I had a couple conversations recently with random people who volunteered in passing that they were feeling kind of smothered and oppressed by the way Trump dominates the news . Whether it is the recent thing about wanting to purchase Greenland from Denmark or retweeting a claim that he is seen by some as the King of Israel or almost any one of the endless lies he spews forth — he is, after two years, omnipresent. And like some digital media version of the white balloon Rover from the 1960’s TV show The Prisoner Trump’s behavior keeps us in his own crazy news village-potentially disheartened and distracted from other issues.

Rover is a fictional entity from the 1967 British television program The Prisoner, and was an integral part of the way ‘prisoners’ were kept within the Village. It was depicted as a floating white balloon that could coerce, and, if necessary, disable inhabitants of the Village […] in one incident, it even killed a person, but it is not clear whether the ability to kill was a normal feature of Rover or if this incident was a malfunction. Several aspects of the Rover device were not explained, presumably left to the imagination of the viewer.