The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

This machinery of niceness reaches points of fracture, but only occasionally. The most infamous was back in September 2016, when Fallon hosted Donald Trump. He sat with the then-candidate, not to interrogate or even lampoon him, but to perform a brief, cozy skit culminating in Fallon mussing Trump’s hair. The moment was not just a lapse in judgment; it was the ultimate, logical end point of the show’s ideological structure.