A book by Scott Woods and a co-author — Toronto CKLN figures Bob knew in the 1980s–90s — that Bob enlists as an outside confirmation of his own reading. As Bob describes it, Unshackled "ransacks pop culture from the 60s on" (Ross Perot, the film Bob Roberts, "every kind of weird phenomenon") into a Innis-style "great inventory" — a dustbin already complete before Trump's presidency, of which Trump is "the completion of all these attempts," an afterimage that clarifies the whole once it is obsolete. Bob claims partial paternity (Woods crediting him and Dave Newfeld), and notes the coda: the author, unable to bear the presidency his book had anticipated, "couldn't Trump." New to it — start with dialogue 20, the only session it appears in.
Across the dialogues
Enters as Bob's outside witness — a book that had already inventoried the whole "dustbin" Trump completes, and whose author then "couldn't Trump," breaking under the phenomenon his own book diagnosed
Bob introduces Unshackled as an Innis-style inventory of pop-culture eccentrics from the 1960s on — a "dustbin" assembled before Trump's presidency rather than after it.
"he and his buddy put together this incredible book called Unshackled, The Dustbin of Donald Trump."
Trump is not one more entry in the dustbin but its afterimage — the figure who completes and clarifies every eccentric performer the book catalogs, visible only once the whole is obsolete.
"Donald Trump was the completion of all these attempts."
Connections
An inventory of pop-culture eccentrics from the 1960s on in which Trump is the afterimage that completes them all.
Bob claims the author, Scott Woods, credits him and Dave Newfeld as influences on the book.