”

To tee up Cruz to praise his own campaign, or read Trump’s bluster as a mark of “confidence” and not a symptom of depthless insecurities, is not simply to blunt the tip of the spear in the name of “civility” or “fairness.” It is, rather, to become the servant of the powerful interests one is ostensibly covering, the trusty conduit through which politicians, staffers, and surrogates might pass their “message” to the public more or less undigested—”which is to say,” per Didion, “as it is manufactured.”

That The Circus is a participant in this process is, on the one hand, unremarkable; it is the ne plus ultra of the reportorial fecklessness Didion identified in 1988’s “Insider Baseball,” and which, as I’ve written for Paste throughout the spring and summer, has come into full flower in the course of this campaign. That The Circus has succeeded, much as Woodward succeeded, in performing the aesthetic jujitsu by which shallowness itself is seen as an asset, on the other hand, suggests that Halperin’s insurmountable learning curve is also our own; it signals the final submission of the adversarial instinct to the desire for access, the tacit agreement to present the campaigns as they intend to be presented, in exchange for a few insignificant crumbs from the moveable feast that is life on the other side of the curtain.

This is the promise of the title sequence’s final image, its illustrated hands pulling open the American flag that descends from the stage’s proscenium arch: That The Circus is the nearest we’ll come to seeing the gears of “the process” whir into action. In fairness, there are moments captured on camera—Sen. Bernie Sanders’ rendition of “the monster” he plays for his grandson, Gov. John Kasich’s groan-worthy “jokes”—that no nightly news segment is likely to feature, moments that depict the candidates, however briefly, at human scale, though it must be said that even these are more rare than one might expect from a series that punts on nearly every issue of import.

What’s so flagrantly irresponsible about the series is not that it pays heed to the performative aspect of presidential politics, but that it does so—with a wink and a nod to its subjects, for whom fielding softballs on matters of style amounts to spring training for their exchanges with heavier hitters—to the near-complete exclusion of positions and policy proposals, to the exclusion, for that matter, of demonstrable facts, and then frames this as an honest assessment of the state of affairs.

The result, to return to Didion, is “an Erewhon in which not only inductive reasoning but ordinary reliance on context clues appear to have vanished,” as in Halperin’s appraisal of Trump’s RNC speech as one that “showed a lot of discipline,” only to find himself wrong-footed the next morning, when Trump, repeating the baseless claim that Cruz’s father was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, goes “back to his old ways.” The result is the “Zen purity” of ”[t]he refusal to consider meaning or outcome or consequence,” as in McKinnon’s reliance on cute aphorisms (“Iowa picks corn, but New Hampshire picks presidents”) to substitute for anything approximating actual thought. The result is the “crude personalization [that] works to narrow the focus, to circumscribe the range of possible discussion or speculation,” as in Heilemann’s jubilant reaffirmation that Gov. Chris Christie “can feel… knows he’s getting traction here,” “here” being New Hampshire, where Christie subsequently finished sixth.

It takes an outsider, if perhaps an unwitting one, to describe The Circus for what it is: A now nine-hours-and-counting belly flop into the wading pool of “political theater,” as former MSNBC anchor and The Atlantic senior editor Alex Wagner says in the aptly titled “Confidence Game”—or, as she adds later, “this shit.” To those for whom the roped-off confines of the big top have come to constitute the entire apparatus of “politics”—ringleader, sideshow acts, animals, and audience subsumed within an impregnable and increasingly indistinguishable whole—such criticism is easily cast as mirthlessness, or worse yet misunderstanding, on the part of the those, myself included, for whom the election of the president is more than the season finale of America’s Next Top Commander.

But it’s no stretch to suggest that The Circus distills the frustration with “the establishment” to which its own correspondents devote so much of their attention, and about which their most incisive analysis amounts to “Frustration with ‘the establishment’ exists.” The danger the series poses—and I use the word “danger” advisedly—is that which Trump’s candidacy has exposed: The Circus prizes the spectacle of the modern campaign to such an egregious extreme that the on-the-ground consequences of “politics” are effectively erased; in it, the foundational principle that well-informed voters cast their ballots to indicate preferences with regard to the candidates’ positions on the “War on Terror” or “the economy,” “healthcare” or “education,” is sacrificed at the altar of the humorous anecdote, the unfiltered comment, the useful idiot’s ardent belief that riding shotgun in the clown car is akin to understanding how combustion works.

In short, the series not only declines to interrogate the sort of dithering typified by Donald Trump, Jr., but in fact assents to the idea that “Whatever happened, happened,” that there is no higher calling than recording the mundane, even meaningless utterances of those inside American political culture’s not-so-big tent and relaying them, unchallenged, to the rest of us. For Heilemann, Halperin, and McKinnon, then, safe in their lucrative sinecures despite failing to introduce a single morsel of worthwhile information or original insight to the discourse surrounding the current campaign, the deferential spirit is also the spirit of the times, the path of least resistance to wealth and influence, or at least the illusion of it. The sole requirement is unconditional surrender to the powerful interests they are ostensibly covering. If The Circus is any indication, there have scarcely been three more willing signatories.