Isiah Whitlock Jr in the Wire. Image courtesy of HBO.
There is a scene in Season 5 of HBO’s The Wire that has recently been bubbling up out of my memory. Hyper-corrupt Baltimore politician Clay Davis, best-known perhaps for his unique way of putting some extra English on the word “shit”, has just been nailed dead to rights in court on corruption charges. On the stand he stages a public skewering of the proceedings, inveigling against the injustice of the system and the inequity of it all and painting himself as a modern day Robin Hood. He uses his silver tongued charisma to turn all the evidence and the trial on its head, and eventually escapes justice.
I remember watching the whole sequence and thinking it seemed a tad theatrical and overwrought. Not realistic, I thought to myself - but damn entertaining. And yet, here we are.
For my money, The Wire is the best television show ever made. The writing, the characters, the acting and the plot are all absolutely top-notch. But the thing that separates The Wire from the rest of the pack was David Simon’s fundamental and penetrating understanding of the institutions of American society - their structures, their weaknesses, their true natures. He understood that institutions are human creations and recognized the feckless, weak nature of the human condition.
We talk about institutional structures; but they are not immovable structures like a building. They reflect the values and beliefs of the society they govern. Institutions are fungible. And people are gullible. We are at a moment in time here, in America, where Clay Davis has been elected president of the United States. Trump is puerile. He is idiotic and uninformed. He is self-serving and clearly unfit for the responsibility of his office. Yet our institutions are struggling to constrain him. Norms have proved to be more elastic than we knew. The media has actively helped him spread false narratives as if they were gospel. He has perverted the court system with unfit and ideological judges. He has co-opted an entire political party, and turned the constitutional checks on his power into a parlor game.
All of this David Simon knew was possible. He toyed with these ideas in the fictional playground of The Wire. He knew that a politician was not really constrained by anything substantive; but only by how he could manipulate institutions to benefit himself. If he’s charismatic enough, and can tap the weaknesses of the human condition, and can exploit the failures and the shortcomings of our institutions, he can get away with anything.
Whether Trump will get away with it in the end remains to be seen. I expect he won’t because Trump is actually worse at the political flim-flam business than the fictional Clay Davis was. It was probably impossible for even the most creative minds in the mid-2000s to imagine someone as inept and crude as Trump being able to do what he has done. But it doesn’t matter. He has already gotten away with so much. The fundamental truth that our institutions are cracked and flailing, that they were a mirage all along, has been revealed for anyone with a brain to clearly see. And it’s something David Simon saw coming a long time ago.
