Burning Down the House (The White House, that is)

“You may may find yourself with a beautiful house, and a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself… my god, I’m guilty!”

Published in

BYOB News

5 min readAug 23, 2018

One of my all-time favorite songs is “Once in a Lifetime.” You know — the Talking Heads track that demands to know “my god?! How did I get here?!”

It’s a refrain always feels relevant, but I never thought we’d be able to answer that rhetorical question by saying “well, first I need to tell you about a reality TV show, a porn star, and a whole lot of thinly-veiled racism…”

💩 My God What Have I Done?!

— Michael Cohen (feat. Paul Manafort and Talking Heads)

Two guilty confidantes in less than 20 minutes: That’s one way to describe President Trump’s no good, very bad day in court this week.
How bad is it? It’s so bad Michael Cohen implicated the President in illegal campaign finance activities and Paul Manafort came oh-so-close to being found guilty on all 18 counts against him!
It’s so bad the Senate is giving Trump the wink-wink nudge-nudge to finally fire Jeff Sessions.
It’s so bad Jeff Sessions is actually standing up for himself! (Heavens to Betsy!)
But on the plus side “I think we can say with some certainty that this will be the last time an American presidential candidate will pay off a porn star without filling out the proper paperwork first.”
Now, let’s focus on what really matters: All the different ways Michael Shannon has insulted the President.

🙀 100% Trump-Free Headlines

Complex things reduced to bullet points

BREAKING: The Olive Garden’s coveted never-ending pasta pass has been upgraded to a $300 annual membership. (I assume the economics are based on the idea that no one can survive that long on Olive Garden and Olive Garden alone.)
The most important debate of the week: Do men enter bathtubs on their hands and knees? (Seriously, you’ll want to click this one.)
Public school teachers might have to buy their own supplies, but at least Betsy DeVos is willing to pay for their guns.
The end of the world is going to smell terrible.
I spend a lot of time beating up on Governor Andrew Cuomo, but this NY Mag profile is absolutely worth your time (TLDR: He’s so very, very flawed!).

🤖 Terrifying Tech News

Facebook is ruining everything, so go follow @wyoy.news on Instagram!

Net Neutrality is getting hot hot hot: Verizon throttled the fire department’s unlimited data until they coughed up extra cash during the California wildfires.
Update from last week: A new research paper found that an idle Android device sends its location data to Google 340 times per day (and even more when it’s being used!).
How the Ukrainian version of TurboTax accidentally released the world’s largest cyber attack to date.
Twitter’s indecision is killing it.

📺 We're Fired

I always knew that reality TV would be the end of the world

Still wondering "my god, how did we get here?!" Well buckle up, because I was serious when I said it all began with The Apprentice. That reality show literally changed the course of history, building the President’s base long before most of us ever knew it existed: Over 20 million people watched the first season finale, but producers knew they had a hit when over 215,000 people auditioned for a show they’d never heard of–– just because Donald Trump was the star.

In hindsight these were red flags, but that’s not the only reason to look back at The Apprentice right now. Because you know who else got their start on the first season of the show? Omarosa. Does she have actual tapes of the actual President actually saying the one word he’s not allowed to say? Your guess is as good as mine, but the always-excellent NPR podcast Embedded re-released their Apprentice episode from last fall in an effort to better explain the situation. (TLDR: Hoo boy there are tapes, let me tell you!)

In the episode we learn that Trump himself told former NBC boss (now, ironically, CNN boss) Jeff Zucker that he probably wouldn’t be President if it hadn’t been for The Apprentice–– and for once Trump is right. Think about how unlikely the whole series of events was:

The guy who created Survivor (Mark Burnett) wanted to pitch a New York-based show so he could spend more time with his family.
NBC desperately needed a hit to recover from the end of Friends.
And Donald Trump needed what Donald Trump always needs: The validation he never received from his father.

That perfect storm made several people very rich–– and left the country morally bankrupt several years later. Because the only thing bigger than a show watched by millions… is one watched by billions (whether they want to or not).