We are big fans of Vic Berger’s surreal, terrifying, hilarious video edits, which have isolated and underlined the absurdity and depravity of the past year’s political theater. But Trump’s press conference last week, in which he alternately pleaded for affection, boasted about his electoral win, badgered the press, and demanded that a reporter who happened to be black set up a meeting for him with the black caucus, seemed to be a breaking point, both for Trump and the American people. John Oliver could only respond with a supercut of news anchors sighing, “Wow,” afterward. Watching the standing U.S. president have a breakdown in real-time felt like a synthesis between reality TV and geopolitical terror that could only occur with Donald J. Trump as commander in chief.
And yet! Here is Vic Berger, up to the challenge of making that press conference even fucking weirder.
It has the airhorns, elliptical editing, melancholy ambient drones, and subtle shading that has defined much of his political editing, but here he leans into the “emo Trump” characterization, capturing the sense of pettiness and desperate neediness underlying the president’s tantrums. The press conference did not need to be much weirder, but by condensing and heightening it, Berger has made it so. This is the way the world ends—not with a bang but a hilarious airhorn.