Originally published in the Business Post.

“How long do you want to stay with this shit?” was the defining question of Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was asked by a translator on a German TV channel on a “hot mic”, who broke off his Teutonic version of Trump’s meandering 3,000 word speech to shout the desperate plea at his producers.

In most broadcast studios, two buttons exist - one titled “cough”, one titled “talkback”. The former mutes your microphone allowing you to cough, burp, hiccup or snort in safe silence. The latter allows you to speak to your producer even when your mic is off.

Some talkback buttons also cut your mic off from the air, so you can hit the button live and have a private chat with whoever is in the control room. Some do that, but not all, and it’s always worth checking how your particular talkback button functions before you rely on its protection to launch into a soaringly defamatory tirade about your last guest.

We assume it was something like this that caused what the German broadcaster subsequently described as “a technical glitch”.

However it came to pass, it neatly summed up the attitudes of millions across the planet. Unfortunately the answer so far has been “we have all stayed with this shit since 2016 and will continue to do so as long as The Donald serves it up, as the rest of the world seems congenitally incapable of providing an alternative”.

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