America's Legal Soap Opera

It's time to cancel the show.

When I was in college, I would spend summers helping my grandma. She had Parkinson’s and everyday things were hard for her. I would drive her to the library and the supermarket and the hair salon, so she could maintain the Jackie O style she had adopted long before I was born.

But my most important task was setting the VCR to record her “stories”.

My grandma got hooked on soaps before television was invented. When Guiding Light debuted on the radio, she was a teenager. When it became a TV show, she was a 30-year-old mother of two. She watched it for the next five decades, aging with the characters.

My grandma lived through the Great Depression and World War II and the turmoil of the 1960s and the cruelty of the 1980s and the illusory reprieve of the 1990s and the terror of 9/11.

But her Guiding Light never waned, staying reliably ridiculous to the end.

She died before the show was canceled in 2009. On some level, I’m glad she did not see the light go out: a loss that was part of the broader erosion of shared American pop culture.

There are many things I am glad my grandmother did not see. Especially without the comfort of a steady diversion, a spectacle that reassures you that this is still America while the America outside morphs and mutates and misleads.

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As a teenager, I shunned daytime soaps. I was far too cultured, reserving my attention for true artistic triumphs, like when Kimberly took off her wig on Melrose Place or Dylan chose Kelly over Brenda on 90210.

During the summer, I lowered my lofty standards. After I managed the mystifying VCR, my grandma and I would settle in under a brown and orange chevron blanket to eat Pepperidge Farm cookies and watch her stories.

My visits revolved around The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. I recognized the names — the scheming Newmans on Y&R; Ridge and his brother Thorne on B&B — and knew some backstory.

But not much, because it did not matter. I could go away for months, return, and pick up as if I had never left. I did that every summer, and never missed a beat.

Soaps move both wildly fast and incredibly slow. Every plot development is either delivered with sledgehammer explication or left gaily inexplicable. Details are unimportant: you know how to feel by slaps, gasps, and chords of desire and doom.

Characters had evil twins or were secret royalty or got murdered by other characters and everyone just kept on trucking. Amnesia was a common affliction, experienced by characters and viewers alike. You were lulled by the non-stop excitement, soothed by the steadfast lunacy.

You could catch up in an instant because plots never really progressed. The same characters stuck around for decades, spawning dynasties and reenacting rivalries, as the scriptwriters recycled old plots, knowing repetition was part of the appeal.

This is a great way to run a soap opera, but a terrible way to run a country.

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I am the author of two books on Donald Trump’s crimes — Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew — and I have mentally checked out of his legal cases like I used to check out of soap operas, knowing that I could tune in months later and nothing meaningful will have changed.

Everyone on the Donald Trump Legal Show has their prescribed role. The most important role — the one they all share — is running out the clock.

Soap operas were designed to fill boring days. Plots were meant to be slow enough that you could do chores while they played in the background yet alluring enough to keep you hooked. They promised a big payoff, if you just stayed tuned.

This is how the Department of Justice and the US media treat Trump’s indictments: not as severe national security threats, but as profitable entertainment meant to pacify citizens until the big show debuts.

The big show is the 2024 election, and it is just as scripted — you do not let a career criminal get away with plotting a coup unless you are operating off a scripted storyline — as the court cases that are rigged in Trump’s favor.

The reason they are scripted is because America is a mafia state.

That is the biggest plotline of all, the one the politicians do not tell you because you are not supposed to know, any more than you were supposed to know the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of the executives who greenlit your soaps.

Over the past decade, American politics has taken wilder twists than any soap opera while the old American pop monoculture dissolved, scattering and separating Americans from our beloved national pastime of cheap recreation.

The result is that we are stuck watching a show we do not want to see — the collapse of our country — and it is the only thing we are all watching together.

This is a tragedy, which is why citizens have begun checking out. But not before other people cashed in.

Trump’s court cases spawned an industry, a legal analysis version of Soap Opera Digest. An array of dubious “experts” — ranging from former employees of the DOJ to randos with records of fraud and ties to scam PACS — are paid handsomely to tell Americans that everything will be fine.

Their job is to insist that what we are witnessing is not deeply corrupt institutions concealing their own complicity, but a slow-motion rollout to a thrilling denouement.

This denouement was never meant to arrive. No soap opera ever truly ends its story, and they certainly do not drop their main villain.

But the DOJ Infotainment Complex had to deceive Americans into believing that it would act. Or else Americans might do something meaningful, like demand true accountability. They might protest, or strike, or investigate, or otherwise challenge the institutions betraying them.

They might compare notes. They might start trusting each other more than they trust state-sanctioned liars.

Soap operas were designed to sell products; sponsorships by soap companies are how they got their name. The two main products the DOJ Infotainment Complex sells are the illusion of justice and the illusion of time.

Legalese fantasies are meant to stop you from thinking for yourself. They want you to believe that Obvious Crimes are “too complicated” to solve. They want you to think you are too dumb to see what’s right in front of you. Theirs is a dangerous act of manipulation, and downright evil in the way it preys on people’s vulnerabilities in a time of hardship.

You should note that the DOJ propaganda that used to be ubiquitous is now increasingly being paywalled. This is because the clock ran out, so savior syndrome mantras need no longer be blasted into everyone’s brains. All that’s left to do is collect the checks and appease the die-hard, dead-end believers.

That’s all that’s left for the propagandists to do, anyway. The rest of us — we have to live in reality.

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Trump is a career criminal who was first investigated by the Department of Justice in 1973. Had he remained president, perhaps he would have issued a half-centennial coin in his own honor, commemorating the refusal of institutions to capture him.

Trump has spent his life working beside multiple mafias, starting with the Italian-American mafia under the tutelage of mafia lawyer Roy Cohn and then moving to a transnational mafia tied to the Kremlin. It is not quite a “Russian” mafia since its movers and shakers tend to have multiple passports and offshore accounts. They are not wedded to any particular country, only to destruction that benefits their wealth and power. States are just things you strip down and sell for parts.

Because Trump has spent his life immersed in crime and frequently confesses crimes in public — he confessed to obstruction of justice twice to Lester Holt alone — a legal solution was the most obvious remedy to the threat he presented.

But our institutions will not oblige, since they are as complicit as Trump — in particular, the FBI. (Two heads of the FBI, Louis Freeh and William Sessions, went on to serve the same mafia tied to Trump.) For decades, US institutions covered up the crimes of Trump and his cohort as mafia money flowed and blackmail and threats rendered Trump and fellow Cohn proteges like Roger Stone untouchable.

That Trump would seek to be an American autocrat was obvious, which is why I warned of it eight years ago. Autocrats rewrite the law so they are no longer breaking it. Criminal impunity becomes official immunity. That is what Trump seeks.

Now that the DOJ Infotainment Complex is fading, an industry of “fascism experts who never mention institutional responsibility” is rising. They focus on autocracy but treat it as a novel peril. That way they can claim 2024 is the Most Important Election Ever and ignore that the Biden administration has made no meaningful attempt to contain Trump and his mafia backers since taking office.

They are feigning amnesia, like a soap opera character, or a lazy scriptwriter. They are pretending that we did not see all the unpunished crimes that took place during the Trump presidency or read about his criminal history in articles now paywalled or deleted.

They’re pretending Trump 2024 is a new threat instead of the latest installment in a long-running series.

They ignore that other series regulars — like Joe Biden, who entered Congress the same year Trump fell under DOJ investigation — are far from ignorant of America’s corruption crisis and have in fact contributed to it through decades of inaction and deception.

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When a legal solution is the best one, but you live in a mafia state without rule of law, in a country that treats political violence as legitimate by refusing to punish those who practice it, thus opening the door to a second attempted coup — what do you do? As I’ve said, you can’t vote out the mafia.

I don’t have the answers, but I know a few things not to do. Stop consuming propaganda. Stop assuming justice will be served but keep demanding it, whether or not you believe your demands will be met, so you do not lose the moral standards wedded to expectation.

Abandon your presumptions about what is possible: both negative and positive. Treat America like a soap opera in the sense that it is ludicrous and sweeping and may get canceled, but do not make heroes and villains out of officials: they are public servants, and most of them are failing you.

Do not treat your countrymen as one-dimensional characters. Do not resort to stereotypes based on where people live or their race or religion. Do not disregard their humanity any more than you would want them to disregard yours.

You are all part of the same captive audience.

In the early years of Trump’s reign, I thought that public hearings were the way out. If the truth were revealed — the full truth, the truth that involves institutional complicity and Democratic collusion and Jeffrey Epstein — then Americans could unite around it. We would have common ground and a road to accountability.

I still think this outcome is possible, but it will not come through hearings. Our officials have no intention of holding them, a fact made clear when Trump’s second impeachment hearings for fomenting a coup were a mere month long. Officials are on one side, and we, the people, are on the other.

In the meantime, we lost the TV monoculture that would make hearings popular. Since 2020, Americans have lost national cohesion in almost every sense. We lost our already weak public health system to covid. We lost journalism to an internet controlled by oligarchs and algorithms. We lost pop culture to CEOs who can delete digital media on a whim. We still have sports, but the problem is that everything is treated like sports, with “teams” and “sides”.

I was trying to explain the betrayal of the Democrats’ campaign promises to my husband. A St. Louisan born in Chicago, he replied, “It’s as if all the Cubs were replaced by Cardinals.”

And I said, “No, it’s like if the crowd was cheering for the Cubs and then the Cubs took out machine guns and started mowing them down and then screamed at the survivors for no longer wanting to wear Cubs hats.”

If the sports mentality is our downfall, the soap mentality may be the one that saves us, so long as we understand its downside. Soaps — and their more masculine corollary, professional wrestling — are the mechanism through which much of modern propaganda is disseminated, from “The Storm is Coming” QAnon brigades to the “Mueller/Garland Is Coming” institutionalist cults.

If you can identity these templates as soaps — compelling bullshit narratives — then you are free. You have bifurcated the Infotainment Complex, putting information and entertainment back into separate categories. You can seek out the facts and give yourself a break with some fantasy — fantasy that you know is fantasy.

Because fantasy that you don’t know is fantasy…well, that’s just another word for a lie.

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I miss my summer days watching soaps with my grandma. I treasure the time we had, even if we spent it dissecting the motives of Ridge and Thorne and Victor Newman.

When my grandma was fourteen, she was orphaned. The year her parents died was the same year Guiding Light debuted. I wonder sometimes if Guiding Light was especially comforting because it was on for the rest of her life. Sometimes a silly diversion can have a profound effect if it sticks around long enough.

Both Biden and Trump have been public figures longer than I have been alive. I shudder to think of them as background stabilizing forces, entities that are always on, like Guiding Light was for my grandma. They feel more like nemeses — especially the latter, by a long mile — that threaten what little stability I have known. I don’t have a reliable pop culture diversion, because tech CEOs keep annihilating them.

I miss my grandma. Sometimes I miss America, and then I stop myself. Because the America I know is not the one that makes it into the propaganda called news.

There is a world outside this living coma that pundits call a legal analysis, outside the frauds that they call leaders.

The America I know still exists. I live in the thick of it in Missouri, but it’s everywhere. It’s fluid and senseless and trashy and satisfying, like a soap. People keep asking me if it’s still on, like a soap. Why I’m still watching that shit, like a soap. I tell them I got it programmed, like a VCR, because nothing’s gonna make me miss my stories.

I write about America with words I choose, words I control. My all-American words, my storyline, my show. I’ve long encouraged you to write your own story, even if it’s just for yourself.

Especially if it’s just for yourself.

Powerbrokers threaten our freedom, but no one can steal freedom of the imagination. My memories, my writing, my nostalgia noir. There is a guiding light in my mind, and no one can extinguish it but me.

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The World’s Largest Gavel in Marshall, Illinois. Photographed September 2022.

Exciting news, Guiding Light fans!

Hanging with my grandma, who in addition to being the world’s biggest soap fan, was a voracious reader and taught high school English. She loved her stories!