Good Night and Thank you

Trump doesn’t defeat his opponents; he casts them, turning liberal conscience into spectacle, and transforming critique into the very script that keeps him centre stage.

George Clooney has joined the administration. Not officially, of course. He wasn’t offered a job and wouldn’t have taken one if he had been. But there he is, playing the part Donald Trump has written for him: an elegant, soft-spoken, moralising liberal. He’s good at it. He’s been rehearsing for years.

This week Clooney appeared on 60 Minutes to promote his latest role—Edward R. Murrow, in a Broadway revival of Good Night, and Good Luck. Murrow, the CBS journalist who stood up to McCarthy, is now repurposed as a conscience figure, perfectly tailored to Clooney’s natural register of furrowed concern. During the interview he spoke about truth, democracy, the decline of American journalism. He referenced his own op-ed last year calling for Joe Biden to step aside, and said it had been difficult to write, but necessary. There was a lot of nodding.

The timing was not incidental. Trump is back in the White House. The institutions that were supposed to stop him didn’t. What remains of the liberal centre is now in broadcast mode, issuing warnings, quoting Murrow, pleading for decency. It’s the performance of resistance, delivered to an audience that no longer believes the plot.

Trump’s reply was brief and effective. Clooney, he posted on Truth Social, is “a second-rate movie star” and “a failed political pundit.” The interview, he said, was a “total puff piece.” He accused CBS of covering for Kamala Harris and repeated, without elaboration, that the mainstream press is a disgrace. The line stuck because it always sticks. Trump doesn’t need new material. He just needs new scenes.

And Clooney gave him one.

Trump doesn’t respond to criticism because he’s thin-skinned. He responds because he knows the critic is a gift. What matters isn’t the content of the attack, it’s who delivers it. He picks his fights carefully, often instinctively, but always with the same aim: to turn attention away from himself and onto the performance of opposition. Clooney is perfect for the role. Famous but safe. Passionate but predictable. His outrage arrives pre-scripted.

This is Trump’s most enduring political instinct: to recast every structural crisis as a personal grudge match. He has turned the machinery of state into a continuous drama of insult and comeback. Tax policy becomes a feud with “the failing New York Times.” Judicial overreach becomes a conspiracy by “Obama judges.” Indictments become proof of persecution by the “deep state.” Whatever the charge, the story is never about what Trump has done, it’s about who dares to criticise him, and why they can’t be trusted.

He’s not fighting the left. He’s not even fighting the Democrats. He’s fighting the narrative, and winning. His opponents are chosen for their symbolism, not their substance. He avoids confrontation with people who might pull him back into the realm of material politics—organisers, labour leaders, even technocrats with inconvenient numbers. Instead he picks actors, anchors, and NGO-class liberals: people who are institutionally incapable of hitting back with anything but the rhetoric of alarm.

Trump understands that in an attention economy, your enemies define you more than your friends. They give shape to your mission. And so he invites the right kind of opposition, glossy, credentialed, wedded to the old norms of civility and turns their concern into proof of his authenticity. If these people hate him, he must be doing something right.

In this way, Trump performs a kind of political judo¹: using the weight of liberal moral authority to reinforce his own anti-establishment appeal. The more Clooney pleads for truth and decency, the more Trump can frame him as the voice of a failed order. The story ceases to be about Trump’s second presidency, its policies, its priorities, its cruelty, and becomes instead a story about them: the elites, the actors, the people who think they know better.

It’s a familiar trick. In Britain, Thatcher never tired of picking her opponents. When she needed to seem strong, she went looking for confrontation—with striking miners, Argentine generals, “loony left” councillors. She didn’t need them to be strong. She needed them to be visible. Their intransigence, real or imagined, gave her licence to rule. Every moral panic gave her a second wind.

Johnson, more erratic but cut from the same cloth, refined the technique for the culture wars. When the pandemic exposed the incoherence of his premiership, he pivoted to statues and flags and invented rows over university syllabuses. His enemies were not the hedge funds bleeding the country or the landlords fuelling a housing crisis, they were history professors and museum curators. They were safer. They were symbolic. They helped him keep the story on his terms.

Clooney, however inadvertently, performs a similar function for Trump. He reminds the audience what the old liberal order looked like—suits, values, sincerity—and why it no longer works. He isn’t dangerous. He’s decorous. And that’s precisely what makes him useful.

This isn’t about Clooney’s character. His concerns are real. But his appearance on 60 Minutes, earnest, well-paced, flanked by slow zooms and Broadway reviews, wasn’t a challenge to power. It was a callback. A reprise of liberal authority as performance. And Trump, ever the showrunner, knows exactly how to use that.

In a healthy media ecosystem, Clooney’s performance would be a curiosity, a handsome actor invoking a better version of America while promoting a stage role. In the current one, it becomes national commentary. It circulates, garners praise, earns applause. But it changes nothing.

That’s the trap. Liberalism in the Trump era has become reactive, sentimental, hollowed out. It clings to gestures and icons, to the belief that someone might still be listening. Murrow, JFK, Obama—names from an earlier canon, invoked now as incantations. Trump’s supporters don’t hate these figures because of who they were. They hate them because liberals still believe they mean something.

Clooney believes he’s telling the truth. What he’s actually doing is confirming the frame.

And Trump’s frame is stable. He knows what time it is. He understands that public reason has been replaced by public feeling, that moral appeals are a kind of content, and that opposition, if properly cast, makes him stronger. He doesn’t attack Clooney in spite of his earnestness. He attacks him because of it.

Opposition is now part of the set. The shadows flicker just enough to make the lights look bright.

So Clooney joins the administration. Not in the Situation Room or the State Department, but in the architecture of the story Trump is telling. A recurring character in a show where no one can remember when the jokes stopped being jokes.

Donald J Trump, George Clooney, United States of America

Footnotes

Also know as a Putin ↩︎

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