That’s a shame: Watching Seinfeld reruns indirectly contributes to the Trump campaign

There are few mechanisms for skipping a boring half hour of your precious time on earth as efficient or pleasant as zoning out with a Seinfeld rerun on. Just tune the TV to TBS, sit back, and let Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer navigate their world of amoral opportunism and self-involved New Yorkers, without having to worry about your job or the environment or the political rise of Donald Trump. Except, as it turns out, by re-watching “The Chinese Restaurant” or “The Bet” in syndication, you’re actually helping—in a tiny, but real way—to bring that latter possibility about.

That’s per Fader, which caught a depressing detail in a New York Times profile of the latest man tapped to serve as chief executive officer of the Trump presidential campaign: former Breitbart News chairman Stephen K. Bannon. In his past life as a media mogul, Bannon apparently brokered a deal with Ted Turner, giving himself a percentage of the profits for all Seinfeld reruns. So every time you try to chuckle along with the “magic loogie”, or yada-yada your problems away, you’re indirectly giving money to the man responsible for keeping the Campaign About Nothing on its rails. (Also, you were already giving money to Breitbart, which is pretty upsetting in of itself.)

Of course, if we wanted to stop the flow of cash to Bannon, all we’d have to do is stop watching Seinfeld reruns. (Sorry, earth.) But hey, at least nobody involved in the Trump campaign makes money off of repeats of The Big Bang Theory, since that’d mean the G.O.P. candidate would be able to buy the country outright one Bazinga at a time.