DONALD TRUMP AND TELEVISION HAD BEEN WORKING TOWARD this moment for seventy years, since he emerged squalling into the world and it burst forth in a spray of static and radiation. From his youngest days in Queens, he sunbathed in it, let it soak into his skin, the shootouts and the breakneck football tackles and the barrel-chested macho men grappling each other in the ring. TV, for its part, had spent decades preparing America for the kind of campaign that Trump would run, for the idea that seizing attention was an act of leadership, for a kind of rhetoric that depended not on logic or narrative but a nonstop, channel-flipping series of excitements. He watched TV, and then he courted TV, and then he starred on TV, and then he became TV. He achieved a psychic bond with the creature, and it lowered its head, let him climb on its back, and carried him to the White House.
Now he was the master of it, or so he thought. Days after winning the election, he summoned to Trump Tower the heads and anchors of the major news networks—without whose attentions he might now be trying to launch his own cable-news channel, or maybe weighing a reality-TV comeback, rather than selecting a cabinet—and yelled at them. They had got it wrong. They had bet against him, belittled him, made him look bad. Unfair! “It was like a fucking firing squad,” said one news staffer, Trump sitting in a Trump Tower boardroom and blasting people around the table, the way he would an Apprentice team for having blown the Sotheby’s charity-auction task.
Things would be different from here on. He’d won. There was one show in America and it had one star and he was it now. And everyone knew you had to keep the star happy. Trump thought it would be with TV news the way it had been with every other partner that he’d taken on and gotten invested in building up his image—the gossip-column reporters, his branding partners, his creditors, the WWE, Mark Burnett. TV would get its cut: the ratings had skyrocketed during the campaign and would continue to grow as he issued a geyser of outrages and provocations. But he would get the sweetest part of the deal, the double scoop of ice cream; he would feed first. TV had been the perfect medium for his sensibility, for picking fights, for whipping up people’s hatred and fear and resentment, for taking the express lane around logic. It had gotten him where he wanted to go, and it had benefited from him. But ultimately, he was the boss.
TV had other plans. Like the new president, it had also been putting its brand on the American consciousness for decades. It had become the national language, framing history and forging emotional bonds and teaching people to think in microbursts of image and impulse. It suckled Donald Trump and taught him to think the way it thought. He took to the lesson hungrily and became its best pupil. “Trump is an avid television viewer,” said former CNN host Larry King, who had covered and socialized with him since the 1980s. “He’s a product of television. He loves television.” TV was in him, and now he was in the White House. Donald Trump thought that TV was his tool. TV realized that Trump was, in fact, its vessel.
As a candidate, Trump controlled TV, feeding the red light drama, monopolizing its attention. As president, he would be controlled by TV. TV—the news shows that he inhaled hour after hour—motivated him and enraged him; it moved him to action and paralyzed him in self-surveillance. It was, though he had access to the intelligence apparatus of the US government, his chief source of information. He was no different as president from when, as candidate, he told Chuck Todd of Meet the Press how he got his military advice: “I watch the shows” (that is, TV news programs like the one he was currently on). He was like Chance the Gardener in the novel and film Being There, the tabula rasa, educated by non-stop TV watching, who was mistaken for a philosopher (“Chauncey Gardiner”) and eventually became the favorite to become the next president. Except that unlike with Trump, we never got to see Chance actually become president.
Trump had always been obsessed with the media. He craved the approbation of gatekeepers like the New York Times and Time magazine; he scoured his clippings and sent reporters copies of articles about him marked up in angry Sharpie. But as much as he coveted print coverage, TV—oh, that was the stuff. In the 1980s, his executive assistant kept a trove of videotapes of his TV appearances for him to rewatch: “a form of ego sustenance,” according to his biographer.
So imagine it. You have been consumed by fame all your life. You grew up with TV. You wanted to get on TV, so you did. You prefer TV to reading. And you prefer TV about you to anything else. You absolutely burn to know what is being said about you at all times.
Now you live in a time when TV is more readily available than tap water. No need for a shelf of videotapes, just punch up a menu on the TiVo. Oh, and you’re the most powerful man in the world, which makes you the protagonist of the news. The news is a TV show, twenty-four hours a day on multiple channels, in which the president is always the star. You have always thought that you were the most important person in any room, and now you actually are, and there are talking rectangles affixed to every surface in sight to remind you of it.
You are on the show, or the people who work for you are on it, or other people, talking about you, you, you. Whether you are winning or losing. How big are your crowds. Who is enthralled with you and afraid of you. It excites you and it enrages you, and you pull out your phone and you tweet your thought, and your thought floats away from you and crosses the barrier and becomes part of the show. People talk about your thought, they wonder what it means, the markets react and people protest and applaud.
When do mortal humans have the experience of seeing a story that is entirely about them, and thinking a thought, and then seeing that thought materialize itself before their eyes? Only when they dream. But you are the one lucky boy in all of history whose real life is that dream, who gets to live out the impulse of every toddler smushing a chubby hand against a glass screen: To go inside the TV.
Why would you ever do anything else?
AS LONG AS TV HAS EXISTED, science fiction has imagined it as a handmaid for dystopia. George Orwell’s 1984 imagined the “telescreen,” a two-way device for surveillance and propaganda. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, envisioned a cowlike population narcotized by “feelies” (movies with “amazing tactual effects” that were “far more real than reality”), “scent organs,” and, of course, television.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a totalitarian state banned books and celebrated television. In Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games novels the poor fought to the death on reality TV. On “The Waldo Moment,” an episode of Black Mirror, a foul-mouthed cartoon character, controlled by malign producers, ran for office and was elected as a politically incorrect truth-teller.
All these stories differed on how the state would use the media. Neil Postman believed that Huxley was more correct than Orwell: visual media would not be a lash, to subjugate people, but a honeytrap, to distract them. “In the Huxleyan prophecy,” he wrote, “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours.”
But what these many warnings agreed on was that the state would use the media, rather than be used by it. The entertainments were for the unwashed, the chumps. The leaders would have better things to do. They would have more sophisticated, potent sources of intelligence. Media was the opiate of the masses. Big Brother did not get high on his own supply.
Donald Trump did. He employed TV, but he was also addicted to it. That was arguably how he used it so instinctually: it was in his veins. The rich history of dystopian warnings about media—many of them praised as prophetic after 2016—did not anticipate this situation. They foresaw leaders who would wield media as a weapon. They did not foresee a media that might select for a certain kind of leader who shared and would propagate its psychology. (Author Douglas Rushkoff described Trump as a human “media virus,” his term for a cultural sensation that spreads irresistibly, carrying encoded ideas with it.)
If there’s a better fantastical analogy for Trump, it might be neither 1984 nor Brave New World but The Lord of the Rings, in which the One Ring gave power to grasping, vain creatures like Gollum but also warped and tormented them, enslaving them to the red light of Sauron’s dark tower. TV was Donald Trump’s Precious. Fusing himself with the culture’s most powerful force, he became possessed by it.
Trump got elected. But TV became president.
REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT POLITICIANS, who were skeptical of Trump before happily accepting the spoils of his win, hoped that he would be the Mark Burnett of his administration, the maestro running a smooth production. This was the Ronald Reagan analog, a template they could at least understand. The “master showman” would razzle-dazzle the nation, while advancing the party’s agenda behind the scenes like a real honest-to-God president. The presidency had been a TV production for decades, so what the hell; maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have the guy from NBC running it. “Donald J. Trump is going to be the executive producer of a thing called the American government,” said Newt Gingrich. “He’s going to have this huge TV show called leading the world.”
The hitch was that, on The Apprentice, Trump had a team of producers to impose coherence on his actions. His presidency would be more like a live raw feed, chaotic, non sequitur, unedited.
Shortly after Trump’s election, C-SPAN set up a daily live-cam in the lobby of Trump Tower. Hour after hour, it was trained on the mirror-finished golden doors of the lobby elevators. It was mesmerizingly boring, a gilded human aquarium. Holiday shoppers would drift into the frame, set down their bags and gossip with cameramen. Occasionally, someone would emerge from the elevator or approach it—a Trump child, or a potential cabinet secretary, or Kanye West, or The Naked Cowboy, a New York street busker known for performing in Times Square in his underwear.
Then the golden doors would slide shut, and the waiting would begin again. It was a surreal metaphor for the coming fake-gilded age. America was about to get, Let’s Make a Deal–style, what was behind door number 2.
What presidents-elect usually kept hidden—the parade of supplicants and prospects—Trump put on display. It was public, yet not transparent. The flow of boldface names paying obeisance kept the press in a state of whispering excitement. Who was in? Who was being toyed with? When you have a surplus of visuals and a paucity of actual information, then rumor becomes the default mode of news.
Those elevator doors recalled the elimination segments on The Apprentice, where ejectees would wheel their sad little suitcases into the lobby and onto the street. Trump allowed himself to be courted openly. He was photographed at a candlelit dinner of frogs’ legs and diver scallops with Mitt Romney, once his harshest critic, now a simpering hopeful for secretary of state. It was a dominance display, the royal court reimagined as reality TV. Romney grinned for a humiliating photo, then was asked to pack his things and go, a first-episode rejectee whom no one would remember by the finale.
TRUMP’S TV INSTINCTS were most apparent in his attention to symbolism. One of his first military actions, eighty-three days into his presidency, was to order the dropping of the most powerful conventional explosive in the US arsenal on an ISIS cave network in Afghanistan. The MOAB—which stood for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or, informally, “Mother of All Bombs”—was Donald Trump in munitions form, a hypertrophic object that represented the exaggerated Looney Tunes conception of itself. Thirty feet long and more than ten tons, with grid-shaped fins and a gleaming nose cone, it looked like something that Wile E. Coyote would mail-order from Acme to drop on the Road Runner. Presidents Bush and Obama had it at their disposal and never used it. In her post–White House memoir, Omarosa recalled Trump being “obsessed” with the bomb, telling visitors with delight how “I was sitting there with my chocolate cake” when his “generals” gave word the bomb would drop. “He kept repeating it, almost like he was reliving it with whomever was in his company,” she wrote. “ ‘Did you see that “mother of all bombs” drop?’ ” He loved the branding and the imagery. It would look great on TV. Fox & Friends replayed aerial footage of the MOAB exploding, to the tune of “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” by country singer Toby Keith. “That is what freedom looks like,” said cohost Ainsley Earhardt.
At a press conference, Trump insisted that he had separated himself from his private businesses by pointing to a table stacked with manila folders and papers, not unlike the “Trump steaks” at his campaign press conference. Staffers blocked reporters from examining them. They may or may not have had printing on them. But like the props on a reality show, they conveyed a visual concept: “Documentation.”
He handled hiring like a casting director. Appearances mattered. He did not care for mustaches. He wanted the gender roles to be visually clear: the men should look good in a suit, women should wear skirts, like they did on The Apprentice, like they did on Fox News.
The thing was to “look the part.” His first secretary of defense, for instance, was General James “Mad Dog” Mattis. The choice upended a long tradition of civilian control of the Pentagon. But of course he picked a general. In Trump’s mind, one glance at a person needs to be enough to tell you the character they play. He built his celebrity by playing a broader cartoon of “rich guy” than The Simpsons’ Charles Montgomery Burns. The symbol, Trump learned, is more important than the reality; it creates the reality.
So what does Donald Trump picture when he hears the words “Secretary of Defense”? Probably the same thing that you do, if you’ve never thought much about the job. Do you think of some pencil-pusher in a suit? No. You think of a general, a barking Patton type out of an editorial cartoon. He’s square-jawed—he’s a he, of course—and he has epaulets and one of those grids of badges on his chest and a nickname, like, I don’t know, “Mad Dog.” If Mattis had not come equipped with that nickname, Trump surely would have had to assign it to him. “This is central casting,” he told Mattis at a luncheon after his inauguration. “If I was doing a movie, I pick you, general.”
OCCASIONALLY, TRUMP WOULD executive-produce an event, TV style, like his 2018 summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Kim was the quintessential adversary for the Trump era: a terrifying clown, like a Batman villain, a starstruck, mass-murdering despot who had befriended former NBA star and Celebrity Apprentice contestant Dennis Rodman. (Pop-culture obsession ran in the family. Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, was so fixated on the movies that he had a South Korean director and actress kidnapped.) One could argue, as some of Trump’s supporters did, that it would take a volatile celebrity figure—someone who brought his own spotlight and made Kim feel like he was feeding off the energy of a costar/enemy—to really engage the attention-seeking dictator. The way that sober leaders of the past seemed to be cast for each other (Churchill and Stalin, say), Trump and Kim were picture-perfect antagonists for an era of postmodern nightmare-farce.
Trump’s feud with Kim was like a reality-TV Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Trump escalated tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs in trash-talking tweets and speeches, threatening to “totally destroy” the nation with “fire and fury,” boasting that his “nuclear button” was bigger than Kim’s. Kim eagerly played the heel, escalating tensions until he got what North Korean dictators had craved for decades: a one-on-one meeting, in Singapore, with the president of the United States. (Rodman also showed up, his visit sponsored by PotCoin, a cryptocurrency for the cannabis industry.)
Trump came prepared with a bizarre, movie-trailer-style video—complete with horses romantically galloping through foamy surf—promising Kim prosperity and glory if he cooperated. The two leaders took a dating-show stroll through a garden for the cable-news channels, they smiled and shook hands, and suddenly, lo and behold, “Little Rocket Man” was now a “very smart negotiator,” enviable for his “tough” guards and his fawning state media. One obsequious North Korean anchor, Trump marveled, was even nicer to Kim than Fox News was to him.
And just like that, we were never at war with Eastasia. There was no actual diplomatic breakthrough. But as in the Apprentice boardroom, there were all the visual signifiers of a “deal”—Handshakes! Men signing things! That little had happened to reduce the actual nuclear threat was irrelevant for TV purposes. If anything, it was better, because it held open the promise of a sequel: See what happens in the next exciting installment of The Celebrity Apocalypse!
BUT TRUMP WAS more often mastered by TV than he was the master of it, as became clear with his administration’s pilot episode, his inauguration.
Trump’s inaugural address was an antihero’s monologue. Inaugural speeches almost universally involve a call to conscience and morality. Kennedy said that “a good conscience [is] our only sure reward.” George H. W. Bush declared that “America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle.” Trump’s speech was about strength, winning, resentment: “You will never be ignored again.” Unique among modern inaugurals—even Nixon’s—it did not make so much as an obligatory gesture toward ethics. In the Trump era, if you wanted to be good, for whatever stupid reason, you would be good to your own kind and on your own time. (Trump later gave Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, the nickname “Boy Scout.” He did not mean it as a compliment.)
This was a niche argument—a powerful one in enough parts of the country to take the Electoral College, but niche nonetheless. And the images of Inauguration Day made this graphically clear. Where Barack Obama had been sworn in before a crowd estimated at 1.8 million, aerial photographs of Trump’s inauguration showed vast empty swaths on the National Mall. (Crowd scientists assessed the turnout at one-third Obama’s.) The next day’s Women’s March protests were the largest demonstrations in US history. The humiliating comparisons were all over TV: against him, streets swollen with pink; on his side, a gaping void.
Trump had always fudged his stats. He got the tabloids to call him a “billionaire” when he wasn’t one; he added ten phantom stories to Trump Tower and his buyers were glad to agree on the fiction. He called the practice “truthful hyperbole.” TV, with its overnight Nielsens, only fed and intensified this scorekeeping fixation: you got a number, immediately, quantifying your success.
Donald Trump, president, was, like Donald Trump, reality star, a niche success. This is a valuable thing to be if you leverage it the right way: in TV, by delivering a select audience to advertisers; in an election, by adding just enough voters in key states to take the Electoral College while you lose the popular vote.
But Trump’s ego needed to win the total audience, not just the key demo.
Reporters who covered the TV business in the Apprentice years were used to Trump lying about his ratings. Back then, delusion-maintenance duty would fall to his publicist, Jim Dowd, who recalled Trump demanding that he phone up TV reporters and boast, “ ‘Number-one show on television, won its time slot,’ and I’m looking at the numbers and at that point, say season five, for example, we were number 72.”
Now, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, was the publicist who had to keep the talent happy. The day after the inauguration, he assailed journalists for believing their lying eyes. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” Spicer insisted. Trump echoed this the same day at a speech to CIA staff: “It looked like a million, a million and a half people.” (He also improved on the day’s weather—“God looked down and he said, ‘We’re not going to let it rain on your speech’ ”—though live TV images of the rain demonstrated that the Almighty had thought otherwise.)
White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway coined a defining phrase; Spicer, she said, had offered “alternative facts.” Facts now had teams. This was an extension of the project of Fox News, which had turned its news audience into a sports audience, driven by rooting interests, convinced that every call should go their team’s way no matter what the instant replay said.
On the one hand, you had a few pictures, a mere testimony of photographic reality waved around by the smug media who wanted to make your president seem small. On the other, you had your team, which, whatever the pictures said, had done something amazing, something nobody thought was possible, by electing him. Those were the sides. Pick one.
The trick of con artistry (or salesmanship, to use the polite term) is not to fool your audience. It’s to get them to fool themselves. Once they’ve bought in, they’ll ignore an uncompleted border wall the way heavily invested tenants, wanting to believe they made a smart purchase, will ignore the bad fit on a kitchen fixture. Both are minor details next to the grander construction—elegance, strength, Making America Great Again—that they’ve signed on to. In a speech to the VFW, Trump told his audience to disregard any negative news about him: “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Anyone can believe something that’s merely true. It takes loyalty to look past truth and believe what the team needs to be right.
Politics was full of ordinary lies, the purpose of which was merely to get the listener to believe them. This was a different kind, identified by Orwell in 1984; its aim wasn’t deception but solidarity. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he wrote. “It was their final, most essential command.” In the aftermath of World War II, the German political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how, in the dictatorships of the mid-twentieth century, lying was a demonstration of power more than a means of persuasion: “Not Stalin’s and Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination.” The leader placed himself above reality itself, and the crowd committed to the ideal of a people with one body, with the leader serving as their eyes, ears, and mouth. “Ideological thinking,” Arendt wrote, “becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things.” (Half a century later, the American political philosopher Stephen Colbert expressed a version of Arendt’s idea on The Colbert Report when he defined “truthiness,” a term for the bastardized reality we end up with when feeling becomes more important than thinking: “We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”)
Trump also positioned himself as the People’s Mouth—“I am your voice,” he said at the Republican convention—but of course, he was not a midcentury dictator with the coercive power of a totalitarian state behind him. His power was in the winking, postmodern arena of twenty-first-century media, which had groomed its audience toward a kind of cynicism that, paradoxically, made it possible to believe anything. The kayfabe of pro wrestling told you that everything was a show while allowing you to invest in the fight as if it were real. Reality TV’s adherents believed more strongly than anyone that “there’s no reality in it,” but they immersed themselves in the stories anyway. Fox News and Internet trollery convinced people that everyone was working an angle, anything could be faked, so what really mattered was not what was technically true but what rang true with your preconceptions. An overwhelming flood of information and provocations from social media, as communications scholar Zeynep Tufekci has argued, can control a population more effectively than a state clampdown on media.
Arendt identified this dynamic long before cable news or Facebook: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
This was the strategy of the propagandists in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, whose hackers and social-media trolls had supported the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. They controlled the Russian population less through iron-fisted clampdowns than through an overwhelming flood of disinformation and reality-TV-style spectacle. This philosophy told the audience: You’re no fool. You get it. You know that everybody lies, that there are a million different versions of every story, that everyone’s trying to put one over on someone else. So be smart and stick with the team. Thus it now worked in America. Did you see the pictures of Obama’s inauguration? Yes. Did you see the pictures of Trump’s? Yes. So why do you believe Trump’s was bigger? Because fuck you, that’s why.
This became the Trump administration’s guiding principle, articulated by his surrogate, lawyer, and chief postmodern relativist Rudy Giuliani when he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the president should not have to testify to special counsel Robert Mueller and risk perjury according to “somebody’s version of the truth.”
“Truth is truth,” Todd said.
“No, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani insisted. “Truth isn’t truth.”
TRUMP TOLD HIS STAFF, the New York Times reported, to think of every day as an episode of a reality show in which he defeated his enemies. Sean Spicer’s briefings became the daily arena. He insisted, straight-faced, that the travel ban against majority-Muslim countries—which Trump had called a “ban”—was not a ban. He repeated a false story that President Obama had tapped a Fox News reporter’s phone. His briefings were not informative in the sense of disseminating facts. But as a live demonstration of the contortions required to maintain Trump’s reality, they were a revelation.
There was another character in Spicer’s daily drama: Trump, a giant flaming eye just off camera. He watched constantly, and like an overinvolved network executive scrutinizing the dailies, had continual notes. Spicer never defended Trump strongly enough for his liking. Sometimes, he would be passed slips of paper scribbled with a red Sharpie—Trump’s writing instrument of choice—and would reverse himself on the spot.
Spicer’s look was all wrong too, shifty and doughy, squinched into an ill-fitting suit, a harried Applebee’s manager in a losing battle with the customers. When Saturday Night Live parodied him—with Melissa McCarthy in male drag as a ball-buster who was more commanding than the real thing—Trump was infuriated. For his guy to be mocked, and by a woman, was emasculating. As spring 2017 dragged on, Spicer carried himself like a man sent out to take a daily beating, with the expectation of a second one for how poorly he took the first.
But Spicer had one saving grace: his cringe comedy was drawing four million viewers every afternoon. “I’m not firing Sean Spicer,” Trump said in April. “That guy gets great ratings.”
Spicer lasted until July, getting a sixteenth minute of fame at that fall’s Emmy Awards by imitating McCarthy’s imitation of him. (His successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, survived longer by playing the martyr rather than the sad sack. When she was booted from a Virginia restaurant whose staff were appalled at the administration’s treatment of transgender people and immigrants, she became one more Joan of Arc for the culture war.) Like a reality show, the administration recast every few months, preferring staffers who had auditioned on cable. Frequent cable-news guest Anthony Scaramucci, during his brief tenure as communications director, proposed an online lottery for a golf game with Trump and “video content that constructively operates as ‘The President Donald J. Trump’ Show” [sic]. From Fox News, Trump brought in the former executive Bill Shine, whose ignominious record in handling Roger Ailes’s sexual harassment scandal bothered Trump not at all. Shine had the president record cranky little op-ed videos from the Rose Garden, modeled on the online-video “Trumpvlogs” in which Trump had once bemoaned the female remake of Ghostbusters. John Bolton and Larry Kudlow became senior advisers because Trump loved how they talked about him on his programs. No matter your job title in the Trump White House, TV was job one. (Of Sebastian Gorka, a bombastic defender on cable, Trump “told colleagues he had no idea what Gorka actually did but loved him on TV.”)
Trump also hired Omarosa Manigault Newman, the villainess of multiple Apprentice seasons, as communications director of the office of public liaison. No one in or outside the White House seemed to know what she did. But she was visible cheering Trump on at press appearances, and she got married in the spring, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, in a bridal gown she got free for appearing on TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress.
After Omarosa was pushed out of the White House late in 2017, she rebranded as a Trump Resistance celebrity. Her change of heart seemed, like her latching on to Trump’s coattails in the first place, transparently opportunistic. But transparent opportunism was part of what made her the most Trump-like of all the personalities associated with him. She too had a sixth sense for taking advantage of strife, knew the utility of a public fight, and was keenly aware of how others perceived her and how to use that.
This would be a pattern in the Trump administration. His most effective adversaries were not his high-minded critics, like the ramrod-stiff FBI chief, James Comey, whom Trump fired in angst over the Russian election-interference investigation. They were people with savvy TV and social-media skills and no encumbering sense of shame, like Stormy Daniels, the porn star who charged that Trump had sex with her in 2006—when he was newly married, with a baby son at home—then paid her off illicitly during the election to keep quiet.
Omarosa’s 2018 tell-all, Unhinged, got publicity for an unproven charge that Trump had used “the n-word” on the set of The Apprentice; nothing is more Trumpian than seizing attention with a provocative claim. But—just like Rona Barrett, the gossip columnist who saw a president in Trump in 1980, when no one else did—Omarosa could also be more insightful about his character than traditional pundits, who strained to cram him into the templates they’d used to understand other presidencies. She was especially sharp in seeing how he ran his reality-TV boardroom the way he would run a country: “Whenever there was a disagreement or an argument, his eyes lit up,” she recalled. “He loved seeing people argue or fight.”
It was a tabloid presidency; maybe Trump needed tabloid historians and reality-TV rebuttals. When Omarosa denounced the administration during her run on CBS’s Celebrity Big Brother, Deputy White House Press Secretary Raj Shah assailed her from the podium. “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice,” he said, “and this was the fourth time we’ve let her go.”
We. The Trump administration, Shah was as good as saying, was a continuation of The Apprentice on a global scale.
TVS WERE RAISED on the walls of Trump’s White House like the flags of a conquering army. In May 2017, Trump took reporters from Time magazine on a tour of the White House, bypassing the renovated moldings and new crystal chandelier to show his interviewers “something amazing”: a massive flat-screen TV, hanging opposite the fireplace in the dining room, and equipped with a capacious DVR. (He boasted to advisers about having “the world’s best TiVo,” as if it were a perk of office superior to Air Force One.) In an accompanying photo, Trump stands next to Vice President Mike Pence, staring grimly forward, clutching a remote control in both hands. He’s a king posing with the ceremonial instrument of his rule, the orb and scepter replaced with a DVR clicker.
TV became the language of his administration. His daily briefings were turned into television, figuratively and literally: “Trump likes to pore over visuals—maps, charts, pictures, and videos,” the Washington Post reported. He became alarmed during a national security meeting when a TV playing Fox News showed video of North Korean missiles blasting off; he had to be reassured that it was old footage and not a live missile launch. He made no apparent distinction between seeing something on a screen and seeing it in person, except maybe that the screen version seemed more authentic. After a massive hurricane hit Texas, he posted an assurance on Instagram that he had been “witnessing first-hand the horror & devastation.” The picture showed Trump looking at a map of Texas on an enormous flat-screen monitor.
Barack Obama had disdained TV news. “Not watching political television,” he told The New Yorker, “is part of how you stay focused on the task, as opposed to worrying about the noise.” Trump craved the noise. As CNN carried his first photo op on Air Force One live, the clicks of the cameras were drowned out by the “800 588-2300, Em-piiiire!” commercial jingle for Empire Today carpet and flooring, playing on a speaker in the background. His eyes would wander to the muted cable channels during meetings. Reportedly, there were three televisions in his bedroom, where he would repair early in the evening with a cheeseburger. If he felt he’d had a good day, he looked forward to TV as his dessert. “Tonight, I’m going to enjoy watching television,” he would tell Melania, “because I did great.”
But often, the stories would not be the story he thought he was watching all day. They would be about the bills not passed through Congress, the critics who called him a racist, the investigation into his campaign and Russia. The stories called him a liar, if not in so many words, then by pointing out the gap between his words and the truth. Without Mark Burnett and his teams of Apprentice editors on the case, there was no one to edit out his flubs, no one to keep unflattering images from leaking—a gust of wind, say, hoisting his comb-over and exposing his bare pink skull as he boarded Air Force One. After 9/11, news channels had invented the “zipper” graphic to deal with the deluge of news; now they developed a new graphic—the fact-checking chyron—to deal with the deluge of disinformation. “PENCE DENIES TRUMP SAID THINGS HE SAID,” ran one on CNN; on MSNBC, “TRUMP CLAIMS ‘WE WON IN A LANDSLIDE’/CLINTON WINNING POPULAR VOTE BY OVER 2.5 MILLION.”
Pointing out Trump’s lies, however, had the side effect of spreading them, and Trump, building on the work of Fox News, was conditioning his audience to dismiss any source but him. Simply pointing out common-sense reality made you an “Enemy of the People,” in Trump’s words, which happened also to have been the words of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Trump, not a reader, may or may not have known the origins of the phrase, just as he may or may not have known his phrase “America First” was used by fascist sympathizers before World War II. As with many things about Trump, figuring out his intention was less important than his action, which was to put his followers at war with information and define an injury to him as an injury to all.
“Enemy of the People” put the press in a double bind. On the one hand, it framed them as on the opposing team from Trump, which invited his supporters to disregard any bad news accordingly. On the other hand, it pressured them, subtly or overtly, to calibrate their coverage so as not to be perceived as if they were the opposition party. This led to such Trump-era clichés as the umpteen million interviews with elderly conservative diner customers in the Rust Belt—attempts to prove that the media hadn’t “forgotten” this exhaustively covered demographic—and to the worry that, if news outlets pointed out every lie or ill-informed statement Trump made, in so many words, they would look biased simply for representing reality. There’s a term in political philosophy, the “Overton window,” which describes the range of acceptable public discourse, which can be shifted by persistent enough extreme speech. Trump’s effect was to fling open the Overton window and shove the truth, arms flailing, straight out of it.
Trump made a similar acquisition of “fake news,” another term he rebranded to suit his marketing purposes. During the campaign, it had been a term for online news hoaxes—many of them in support of Trump, like a phony report that the Pope had endorsed him. As with “Make America Great Again,” he co-opted the phrase, secured the cultural copyright. Like “Make America Great Again,” “fake news” meant whatever you needed it to. At first it was a literal denial—“This news is untrue”—but it quickly entered the half-literal, pro-wrestling kayfabe-osphere of so many Trumpisms. Maybe it meant the news was true but unfair. Or it was true but disrespectful. Or it was true but it made the wrong people happy, and you were not going to give them the goddam satisfaction of admitting it. It was tribal signaling. It meant, “I give you permission to ignore this fact that is not good for our team.” Trump blurted as much in a tweet complaining about TV coverage: “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake).”
Still, he watched. He couldn’t help himself. He attacked CNN regularly, tweeting a doctored video of him downing Vince McMahon at WrestleMania, with the CNN logo imposed on McMahon’s head. When Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe mocked Trump for hanging fake Time magazine covers with his picture in his golf clubs, he tweeted the claim that she had once shown up at Mar-a-Lago “bleeding badly from a facelift.” (Trump claimed never to watch CNN or Morning Joe, like an actor who “never reads the reviews.”) White House aides fretted that the Morning Joe feud “overtook the president’s fight with CNN, which seemed in their eyes to have clearer villains and heroes.”
These fights themselves would become the news. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onto the screen shortly after the president hit “Send.” For decades, Trump had essentially been a cable-news channel in human form: loud, short of attention span, and addicted to conflict. Now he and cable had achieved the singularity, a meshing of man and machine into a symbiotic consciousness, the perturbation of each amplifying the other.
He would get angry watching people badmouth him on TV. He would lash out, and TV would get excited and cover it, and then he would get angry watching himself be angry. A White House staffer said that his fury at his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself in the Russia investigation got worse because “Trump watches TV coverage of him criticizing Sessions and gets madder.” In January 2018, the federal government shut down amid a budget fight in Congress. Trump “spent much of his day watching old TV clips of him berating President Barack Obama for a lack of leadership during the 2013 government shutdown.”
During the campaign, Trump used to watch the Golf Channel to relax. Now he watched nothing to relax. He was like a man in a Finnish sauna, blasting the heat, flogging himself with birch branches, believing that it stimulated the circulation.
But above all, he wanted his love. That, he got from Fox, which he could count on to tell him what a good day he had when nobody else would. Best of all was Fox & Friends, which would tell him what a good day he had before the day even began.
WHEN DONNY TRUMP WAS a little boy in Queens, a childhood friend of his recalls, he used to watch Andy’s Gang, a Saturday kids’ show hosted by Andy Devine. Once a popular comic-relief actor in cowboy movies, Devine was a gentle giant with a big lopsided smile. Every episode, his naughty puppet sidekick Froggy the Gremlin would work the studio audience into wild-edged peals of hysteria with his pranks. But at the end Devine would calm things down and speak straight to the kids at home: “Yes, sir, we’re pals. Pals stick together. Now gang, don’t forget church or Sunday school!”
This was the promise of the show: you would be swept up into a communal frenzy until you could barely control yourself, but in the end you would be accepted, loved, reassured that you were good.
Fox & Friends in the Trump era morphed into a morning children’s show for the president of the United States. Kids’ programs often hold the attention of their distractible audience by addressing them through the fourth wall. Dora the Explorer asked kids to help her chase off Swiper the Fox: “Say, ‘Swiper, no swiping!’ ” Elmo became the most popular Muppet on Sesame Street by talking to toddlers directly. The local hosts of Romper Room would pretend to look through a “magic mirror” and see the children in the home audience, calling them out by name.
Fox & Friends applied that formula to an audience of one. Its hosts offered Trump encouragement, flattery, and advice. When he tweeted, his tweets—many mornings, in perfect sync with the show’s topics—would materialize on a giant video wall. One morning in January 2017, the show put a video feed of the White House on screen and asked Trump to flash the lights on and off if he was watching. The producers added an effect of the lights flickering, a “TV trick” the hosts later acknowledged.
But for Trump, the childhood illusion—that your favorite show is as aware of you as you are of it—became real. Fox & Friends was Donald Trump’s magic mirror.
The president was the show’s audience, its subject, its publicist, and its virtual fourth host. His morning tweets set the focus of the show, which often scrambled to keep up. After the failure of a Republican healthcare plan, his ragetweets careered from “REPEAL failing ObamaCare now” to “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail” to advocating “full repeal” again. The Fox & Friends caption tried to impose order on the morning’s whiplash: “As Congress Spars, President Focuses on Jobs.” Spurred by a Trump tweet complaining that Senate Democrats were holding up his judicial nominees, Kilmeade called the Democrats’ resistance “anti-American.”
“Well, it’s anti-Trump, ultimately,” Doocy said.
“Which is anti-American,” Kilmeade answered.
But just as often, the show drove Trump’s agenda, and thus the nation’s. When it aired an incorrect report that former FBI director James Comey had leaked “top secret” information about a meeting with the president, Trump repeated the charge on Twitter: “So illegal!” (Swiper, no swiping!) Easter morning 2018, Fox & Friends Weekend reported an “army” of Central Americans—in truth, a ragtag group of refugees from Honduras—traveling to the United States through Mexico. Trump’s tweets that morning, after some benign Easter wishes, became increasingly agitated about the “caravan” of invaders. (“NEED WALL!”) By the end of the week, he’d deployed the National Guard to the border. (Thereafter, an immigrant “caravan” managed to appear whenever Fox News and Trump needed it—before the 2018 midterm elections, in the midst of a government shutdown Trump precipitated to pressure Congress to fund his wall.)
Media critics took to calling this obsequious iteration of Fox “state TV,” but that term implied that the state was controlling the media. More often in this case, the media was controlling the state.
In July 2017, I wrote a column in the New York Times about the feedback loop between Trump and Fox & Friends that ended up as part of that loop. The show’s hypnotic influence on Trump, I wrote, made it “the most powerful TV show in America.” Fox, seeing an opportunity to tweak the Times, took out a full-page ad in the paper highlighting that quote; the hosts of Fox & Friends showed off the ad on the air (not mentioning, of course, why I’d said the show was so powerful).
Minutes later, Trump tweeted out the quote from my column. Magic mirror time had begun for the day.
THERE WAS A TRAGIC DIMENSION to Trump’s TV dependence. TV was the true love that he could never confess. To a gaggle of reporters on a trip to Asia, he griped, “People that don’t know me, they say I like to watch television. . . . But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.” On that same trip, he had tweeted that he was “forced to watch @CNN” because Fox News was unavailable in the Philippines.
His denials of his TV-watching were jarring for being so obviously, needlessly false. Trump clearly loved TV and loved being on it. His administration boasted about The Apprentice. His aide Stephen Miller defended the president to CNN’s Jake Tapper as “a self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV.” Sometimes, Trump would slip and refer to the Cabinet Room as “the boardroom.” At a particularly low point in summer 2017, he held a live-TV cabinet meeting in which members around the long table competed to praise him—chief of staff Reince Priebus thanked Trump for “the opportunity and blessing” of working for him—exactly like Apprentice contestants kissing up before an elimination.
TV was mother’s milk to Trump; it was the focus of one of the few memories he shares of his actual mother in The Art of the Deal, watching Elizabeth’s coronation when he was a boy in Queens. But on some level—maybe it was that voice of Fred Trump telling Mary, For Christ’s sake, turn it off—he also seemed to find TV-watching shameful, weak, infantile. When he saw a New York Times report that his campaign manager Paul Manafort would try to send him messages by going on TV, he erupted: “Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”
“Baby” was one of Trump’s most common, seemingly deep-rooted, insults. Fred Trump raised Donald to admire the strong and the active; to sit and watch was weak and passive; to be weak and passive was to be a baby; and he was not a baby. “I am not a baby,” he said—twice—to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes during a combative interview in October 2018. To give a weak interview on TV: that was also being a baby, as he told Rudy Giuliani after what Trump considered an insufficiently zealous defense following the Access Hollywood tape, a time when Giuliani was one of the only people willing to speak up for him in public at all. “Rudy, you’re a baby!” Bob Woodward recounted him saying. “They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed.” Trump saw all this, of course, because he’d been watching TV, like a—but he was not a baby.
He was like a binge-eater self-soothing with tubs of ice cream: he would indulge, then spiral, then deny it all, chocolate sauce still staining the corner of his lips. “I have very little time for watching T.V.,” he tweeted one morning. The three days before that, he had retweeted six different videos from Fox & Friends.
DENIALS OR NO, magic mirror time began to run longer and longer. The president’s daily schedule included “Executive Time”—unstructured blocks available for TV and ragetweeting—until 11 a.m., with further such breaks in the afternoon, until the work day wrapped at 6 p.m. Weekdays, he was reportedly watching four to eight hours a day. Some weekends, he might not do much else besides eat and play golf.
You could say that the president was hardly working. Or you could say that he was doing the only job he was truly elected to do: monitoring, stoking, and embodying the cultural anger machine.
Political coalitions are complicated things. Some of Trump’s voters were mainline Republicans who wanted tax cuts or conservative Supreme Court justices or rollbacks of regulations. If Trump was the monster they had to ride to get to the land of small government, so be it.
But for the true believers—the rallygoers, the meme-sharers, the retweet-seekers—the tantrums and grievance and spite weren’t the means, they were the end. Shocking the system. Making liberal heads explode. Putting on a show.
Even more than winning, the faithful enjoyed seeing the enemy losing, the wounded bayoneted. They couldn’t get enough of Hillary Clinton–bashing, long after she lost. On Fox News and in Trump’s tweets, she became a perpetual bogeywoman, the equivalent of “Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People” from the daily “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. Trump’s diehards bought collectible mugs, after the election, labeled “LIBERAL TEARS.” Trump’s job was to fill ’em up.
Tears, in Trump’s America, were for losers. Trump mocked Senator Charles Schumer as “Cryin’ Chuck,” for choking up when, while criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban, he remembered his relatives killed by the Nazis. Trump himself once told a Christian-TV reporter that he had never cried. (Babies cry. I am not a baby.) The Trump administration made an ethos of reality TV—that empathy is weakness, whereas meanness equals strength and authenticity—into a principle of governing. You have to harden your heart to win. It’s a jungle out there.
So thorough was the administration’s conviction that in June 2018, when it started separating undocumented families at the border and imprisoning the children, it was surprised that anyone objected. On Fox News, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski mocked a Democratic strategist for bringing up the story of a girl with Down Syndrome separated from her mother, making a “sad trombone” noise: “Womp womp.”
“Womp womp” was the Trump National Anthem. Trumpism, beyond any policy, was the attempt to redefine cruelty as virtue. (Arendt had seen this same tendency in the intellectuals of Europe between the wars: “their brilliant and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty.”) “Virtue,” meanwhile, became a vice—specifically “virtue signaling,” the successor catchphrase to “bleeding heart,” but with a twist. Nixon-era conservatives at least acknowledged that “bleeding-heart liberals” were moved by genuine feelings. “Virtue signaling” added the implication that no one was really virtuous, that people simply faked it to make themselves look good—just like the “ ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity” whom Trump, in The Art of the Deal, compared unfavorably with his role model, Roy Cohn.
TRUMP STARTED HOLDING his rallies again, as his pick-me-up when the job got him down. He went back to Phoenix following the deadly August 2017 racist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white nationalists chanting “You will not replace us” (some substituting “Jews” for “you”), after which he’d crabbily insisted that there were “very fine people” on both sides. In September 2017—with the Russia investigation dragging on, his polls flagging, his various Obamacare-repeal attempts failed—he held a rally for a Senate candidate in Alabama, during which he decided to talk about football and TV.
“The NFL ratings are down massively, massively,” he said. Part of the problem, he added, was his old bugbear: not enough violence. “If you hit too hard—15 yards! Throw him out of the game!” But this time he had a new gripe, the players who were kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!”
It was textbook Trump culture warring. The between-the-lines racism. The obsession with ratings. The “You’re fired!” callback. The way his stream-of-consciousness rant tossed together a combo of resentments—America had gotten soft, liberals hated the flag, these black sons of bitches didn’t know their place—into a kind of freeform hate salad.
This (and not Trump’s endorsement of the Republican candidate, who lost) took over TV for days. And it recurred over weeks, as every football Sunday became a cycle of players kneeling in defiance of Trump, and Trump—aggravated by what he was seeing on TV—inflaming both the protest and the rage against it. By the next fall, when Nike prodded Trump (and boosted its sales) by making an ad with protest leader Colin Kaepernick, the football proxy war had become a new national fall tradition.
Nearly any other president would have sought to calm the matter (or at least have someone else fight the battle, like Spiro Agnew did for Nixon). But because Trump thought like a cable-news network, he couldn’t resist a conflict. And because he thought like the cable-news audience, he couldn’t resist making it worse—or, from the standpoint of his base and the red light, better.
The fight might be about policy—his draconian immigration measures, a Supreme Court appointment, restricting rights for transgender Americans. But just as often, it would be over symbols and slights: comedian Michelle Wolf lambasting his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; ABC’s firing his supporter Roseanne Barr over a racist tweet. Like Breitbart and Bannon, Yiannopoulos and the GamerGaters, Trump saw culture—sports, TV, Christmas—as another part of politics, maybe the main part. More than policy, people see culture as an extension of themselves, their ancestors, and the people they love. No one dances to a budget agreement, gathers with their family to watch healthcare legislation, or wakes their excited kids on Tax Day morning.
To ask why Trump would pursue an unnecessary fight is to forget that, in reality TV, every fight is necessary. Fighting is the end, not the means. So too in Trump’s politics. When you lose (though you never admit losing), your bloodied team cleaves closer to you, aggrieved and craving revenge. If you win, and you win in the ugliest possible way (narrowly, with no concessions or graciousness, the losers’ suffering taunted and enflamed), you ensure that the tears of your enemy will be flavored with the sweetest sorrow and pain and that the next fight, when it comes, will be even uglier, charged with recriminations that will draw your partisans tighter to your hip. It will make better TV.
IN EARLY 2018, Michael Wolff, a journalist who specialized in Manhattan media and power circles, published Fire and Fury, an account from inside the Trump White House. It depicted an administration in chaos. At the center of the chaos, invariably, was TV.
The president, Wolff wrote, would refer to himself in third person, like a character in a story. (This rang true if you’d watched The Apprentice—“You see why Trump is Trump”—or followed him on Twitter.) He would watch an interview on Fox and then post a misspelled, false ragetweet claiming that President Obama had ordered intelligence agencies to “tapp my phones” during the campaigns. He would replay slights to him on his DVR, fuming, his mood worsening, like Nixon with upgraded technology. He would refuse to watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe out of pique, then have his twenty-eight-year-old assistant Hope Hicks—formerly a PR aide to Ivanka—tremulously recap the show for him every morning. (Wolff got White House access in the first place because Trump had seen him say nice things about him on CNN’s Reliable Sources.)
Shortly after Fire and Fury came out, the cartoonist Ben Ward posted what looked like an excerpt on Twitter, with the comment, “Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind”:
On his first night in the White House, President Trump complained that the TV in his bedroom was broken, because it didn’t have “the gorilla channel.” Trump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.
To appease Trump, White House staff compiled a number of gorilla documentaries into a makeshift gorilla channel, broadcast into Trump’s bedroom from a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn. However, Trump was unhappy with the channel they had created, moaning that it was “boring” because “the gorillas aren’t fighting.”
Staff edited out all the parts of the documentaries where gorillas weren’t hitting each other, and at last the president was satisfied. “On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me.
The parody so perfectly comported with the stories about Trump—the endless TV watching, the lust for conflict, the tantrums—and so deliciously satisfied his critics’ desire to see him exposed as an addled child, that Ward’s joke was widely shared as true. Ward finally had to go on Twitter to clarify that the gorilla channel wasn’t real.
But also, the gorilla channel was real.
It was real that the president’s staff tried, fruitlessly, to manage him by managing what TV he saw and limiting his “screen time.” (Bannon, seeing that his boss was mainlining up to eight hours of tube a day, asked, “Think what your brain would be like if you did that?”)
It was real that TV personalities—who cast his world in terms of exciting victories and wicked antagonists—were more persuasive to Trump than his own staff. He directed his secretary of state to “closely study” a white-nationalist conspiracy theory that white South African farmers were targeted for “large-scale killing,” because Fox’s Tucker Carlson had promoted it. Sean Hannity, who fulminated about conspiracies against Trump nightly on Fox, was the most influential White House counselor. “He basically has a desk in the place,” a Trump adviser said. Trump ordered the release of classified intelligence on the Russia investigation at the behest of his favorite TV hosts: “the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanine Pirro.” He disastrously shut down the government for five weeks, in a failed attempt to pressure Congress into funding his border wall, after Fox & Friends said he would “look like a loser” if he didn’t. He was as impressionable as a 1950s kid eating Cheerios because the Lone Ranger said to. Sometimes he would hire people who talked about him on his programs, like Scaramucci, then fire them when the flesh version disappointed.
It was real that political reporters would get thousands of dollars’ worth of dental work, to look more telegenic when the president saw them on his programs, the better to get their calls returned from the White House.
It was real that critics, lobbyists, and corporations trying to persuade or curry favor with the administration started reaching out to the president, not by booking meetings, but by buying commercial time on the TV news shows he binge-watched.
It was real that Trump’s own staff created TV events to placate, control, and persuade him. Things were more real to Trump if he saw them on TV. People were more real if he saw them on TV—even people he saw, in person, every day. White House officials would go on TV “to emphasize points to their boss, who was likely to be watching just steps away in his residence.” When that didn’t work, they booked outside experts onto his shows. When Trump took a shine to Fox’s Pirro, a former prosecutor who offered him on-air advice on his legal troubles, someone from the White House had to go on her show every week to get the staff’s voice into his head.
The president was like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show (1998), except in reverse. In the film, Truman Burbank, an ordinary man, is raised from infancy on an island that serves as a vast, hermetically constructed reality-TV set, which he takes to be the real world. In fact, he’s being surveilled for a long-running, voyeuristic TV series, which he finally discovers one day when he sails off for the horizon and his boat punctures the skin of a sky-colored dome. On The Trump Show, the president was the star of the TV series that he lived inside, but he was also its sole audience; it was the rest of the world that needed to be conscripted as stage set and players, to perform the required story.
Others quickly got the idea, crawling inside the magic mirror to ask Trump to bomb Syria, to fire Robert Mueller, not to fire Robert Mueller. Ann Coulter, conservative TV’s perpetual font of spite, went on Fox amid news coverage of children being imprisoned at the Mexican border—“I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV”—and told Trump, directly to the camera, that the suffering kids were “child actors”: “Do not fall for it, Mr. President.” “One of the ways to influence the president,” a high-profile white nationalist told the Boston Globe, “is to make sure there’s things on Fox that interest him.” Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, seeking a meeting with Trump about opioid abuse, said on Morning Joe: “To the president: I know you’re watching, so I’m looking forward to meeting with you.” That morning, Trump called him.
At times, the president would attempt to program the gorilla channel himself. An associate of his reported getting a call in April 2018 from Trump, who asked the source to go on TV and tell Trump to fire the special counsel investigating him. It is possible, of course, to see this as the act of the president as canny media manipulator, attempting to engineer a “Will no one rid us of this turbulent priest?” chorus to excuse putting himself above the law (although he ended up taking no action). But you could also see it as a frustrated couch potato, unhappy with his programs, fiddling with the antenna, smacking the sides of the box, demanding that it tell him a better story.
The performances for the audience of one could take on the high drama of a reality-show season finale, as when Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused by research psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of sexually assaulting her when they were high school students in the 1980s. Dr. Ford was called to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a live-TV spectacle that recalled the wrenching 1991 hearings where Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. But this time, with the Senate entrenched along partisan lines, Kavanaugh’s fate would largely depend on the continued support of the News-Junkie-in-Chief.
Ford spoke the morning of September 27, 2018, her tremulous account moving some spectators in the hearing room to tears. Trump, the TV native, knew how persuasive she came across; even Fox News was calling her testimony a “disaster” for Republicans. Trump had been upset for days, since Kavanaugh had given a numb, robotic interview to Fox, stumbling over canned lines like “I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.” What bothered Trump was his meekness. Why wasn’t Kavanaugh hitting back? Jesus! He’d fired people for that on The Apprentice.
When Kavanaugh took the stand that afternoon, he delivered what the president wanted to see: an imitation of himself. The judge showed up hot and angry, roaring that the hearing was a “national disgrace,” his features twisting and reddening, his plosives smacking against the microphone. His rage was discomfiting and divisive. But he knew that there was one show, and there was one viewer, who required one performance—who wanted to see his guy stop being polite and start getting real. Almost the second the closing gavel struck, Trump tweeted his review: “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him.”
Trump’s choleric face was mirrored in the face of the next associate justice of the Supreme Court; it was reflected in the legislators who learned to ape his blown-gasket affect to win over his followers and avoid his displeased tweets; it was reflected in the campaign ad for the winning gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, who threatened to “round up criminal illegals” in his big ol’ pickup truck; it was reflected in the conservative news pundits spinning uglier conspiracy theories and sharper vitriol to enflame his imagination; it was reflected in the Montana congressional candidate who won his election, and Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement, after body-slamming a reporter for asking him a question; it was reflected in the school bullies yelling, “Build the wall!” at their Hispanic classmates.
The world had become a closed-circuit TV network dedicated to the cultivation, appeasement, emulation, and management of one excitable viewer. Every character on the channel mattered only in relation to him, for how they could affect him or be affected by him. It was tacitly understood that American civic life had become a show, and that there were expectations when one was called to perform in it. The president would be satisfied only once the gorillas were fighting.
