Are you currently at an airport? Strapped to a hospital bed, with various tubes protruding from your body? Maybe you’re on a treadmill or visiting an elder care facility? Chained to a radiator in the basement from the Saw movies?

If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be watching cable news while reading this column. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people currently watching Donald Trump’s answer to cable news, Trump TV – a YouTube streaming channel that airs nothing but White House-sanctioned content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Kudos to you for multitasking, and thank you for the click. I know Jacob Soboroff is hard to look away from, but at least finish this.

I don’t typically watch cable news. Or broadcast news. I feel like the best way to consume vital information is through the glorious written word, full of context and detail, rather than various “experts” yelling at each other about which one is the harbinger of the antichrist. Instead, I can yell all I want at a newspaper or an internet article and no one can tell me not to. Except the people in the dentist waiting room with me.

Trump TV is kind of like cable news, if it served absolutely no purpose and had even fewer human beings watching. I gave myself the challenge of watching this neverending digital pathway to hell for one single hour, hoping I could capture whatever joy is being derived from this American horror story.

When I first logged onto the stream, I was “treated” to a 11 March 2016 speech Donald Trump gave in Hebron, Kentucky – which Trump on more than one occasion pronounced “Keentucky”, presumably to mimic local speech patterns. That Donald Trump is just a good ol’ country boy, after all.

I came in right smack-dab in the middle of the remarks, which very clearly were not prepared. As someone hyper-allergic to cable news, I don’t often witness the president’s speeches in full. I immediately felt as though I were succumbing to a form of intense psychosis, where reality had begun to melt before my eyes, like an ice cream cone that’s sat out in the sun too long.

Trump was describing the stairs at the event, stairs he had to walk up and down. Stairs that he traversed despite........

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