It was inevitable, heading into 2018, that famous basketball dad LaVar Ball’s relentless self-promotion would collide with famous Twitter user Donald Trump’s penchant for race-baiting and petty culture wars. Now that it has happened—with Ball’s middle son, LiAngelo, getting detained for shoplifting in China, supposedly freed with help from Trump, and then tossed aside as the two older men began slap-fighting about who deserves the credit—it has begun creating television of absolutely astonishing surreality.
Last night the senior Ball, as if inspired to new heights by the bloviating prowess of his opponent, visited CNN’s Chris Cuomo, where, among other topics, he engaged in a free-form, dadaist improvisation with the host about the nature of gratitude in a relentlessly artificial media environment built upon performative rhetoric. It must be seen:
Ball begins by goading Cuomo onto his turf, derailing substantive questioning with instead a demand to be thanked immediately. Cuomo eventually acquiesces, then confuses the preceding interaction as engaging banter, and so counters by demanding a thank-you of his own. This morphed, through no real conscious effort of either participant, into a brief discussion of whether or not Donald Trump deserved a thank-you—which was, if you can remember anything preceding this labyrinth of grinning idiocy, the impetus for this conversation. The Trump talking point does not last long, however, before the two return to some musings about the nature of thank-yous and when they’re merited.