The Republican National Convention was a natural place to display this gleeful cynicism. It was a television spectacle, and television, as the novelist David Foster Wallace once argued, is a cynical medium. As Wallace explained, the television screen is a perfect canvas for displaying “sights that undercut what’s said”: Consider, for example, the spectacle of former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaking at the convention about the evils of nepotism, while the chyron below announced speeches that evening by Trump’s wife and two of his children. Yet, in Wallace’s view, the cynicism and irony of television tend to overpower any criticism.