“Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future” was how a November 7 piece in the Times put it, capturing a whole mini-genre of hot takes that appeared right after the election about Democrats “reckoning” with their catastrophic loss. Those articles have since been replaced by a cascade of “Where Are the Democrats?” pieces. But it turns out the Democrats are still devastated, still blaming, and still staring at a dark future.
I, too, have been devastated, blaming, and staring. I admit, I have been looking back at those initial post-election pieces, in a kind of listless final search for this alleged Democratic reckoning. (A reckoning with what, exactly? The party’s failure to mobilize voters this fall? Its lack of any sort of vision for the future? Its five-decade embrace of neoliberal policymaking and its rule by the rich? Capitalism itself?) I have not found any such reckonings. Instead, in all my devastated, blaming staring, what I have found—curiously, repeatedly, conspicuously, ridiculously—is the teleprompter.
Teleprompters are of course not meant to be seen; even the speech-giver is supposed to see through them. They are therefore very sleek, very demure, very mindful. Photojournalistic decorum is not to feature them—if the camera happens to catch a stray one in the frame, those photos go unused. Teleprompters need to hide in the shadows. At most, you glimpse a curved edge, or a black stand. But suddenly we were seeing them starkly, nakedly: already in that November 7 piece, there was one standing dramatically above Harris, angling itself in cool, gray rebuke—a gesture that was both plain and inscrutable. In the photo, Harris’s eyes are uncharacteristically wistful and her lips are pursed. She is probably just mid-word and about to blink in the middle of some paragraph, but here, paired with the headline about her loss, her eyes look sad; her mouth, very tired. The teleprompter looms like a stern parent, a guidance counselor who isn’t angry, just disappointed. Its slim profile starts to recall slim margins, inscrutable demographics. The picture is in cool tones, but there is a ring chandelier glowing warmly in the building behind her. It floats to the side of her head, like a halo slipping off, an almost-crown that is echoed in the vice-presidential seal on her podium.
Of course we will never see pictures of Kamala Harris actually looking sad, exhausted, and contrite after her loss. This is one of those weird stand-in photos they deploy after the fact, to illustrate something we are all imagining but won’t get to access directly. It is an awkward genre of imagery—not quite art, with its intentionality, not quite journalism, with its factualness—but I like it because it contains the halting guesswork, the emerging clues in what Freud initially called the psychology of errors, slips of the national subconscious. When I saw my first teleprompter, I was merely surprised, but when I saw the second and the third, I became intrigued. Why were photo editors reaching repeatedly for these teleprompter scenes?
For starters, it’s because there are no photographs of the Democratic party caught in the act of reckoning, either because that reckoning happens behind closed doors or because it doesn’t ever happen. Either way, this puts photo editors at a loss. A reckoning is required, it must be happening. How to picture it? They could, of course, find some shots of Joe or Kamala holding their heads, or looking pensive, or gathered around a table—but all of that is too obvious. The standard imagery of “politician faces a reckoning”—unruly scrum of press microphones, sometimes a devoted spouse off center—was probably ruled out because we all know Harris and Biden didn’t make a habit of speaking to journalists. The reckoning would be more about facing the voters than facing the press. Plus, the infidelity here was to the historical moment, nothing Jill and whatshisname could bolster. What the Democrats were reckoning with, or should have been, was precisely their own ignorance of what to do, what to say. Cue the teleprompter.
Harris faced the teleprompter again on November 8, under a Vox headline: “The debate over what Democrats do now hinges on one question,” and a subhead: “There are two ways of interpreting Harris’s loss.” (Sure there are, Vox.) And there, in the accompanying image, leaning over the top right corner of the photo: teleprompter! Again, it was opaque and gray; again, it was pitched at an imposing angle. My immediate, associative, very grim thought was: guillotine. Harris, for her part, is kind of grimacing, and seems to be looking to her left with one eye and slightly to her right with her right eye. The left eye moves in the direction of the teleprompter and the right eye looks toward us, the audience, and also toward a transparent something—is it a bulletproof partition?— that covers the left third of the picture. Are these eyes signaling the “two ways of interpreting Harris’s loss”? Is the question whether to read the teleprompter or to read the crowd? Of course Harris is just making some face mid-speech—and the jacket and earrings suggest it was the same event as in the Times photo—but there is an unmistakable side-eye going on here as she confronts the teleprompter. The split vision makes her appear both determined and afraid—a humanizing look, given the circumstances. The teleprompter, again, is perfectly blank.
Then, of course, Biden came to be included in the teleprompter reckoning. On December 2, Biden and the teleprompter appeared together under the headline: “In Pardoning his Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints.” This time the teleprompter is front and center, and Biden is squinting at it from his podium off to the side. Like Harris, Biden has been photographed awkwardly, mid-action. He is about to say something and the photograph catches him with his mouth not quite yet open. It would be an unflattering look for anyone, but is an especially unkind shot of a stutterer and a cutting picture of someone whose debating inabilities will forever mark his legacy. His eyes are giving Clint Eastwood, but his mouth is frozen mid-word. It’s like those dreams where you want to speak but can’t. The teleprompter, once again, is leaning in from above. It is a very plain photograph whose only distinction is that the teleprompter seems like Biden’s conversant. Biden is looking right at the teleprompter—to read it, naturally—but here it looks like he’s talking to it, or trying to talk to it. Hey old pal, you can almost hear Biden say. But you can’t immediately imagine what the teleprompter says. It’s not friendly. Maybe the teleprompter is disappointed that Biden pardoned his son. Its angle is at the very least skeptical. Talk to the hand, it seems to say.
Later in December, the Times ran a Patti Davis op-ed called “The Blaming of Joe Biden.” The photograph accompanying it, by Damon Winter, is a masterful encapsulation of the present political moment. A teleprompter dominates the lower right quadrant of the picture, angled in toward Joe Biden, who is looking down, his forehead inclined towards the teleprompter. We know Biden is Catholic and the gesture is of someone taking communion, their head leaning towards the priest in shared solemnity. It is as if that long-postponed Democratic reckoning has finally occurred.
Of course, in reality, no such thing is occurring. If it weren’t for the shameful post-election context, it would be a non-picture. Biden is probably looking down at his speech in between sentences and closing his eyes and mouth to get ready for the next one. But because he is leaning toward the teleprompter, which is itself leaning over him paternalistically, you get a sense of contrition. Forgive me, Father.
All the more so because Patti Davis wrote the piece, the headline is about blaming, and above Biden and the teleprompter is Gilbert Stuart’s famous life-sized portrait of George Washington, arm outstretched. Biden’s head comes up to the knees of the first president. Washington is gesturing in that empty, to-be-filled-in way of official portraits, but in the framing of this particular image, his hand directs our attention to a set of electric candles in a sconce on the wall. The candles look cheap and off-kilter. Again, if this were a regular news photograph, one used to report on the actual speech he was giving, it would have been a throwaway, too downbeat, too heavy with inert symbols. But somehow, post-election, Washington is pointing emphatically to the light and the truth and the way, while Biden, facing away, closes his eyes and leans toward the teleprompter, accepting blame.
One way to think about what the teleprompters mean in relation to the losing, supposedly reckoning Democrats is to think about what they mean in relation to Trump, who is winning and never, ever reckoning. Stories about Trump and teleprompters usually involve times when he tried to give a scripted speech and then very quickly started to ad lib. At one point there were theories that he couldn’t read. He doesn’t read much, which is enough for us here. He trained in real estate, then on reality TV—both realms that require a lot of acting, but no script. Instead, he recites the ur-script of bullshitty American bluster. The three rules he famously learned from Roy Cohn—“Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory”—are like a dark version of improv’s famous “Yes, and” rule. As a program for unscripted speaking and governing, they have furnished Trump with his own kind of integrity. Occasionally it even looks like bravery.
With all the blood streaming, and the fist pumping, and the scrum of Secret Service members diving around, you probably didn’t notice all the teleprompters making sly cameos in photographs of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024. It took me six months to see them, and even then I needed help. The colleague who pointed them out said that they were “peeking ineffectually into the frame,” and that’s exactly right. Despite being sleek, neutral, abstract shapes, they manage to look clumsy and ridiculous at the margins of these photos. Once you see them, they look like they are photobombing.
In the most iconic image, the Iwo Jima–like pile-up captured by Evan Vucci for the AP, the teleprompter juts in perfectly at the center of the left margin, pointing to Trump’s bloody ear with melodramatic precision, and tilting in synchronized angles with the flagpole and flag that form the pyramid at the center of the picture. Of course, what you’re really looking at is Trump’s wounded face, frozen mid-yell, his defiant fist, the Secret Service woman hug-tackling him from the left. I saw the video footage of the shooting before I saw the stills, and I remember being shocked not just by the assassination attempt but by Trump’s fist pump. I confess, I was impressed. I had been thinking for years that the Democrats would manage to lose in 2024, but in that moment, I thought: Trump will win. He didn’t just survive the shooting, he managed to improvise around it, to play to the crowd within it. Attack, attack, attack.
The teleprompter is certainly not as important as the flag pins, the red tie, the red hats and all the other visuals of the MAGA movement. But it offers an interpretive key to the moment. The Democrats are pictured robotically facing it, beholden to it, confused by it, bowing to it. Trump ignores it and pumps his fist. Even in a low moment, he makes the teleprompter a spectator. Why is this act so powerful? Call it late-late capitalism, call it neoliberalism, call it algorithmic culture or the society of the spreadsheet—but we live inside the script. Democrats seem at times to fully believe in that script, at other times they offer revisions. They do not, under any circumstances, suggest tearing up the script. Lately they have mostly been pictured staring at it quizzically. Trump offers to ignore the script, to simply clown.
So, we have reached a point in the great American decline where the choice is between robot and clown. Let’s take an example from everyday life. When you call a company on the phone, the robot is there to greet you, to offer you choices, to instruct you to Press 3 for more options. We are all used to this by now—but then when something goes wrong, the robotic experience actually intensifies. When you ask for a human, when you really long for a human—to resolve a health insurance claim humanely, say—what you actually get is human-as-robot. They are trained precisely to not resolve your claim humanely. When you go further up the chain, as your feelings of helplessness or injustice intensify, the conversation becomes ever-more scripted. You might get to the people at the top, who really know how to robotically say all the right things, and they will admit there is nothing they can do, they are very sorry. You do sometimes think, OK, that’s enough robot, patch me through to the clown. Let me see the clown.
In my lifetime the Democrats have consistently stuck with robot: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris. Bill Clinton and Biden occasionally seemed less robotic, humanized in different ways by the pathos of their family lives. But they couldn’t figure out full clowning, except that one time Clinton played the saxophone. Obama promised something more dignified, a robot with dreams, but his policy choices were pro-drones, pro-banks, pro-private insurance—very robot. The Republicans, though, have won with clowns. Reagan played it pretty straight but he was basically miming cowboy. Bush pere was a robot, and the exception here, but he gave us W, who was a total clown in office and has leaned into clowning further in retirement. Romney is the nicest robot you’ve ever met. McCain was a soldier robot, poor man, so they tried to pair him with a full clown in Palin. But it works better with a clown at the top of the ticket and a robot as VP. Trump, of course, is full clown. Vance is full robot, only clownish in his exaggerated obedience.
Musk, for his part, is prototyping a scary new synthesis: robot clown. He crashes the cabinet meeting wearing a Tech Support T-shirt with pure robot panache. He posts offensive memes at an inhuman rate; he produces hilarious amounts of children, machine-like; watching him do the Nazi salute, I finally understood that storied gesture as “strong emotion, but make it robotic.” I have seen “the spectrum” cited to explain his unorthodox behavior, but this mistakes mere social awkwardness with a ruthless harnessing of the anti-social at the scale of actual society. He might be “not reading emotional cues,” but the main thing here is the hold this has on the rest of us. So when I saw him in the Oval Office with his black-on-black MAGA hat, making Disney-villain hand gestures while his son wipes boogers on Trump’s desk, I could see how he manages to be a pantomime villain and a real villain at the same time. That is our moment, or rather, his moment: the merger of the spectacle and the spreadsheet.
The teleprompter stands at the center of the robot-clown binary. When barely seen, it is sleek, transparent, effective. But then if you look at it straight, it is cold, gray, anodyne, useless. It is the inhuman machinery that we humans have certainly made. Musk is born of this moment and he seems to be mastering it, making every kind of mistake except the ones that would lead to his own loss of power. The Democrats, too, rode the era of the teleprompter, but they now stand dumbstruck, mid-word, waiting for a prompt, waiting for the machine to reboot. Despondent, they keep going to the fortune teller, but her famous crystal ball, once purple and full of promise, like a swing state, has been flattened, drained of all color. It’s just a gray slab now, but they keep staring at it, their oracle in a time with no future.
