Politics

Do Not Watch C-SPAN’s Live Feed of the Trump Tower Lobby

It will destroy your soul.

At one point during the tranquil flow of activity on C-SPAN’s live stream of the Trump Tower lobby, a doorman appears to have a moment of existential crisis. He has just guided a woman in a rose jacket to the correct elevator. He’s held the door of another elevator open for a lady leaning on a cane. Suddenly, he pauses. He massages his temple with one finger, then goes all in and rubs his whole face with his fist. It’s hard to escape the hunch that this is the correct response to C-SPAN’s subtly uncomfortable video feed, installed shortly after Trump was elected 45th president of the United States and designed to “let our audience see who is coming and going to meet with the Trump transition team, and watch them speak to the media located in the lobby,” according to C-SPAN’s director of communications.

The feed, like most C-SPAN feeds, is a banality bomb thrown in the face of history. Most of the footage—tourists in puffy winter coats, pizza delivery guys, men in dark suits holding coffee, women in blazers holding coffee—has nothing to do with the president-elect. The job of deciphering which of these well-heeled humans are actually en route to meet with Trump is left to our own imaginations. It lends Trump a mystique he doesn’t deserve, sequestering him out of view while ferrying him to the center of our thoughts.

So far, the cameras have captured various satellites orbiting the Trump star, from a furtive Rudy Giuliani to a grinning Kellyanne Conway. They’ve caught Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Jeff Sessions, Mike Huckabee, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, banker Steven Mnuchin, boxer Floyd Mayweather, PEOTUS ex-wife Marla Maples, PEOTUS scions Donald Jr. and Eric, and many others (including, weirdly, the Naked Cowboy, who one colleague suggests without evidence may be in the running for poet laureate). Secretive and self-important, the insiders stride across the marble floor, sometimes nodding at the doorman behind the golden podium—engraved with an ornate double T—before stepping into one of the four golden elevators and out of sight.

Of course, this footage may provide clues as to the eventual makeup of Trump’s Cabinet. (Mnuchin, for instance, was announced as incoming treasury secretary six days after his C-SPAN cameo) or hint at Trump’s priorities. But it also may just help publicize his stunts. (Vice President Al Gore arrived at Trump Tower on Monday to discuss human-caused climate change—does Trump plan to defer to scientific consensus when he takes office, or is he simply trying to stay on Tom Friedman’s good side?)

I monitored the Trump cam for a few hours on several days in November and December. (Past video is available on the channel’s website; you can watch the actual live stream via C-SPAN’s Facebook page.) The footage is something that John Cage, given a camera instead of an orchestra, might have dreamed up: part “slow TV,” part Waiting for Godot, part Where’s Waldo? spread in which everyone knows that Waldo is upstairs. First off, the setting. The pale mottle of the marble floor rises to meet the dark mottle of the marble walls, aureate columns conceal the elevator shafts, and a lot of reflections bounce off the various shiny surfaces, which means people are often checking themselves out in the lobby of Trump Tower. Yes, narcissism is built into tower’s very design.

There are recurring characters, such as the tall doorman with the crew cut who looks bored and the older, shorter doorman with the crew cut who looks less bored. (The first is the one who may have experienced the existential crisis.) There is also possibly an electric fence around the doorman’s podium, because both doormen occasionally wander a few feet to the right or left and then jerk back as if shocked.

Some other things that happened in the Trump Tower lobby on my watch: A man wearing a suit rolled a vacuum out of an elevator. Another man wearing another suit walked very quickly across the lobby with a broom and dustpan. (The cleaning staff at Trump Tower appears to be primarily white, male, and dressed for cocktails.) At one point, a protester came in wearing a Reagan mask and holding a stack of papers. He peeled off his mask to reveal that he was black, with a prophet’s beard. “This guy’s trouble,” a security guard said, and walked him out of the camera frame.

At no point did I see any streakers or Democrats carrying flaming bags of poop. At no point did anyone exeunt pursued by a bear.

A better version of C-SPAN’s feed would resemble the nesting bald eagles cam in D.C., or a puppy cam, or the live shark cam at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Such a feed would follow Trump in his natural habitat, using observational models to apply a scientific frame to his behavior. Perhaps we would see the president-elect eating a taco bowl, firing a staffer, or impersonating Alec Baldwin. This would provide us with invaluable information about his species.

Instead, C-SPAN’s live stream is similar to the Loch Ness monster cam and the Willard Library ghost cam, in that it fixates on a space, with no guarantee that the covert subject will ever appear. It also evokes the Old Faithful cam, which alternates stretches of monotony with bursts of geologically significant activity. The Trumpcast offers dullness punctuated by revelations—the Naked Cowboy!—that we perceive as politically meaningful. And it suggests that, no matter what changes are brewing in the halls of American government, life goes on.

I hate it. Not because the video is boring or because it reminds me that a man swept into power on tides of populist resentment spends his days amid unimaginable luxury. I hate the Trump cam because of the transparency it promises and the opacity it provides. C-SPAN’s mission is to open a window into how our government works. The Trump cam veils the president-elect from all accountability. He is somewhere, 58 stories above the action, pacing, fulminating, tweeting. He sits on high, conducting his business with impunity, the absent object of every searching gaze. And the rest of us? We’re left watching a TV show that never ends.

Update, Dec. 8, 2016: An earlier draft of this article was originally posted in error. The text has been updated to reflect the final version.