‘Succession’ Makes Us Relive Trump’s Presidential Election

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Succession, “America Decides.”

Like so much of what happens within the episode, the title of “America Decides” is a lie. America does not decide the result of the presidential election dramatized within the installment. Kendall Roy decides.

Well, so does Roman Roy. So do a bunch of Jeryd Mencken’s (Justin Kirk) most criminally enthusiastic followers. And so, for that matter, does Shiv Roy. Shiv spends much of this slow-motion tragedy arguing to her brothers, to Tom, to anyone who will listen, that if Mencken wins the White House, it will be the end of democracy as we know it. What “America Decides” argues, though, is that democracy is already dead — that in an intensely fractured nation, small groups of people have inordinate levels of power to make their wishes into a reality.

And so Mencken wins — probably — as Logan Roy raises a middle finger from the grave at an adopted country he never saw as anything but an easy mark. Democracy dies not in darkness, but in a brightly-lit conference room of what claims to be a journalistic organization, even though it is anything but.

For anyone with PTSD from the past seven years of American political life, the episode’s hour-plus running time may have felt much, much longer, or simply been much more difficult to sit through than your typical Succession. We all make the Faustian bargain with these kinds of shows that we will spend hours and hours, across years of our lives, watching, analyzing, and at times empathizing with the absolute worst types of people alive. As you may know, it took me the better part of two seasons to make peace with that in this case, and to invest in the story of these despicable people fighting over who gets the ultimate authority to make the world a worse place. But I eventually fell under the spell of what Jesse Armstrong and company were doing. I learned to laugh at all the nasty things that Roman or Tom Wambsgans said, to develop rooting interests in different characters and team-ups, and to hope for ways in which Kendall could manage to be a little less broken.

But like some of the final Sopranos or Breaking Bad episodes(*), “America Decides” removes any barrier or level of artifice that has allowed us to simply laugh with the Roys. It is all of them — Roman most of all, but the whole group, Shiv included — turning America, and by extension the planet, into collateral damage in a fight over the deal with Lukas Matsson. Which, as we know, is in no way a fight over principle, but simply Kendall and Roman not wanting to let go of their chance to stay on the throne they’ve dreamed of occupying for their entire lives. They let Mencken’s followers light thousands of votes on fire, and in turn set a torch to the country that Mencken may now get to lead, depending on whether there is an actual legal battle over those incinerated ballots. It makes clear, in no uncertain terms, that all of them are monsters in some way or other, and that they have combined to unleash a bigger monster on everyone else.

(*) This is, like the great “Ozymandias” was for Breaking Bad, the show’s third-to-last episode.

Most of this season’s episodes have taken place over a single day, usually (but not always) on consecutive days. This one is the day after Tom and Shiv’s disastrous cocktail party, and really only takes place over a few hours, from Tom going into the 5 o’clock meeting through ATN calling Arizona — and, thus, the entire election — for Mencken. It is at times frantic and farcical, like Kendall and a coked-up Tom both freaking out over ATN’s faulty touchscreen — both seem much more upset about this than the idea of a white nationalist winning the presidency — or the wasabi from Cousin Greg’s bodega sushi winding up in the eye of Decision Desk Darwin. (Greg hilariously tries washing it out with LaCroix, insisting that the drink is not too lemony.) 

Mostly, though, it is a nightmare for Shiv, for the Jimenez campaign, and for anyone who is not a fan of Nazis, be they real or fictional.

The previous episode suggested that Mencken was underperforming in the polls. But since he is meant as something of an analogue to our former POTUS, in much the same way the Roys are inspired by the Murdochs, this of course means that the polls turned out to be less than representative of his support — especially since his most rabid followers are resorting to voter intimidation, and, in Milwaukee, outright domestic terrorism.

The three Roy siblings watch this unfold with three different perspectives. Roman, who wants to kill the GoJo deal, who was drawn to Mencken BDE from the moment they met, and who is often the most blithely dismissive about the impact his father has had on the world, is excited to see his guy doing so well, taunting Shiv with comments like, “If my team wins, they’re going to shoot your team.” He suggests the Milwaukee bombing was antifa, shrugs off or outright laughs at every one of Shiv’s arguments about what a Mencken presidency will mean, and eventually puts his thumb on the scale by feeding talking points to the ATN anchors. (Mark Ravenhead, who has already been established as a Tucker Carlson-esque aspiring fascist, takes particular delight in getting to rant on-air against the liberals he so despises.) We have occasionally seen bursts of empathy from him, but almost always on an individual level, like him helping Kerry pick up her belongings at the wake, or the guilt he felt about having to (try to) fire Gerri. But on a grander scale, he rarely seems to care about other people, and in this episode, he really doesn’t care. All that matters to him is winning: crushing Shiv, crushing Matsson, even crushing Kendall, who is not close personal texting buddies with Mencken like Roman is. He will do whatever it takes to make it happen, and will laugh at the tears of anyone in his way. It is Roman at his absolute worst, with the biggest possible consequences.

Shiv, as we have known from the time Mencken was introduced, is horrified that her family has supported his candidacy and amplified his disgusting message. She is the Roy who is always most conscious about what Waystar Royco does to everyone else, even if she is ultimately too self-interested to fully fight or break away from the family’s dirty business. She tries appealing to the better angels of her family’s nature, only to be reminded that they have long ago given in to the devil who used to run the company. Roman is a lost cause. Tom is still too angry with her, which leads to a spectacular, brutal moment where she tells him about her pregnancy and he wonders, with good reason, whether she is telling the truth or just doing another play. (The look of disbelief and hurt on Sarah Snook’s face would be unbelievably great, except for all the other moments we’ve gotten to see her in this role.) Kendall is ultimately her best chance, if only Shiv didn’t secretly have a horse in this race beyond ideology: She has aligned with Matsson, and a Jimenez victory would allow the deal to go through, while Mencken would block it. There is a moment — an agonizing tease of a moment — where it seems she has played Kendall like a fiddle, reminding him of his desire to be a good guy, stirring up his jealousy over Roman’s closeness to Mencken, pushing every damn button she has to in order to get Kendall to break the tie in her favor and stop ATN from declaring Wisconsin for Mencken. She needs it to work. We need it to work. And it is going to work, except that when Kendall asks her to call Nate and offer to trade the Wisconsin call for an assurance that Jimenez would block the deal, Shiv doesn’t do it. She is too invested in helping Matsson, so even at the cost of the country she claims to care about, she fakes a call, and then is busted when Kendall insists on calling Nate himself, followed by Cousin Greg ratting on her(*).

(*) Again, most of the episode is stomach-churning, but the scene where Greg tries to blackmail Shiv, and she first messes with his head by asking if he finds her attractive, then outright threatens him, is a delight. So, for that matter, is Greg’s account of his night with Matsson (who views Greg as “a normalist”), including a time when, “I drank things that aren’t normally drinks.” The less said beyond that, the better. And Connor has some amusing moments as his campaign inevitably ends as a complete non-factor, particularly his pretentiously olde-timey response to Willa saying, “Fuck Kentucky.” “No I shan’t become that, no,” Connor intones. “Alas, Kentucky, Willa. Alas, vanity.” 

All of which brings us to Kendall. He spends much of the episode looking forlorn and haunted. But cry us a river, Number One Boy. He claims to care so much about the world his children will inherit from him,  and fears so much that he will become like his father. (“Maybe the poison drips through,” he says, in reply to Shiv’s suggestion that he has tried to be a better father than Logan.) If that genuinely mattered more to him than anything else, he would stop Mencken. We see that he has the power to do it — that Roman is only running amok because Kendall is sitting idly by, uncertain of what move to make. But ultimately, what Kendall wants is what he has always wanted, and he will do anything possible to keep Matsson from taking his toy away from him before he’s had a chance to really play with it. Roman complains that when they were kids, Kendall always got his way on dinner, and now Kendall is going to get his way on GoJo — especially once his discovery of Shiv’s betrayal extinguishes whatever higher ideals he embraced for a half-second there.

The tension of the thing is peak Succession. We want Kendall to stop it, because even though this is fiction, it is still very bad, and so evocative of things in the real world. (Mencken’s victory speech is more eloquent than anything The Former Guy would ever say, but it similarly tries to position himself as an anointed king, rather than a public servant entrusted with maintaining our system.) But him actually stopping it would be antithetical to everything we know about Kendall Roy, and everything that Succession has stood for. As the creators of another show famous for its terrible main characters once said, no hugging, no learning. These are bad people doing bad things without knowledge or care about who suffers for their sins. Kendall riding in on his white horse to rescue democracy might be the ending we desire, and/or the one Kendall believes himself capable of, but it is not what he, or Succession, is ever going to do.

Perhaps the series’ remaining episodes will show that this Mencken victory was only a temporary one. Or if we stick to the relatively tight calendar, the story could end before this has all been litigated. But in the moment, everyone is acting like Mencken is the president-elect, and the brothers Roy are both rationalizing their roles in making that happen. In the car on his way home, Kendall tells his driver, “Some people just can’t close a deal, Fikret.” Roman, meanwhile, insists, “We just made a night of good TV. That’s what we’ve done. Nothing happens.”

We know better than Roman does. We know what happens with men like this. But both he and Jesse Armstrong definitely made a night of good TV, however unpleasant it was to watch.