No worries! 
I think the mockumentary that I linked to above touches on many of the excellent points that you made in your comment and expands on how American politics can be viewed as “scripted”. I suppose by “script” I was thinking more in terms of “structural” (system) or “formulaic”—e.g. the roles that politicians play, the limits of acceptable debate, and the predictable narratives that get recycled over and over again to manufacture consent.
I’ll finally answer your querstion. No, I don’t think it looked scripted. However, if you take the idea of politics as theater and politicians as actors to its logical end, it stands to reason that some politicians would be very good at giving convincing performances—especially if there are certain incentives involved (e.g. money, blackmail). For example, Trump is literally an actor—he has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But even in WWE, there is a certain amount of improvisation and genuine surprise—someone could miss a beat, something unexpected can happen, accidents can occur.
That’s true. Speaking about myself, I have changed many of my “conservative” views over the past 4 or 5 years and I find myself agreeing with people (although often for different reasons) I used to think were out of their freaking minds. It’s always a good idea to get all sides of an issue, and not just the ones on the limited red-blue spectrum—think 5D, like Trump!
Good example. As another example, the mockumentary showed a clip of Trump saying this about the Clintons at his inaugural luncheon in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall back in 2017:
I was very honored…very, very honored when I heard that President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton was coming today. I’d like you to stand up…and honestly there’s nothing more I can say…I have a lot of respect for those two people.
Of course, respect can take many forms—including the kind reserved for a formidable adversary, or for a criminal’s ingenuity and skill—however, I get the sense that that’s not what Trump meant.
Yes, for sure—the SOTU is a literal example of a scripted, often cringe, theatric performance.
You’re right, this isn’t what I had in mind, BUT now that you mention it, I think it is a de facto script that politicians follow to win people’s trust as part of a broader “confidence game”. One of the traits of a psychopath is telling people what they want to hear and shaping themselves into what they think the other person wants them to be.
I wonder how much is genuine conflict and how much is theater designed to maintain the illusion of choice and accountability—I suspect that these disagreements operate within carefully managed bounds. Of course, for the system to appear credible to the masses, it must allow a certain amount of infighting and dysfunction, as long as the deeper goals—endless wars, corporate influence, centralized control—proceed apace. At the end of the day, what matters most are the outcomes. In the mockumentary, the producer character asks the question “How do you know what a system is designed to do?”—and then he answers: “You observe what the system actually does.”
I also think there are a lot of what I would call “throw away” issues—issues that have nothing to do with the ultimate goals of the system (or the people running it)—that might be used to achieve some short-term end and then discarded (e.g. not promoted anymore or allowing a side to claim its demise as a victory) once they’ve served their purpose. DEI and the whole transgender thing are two possible candidates that come to mind.
)—or if you still hold out hope that the system can reform itself—then carry on. But once you see that American politics is just another form of WWE theater—scripted, performative, fake—designed to keep you on the reservation, you can’t unsee it.
