THE LEAST OBJECTIONABLE PROGRAM
“DONALD J. TRUMP,” THE TELEVISION CHARACTER, WAS BORN on August 21, 1980. This is what it looked like.
Tom Brokaw is introducing the viewers of The Today Show to a personality who’s been making noise in the New York City real-estate business. “Trying to scrape up a down payment for a little fixer-upper in your neighborhood?” he says. “This is Donald Trump, thirty-three years old, and some people think that he wants to buy the World Trade Center, the 110-story Manhattan skyscraper that anyone can pick up—if they’ve got the coins.”*
For the audience making breakfast and dressing for work, particularly if they’re not New Yorkers, it’s their first introduction to a face they will see countless times again on NBC. (Trump’s mid-’70s real-estate projects landed him briefly on a few local talk shows—One Woman’s New York, Here and Now—which appear to be lost to time.)
Brokaw has a shaggy haircut and wears a suit the color of toast. The whole set is shades of toast—the desk, the curtains framing the “window.” (Through it, you can see Trump Tower, or rather an artist’s rendering, because the building does not exist yet.) There are flowers and potted plants. It’s 1980, which is still, really, the 1970s. Jimmy Carter is still president. Everything, in 1980, kind of looks like toast.
But the 1980s are there, sitting opposite Brokaw. “Donald Trump, real estate investor,” the caption calls him. His hands are clasped. He slouches a bit, like a prep-school kid at an interview for an internship he’s been assured that he’s going to get. Brokaw kicks off, noting that Trump has built up his father’s more modest real-estate business by buying up fire-sale properties in Manhattan.
Brokaw’s manner is earnest Midwest-newsman—plain-spoken, dressed like a regional bank manager, sharing his audience’s wonder at the extravagances of Manhattan, like the new Trump Tower, which has just broken ground next door to Tiffany’s. You can buy an apartment, Brokaw marvels, “one floor of it—one floor of that whole building, that is—$11 million altogether.”
The most contentious section comes in the middle, as Brokaw asks Trump why he didn’t save the renowned Art Deco friezes on the Bonwit Teller building he demolished to build his namesake tower. Trump deflects it creamily: “There was something of an outcry, but I think that’s generally subsided now, and I think people like what we’re doing.” The friezes—delicate bas reliefs of classical nudes dancing with scarves—weighed tons, he says, and “people could have been very badly hurt and killed” if they fell into the street while being taken down.
It’s transparently bullshit, of course. Trump himself will later put it more frankly in The Art of the Deal: “I just wasn’t prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a few Art Deco sculptures that I believed were worth considerably less.” But Brokaw’s audience is not much interested in the fine points of New York preservation controversies, and he moves on. “You’ve said you don’t care if you become a billionaire?” No; “I just want to keep busy and keep active and be interested in what I do, and that’s all there is to life as far as I’m concerned.”
Someone watching that interview in 1980 probably never thought twice about it again, once they polished off the toaster waffles and headed out the door. Maybe they took away a general ambient knowledge that people paid ridiculous sums to live in New York, the city they’d watched burn during the World Series just a few years ago. Trump himself, assured, subdued, unctuous, doesn’t cut a memorable figure yet, beyond his mane of hair. He’s still more James Spader (the oily preppy of Pretty in Pink) than Michael Douglas (the predator-capitalist of Wall Street).
But from our vantage point, there’s a lot of information in it. The striking thing is Trump’s tone. He sounds like Donald Trump as we would later know him, yet not at all. His manner of speaking is mild. His sentences are diagrammable. There are some familiar locutions—“very badly hurt and killed,” “people like what we’re doing”—but not the punching cadence, the pugnaciousness, the anger. There are no insults and little bragging. Given a chance to engage a controversy, he deflects it. He’s trying to charm rather than incite.
There could be personal reasons for this, even biological ones. Trump’s early speaking style could, in part, be the mannerism of the outer-borough businessman still hoping to be accepted by Manhattan society. His later manner, as a candidate and as president, could be a performer evolving his affect to his audience. It also could be a sign of cognitive decline. The science writer Sharon Begley asked neurolinguistic experts and psychologists to analyze the changes in Trump’s speaking style over the decades, and they suggested the change could reflect anything from fatigue to the physical deterioration of his brain.
But there’s something else you’re hearing in the Donald Trump of 1980: the voice of twentieth-century mainstream media.
THE YEAR 1980—REALLY, right about the precise moment Trump sat on Brokaw’s couch—was the peak of the mass broadcast-TV audience. TV was still, essentially, a three-network medium. An American population of about 226 million had only a few programming choices at any time. A popular show could get 60 million viewers, three times as many people as would watch a number-one show in the 2010s, when the overall population was more than 40 percent greater.
In other words, the audience for each of the major networks in 1980 was about as big as it had ever been and would ever be. For several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, first radio and then television did something that hadn’t been done before or since: bring together the majority of the public to have the same cultural experiences at the same time, all the time.
The mid-twentieth-century mass media took a country of regional cultures, dialects, and art forms and introduced a monoculture. At the same time that the Interstate Highway System was bypassing local byways and national chains were selling the same goods and fast food coast to coast, TV gave us national news, national amusements, and national obsessions. There was even a national voice, in the mid-Atlantic neutral-speak of TV hosts and anchors.
Today, in the twenty-first century, some commentators romanticize this period as a time when Americans shared common interests and experiences, before we were divided into bubbles.
But at the time, their twentieth-century peers denounced the same phenomenon for creating a culture of conformity and complacency: what the cultural and social critic Dwight MacDonald identified in 1962 as “masscult” and “midcult.” George W. S. Trow, in the 1980 essay that became the 1981 book Within the Context of No Context, wrote that television divided American life into “the grid of intimacy” (one’s personal relationships) and “the grid of 200 million” (mass public life, on the national scale imposed by TV). It thus obliterated “the middle distance,” essentially, the intermediate institutions, between the individual and the nation as a whole, that once defined and elevated civic life.
The communal stage on which Donald Trump debuted was the broadest ever created. That created certain demands of presentation. If everyone watched the same things, then everything on TV—sitcoms, news, politicians, talk-show guests—had to try to appeal to everybody.
The ideal TV show of the time was what Paul L. Klein, an audience-measurement executive at NBC, referred to in TV Guide as the “Least Objectionable Program” or, charmingly, the LOP.
The LOP was a kind of programming whose chief goal was negative: Never give the viewer a reason to change the channel. It was fine if a show was unexceptional as long as it was unexceptionable.
Why? Television was something that flowed into your house. Rather than seek out your preferred programming—as you would choose a book at a library, or as you’d pick a show today on Netflix—you turned TV on like a tap and let gush out whatever happened to be coming through the pipes. That would be whatever channel you were watching when last you turned the machine off. The inertia of the American TV viewer was the broadcaster’s best friend, the arduous journey from the couch to the channel dial a defensive moat.
The LOP—innocuous, smoothly palatable—defined the network programming of the 1950s and 1960s. (Not all of it, obviously, but we remember the exceptions—the avant-garde surrealism of The Prisoner, the antiwar protest of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the social allegory of The Twilight Zone—because they were exceptions.) As American life became more divided and contentious, sitcoms escaped into domestic fantasies about aliens, genies, and witches. As the carnage of Vietnam intruded into the evening news, TV offered up the chipper GI sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and Hogan’s Heroes, about the wacky adventures of prisoners in a Nazi POW camp in World War II.
The LOP was there to give you a break. You didn’t turn on the TV to find something you loved; you turned it on to find something you didn’t hate. You turned it on to have the TV on. TV aimed to be OK with everyone, to induce a kind of room-temperature stasis. It was inoffensive, unprovocative, unobjectionable.
These programming guidelines applied to politicians especially. This may have been what Trump had in mind when, two months after his Today appearance, he told NBC’s Rona Barrett that someone “with strong views” could not be elected president in the TV culture of the time.
The mass TV audience wanted smiles and reassurances. It wanted optimism. Even if the electorate was unsettled, even if it wanted to lash out, it wanted candidates who would soothe its fury, not goad it. It wanted that cool, prime-time TV feeling of a steady hand in control. Agitator candidates, like Barry Goldwater (the 1964 Republican nominee who declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”) and segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace, could get attention. But in the three-network-TV era, they could never win.
In late October 1980, a few weeks after Trump sat down with Barrett, President Jimmy Carter and his opponent Ronald Reagan had their only debate. Reagan had political tailwinds all year—Iran, the general American bummer Carter referred to as “malaise”—but he was hurt by the perception that he was an extremist who couldn’t be trusted with the bomb.
He was, however, at home with a microphone and camera. Before Reagan was governor of California, he was a baseball announcer, a mid-tier movie star (he kept the nickname “the Gipper” from his role in the football flick Knute Rockne, All American), and the host of TV’s General Electric Theater. Reagan was not a thespian of great depth—among his roles, he costarred with a chimp in 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo—but he knew how to disarm an audience and put them at ease. He used the debate to soften his image, famously deflecting an attack by Carter with the one-liner, “There you go again,” and a smile. Message: Surely Grandpa wouldn’t blow up the world!
Political analysts disagree on whether Reagan would have won the election anyway, but polling suggests that he at least widened his margin that last week. He successfully recast himself as the Least Objectionable Program.
Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death around the time of Reagan’s reelection, and while his book was a study of the media over decades it was also, between the lines, very specifically about political language in the age of Reagan. (The idea that the values of show business had conquered the presidency was a defining worry of liberals at the time—at least until Bill Clinton, whom cultural critic Kurt Andersen called “the entertainer-in-chief,” won in 1992.) By 1984, Postman wrote, debates were covered not as contests of ideas but as “boxing matches,” albeit ones fought with velvet gloves: “how they looked, fixed their gaze, smiled and delivered one-liners. . . . Thus, the leader of the free world is chosen by the people in the Age of Television.”†
Ironically, Postman’s critique has something in common with Trump’s complaint to Rona Barrett about election-year TV, that it gives an edge to the candidate with “a big smile.” Postman was concerned that the tyranny of the cheerfully entertaining worked against intellectuals, which was hardly Trump’s worry. But it also worked against bomb-throwers.
So you can see the way Trump talks to Tom Brokaw—roguish rather than threatening, urbane rather than pugilistic—as a way of reconciling himself with the voice of that media era. If he tries to reassure rather than aggravate, to soothe rather than inflame, it’s because that is what 1980 required. Cool, not hot. A purr, not a scream. The least objectionable version of himself.
The journey of Donald Trump from Least Objectionable Program in 1980 to Most Objectionable Program in 2016—when he won as very much the kind of personality he said could never be elected in Reagan’s time—is, in part, the story of the disintegration of the mass-media audience.
TV IS A BUSINESS. What stays on the air is what makes money. In the early decades of TV, this worked simply. TV shows made money through advertising. The more viewers—young, old, urban, rural, rich, poor—the more advertisers would pay. This reinforced the idea of the LOP. If a show appealed to more kinds of people, it was better business. There was not, yet, a means of monetizing a show because it especially appealed to, say, twenty-six-year-old male extreme-sports enthusiasts.
So you offered a little something for everybody. Thus variety-show host Ed Sullivan hosted both the Beatles and Señor Wences, the ventriloquist who used a face drawn on his hand as a puppet. The television of the 1950s reflected a go-along, get-along sensibility not simply because of the social conservatism of the time, but because it kept people from changing the channel. (And, of course, the one reinforced the other.) And the television of the 1960s was much the same, even as the larger society divided.
The first fissures in the great mass-audience glacier started appearing as early as the late 1960s and the 1970s. As advertisers became more interested in more specific audiences, especially young ones (“Now it’s Pepsi—for those who think young”), programmers took note.
Earlier in the ’60s, TV fell hard for shows about country folk—The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction—which appealed to rural viewers who felt represented and city folk who got to laugh at the likeable rubes. On The Beverly Hillbillies, backwoodsman Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen) struck oil and moved his family to “Californee,” where their snooty neighbors looked down on them. On Green Acres, a New York attorney (Eddie Albert) with a fashionable, heavily accented wife (Eva Gabor), gave up the city for “farm livin’.” (Trump—the Manhattan penthouse dweller with the accented wife who became president by pitching his campaign to the resentments of rural, white voters—would reprise the Eddie Albert role in a sketch at the 2005 Emmy Awards.) CBS had a lot of these shows, but at the beginning of the ’70s it axed most of them in the “Rural Purge,” a midlife crisis aimed at rejuvenating the network with more “relevant,” and thus hopefully young-skewing, programs like The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
If the Clampetts were around in 2016, they’d have probably voted Trump. And Trump appealed to the Clampett in his voters, the shared grievance that they were laughed at, scorned as “deplorables,” dismissed—or simply, like Jed and his kin, canceled—by an alien liberal culture.
CBS executive Michael Dann, who had programmed many of the countrified comedies, protested the Rural Purge shortly before leaving the network. “Just because the people who buy refrigerators are 26 to 35 years old and live in Scarsdale,” he said, “you should not beam your programming only at them.” But exactly that approach would, over a long time, become the future of television, and Dann had a hand in it. One of his last acts at CBS was to pick up Norman Lear’s All in the Family, about an outrageous loudmouth from Queens whom millions of Americans would come to love despite, or because of, his bigoted blather.
All in the Family, which premiered in January 1971, began a few years of ferment in TV, when programmers sought to steer into the chaos of American social life rather than spackle over it. M*A*S*H, the antiwar comedy that launched on CBS the next year, used the Korean War as a thinly veiled stand-in for the one still being fought in Vietnam. Lear’s Maude (a spinoff of All in the Family) and Good Times (a spinoff of Maude) made comedy of feminism and inner-city poverty. Even escapist TV become fashionably gritty, with violent (for the time) cop dramas like Toma and S.W.A.T. playing off the daily news of urban blight and lawlessness. (When Trump gave Brokaw his pitch about turning around the “inner city,” he was referencing a narrative that prime-time TV had been giving the Today audience for years—even, or especially, if they lived nowhere near a city.)
But three-network TV remained a mass enterprise, and the gravitational pull of the LOP reasserted itself. By the mid-’70s, the networks wanted optimistic and upbeat, turning to nostalgia (Happy Days), fantasy (The Love Boat), and sex appeal (Charlie’s Angels). It was as if, with Nixon’s resignation, the industry saw its burst of creative restlessness as a Watergate-like fever that it had burned through. Gerald Ford declared that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” presenting himself as a Least Objectionable President, as anodyne and forgettable as a car commercial. TV’s Ford-Carter years reached a bland détente with the aftermath of change, picking and choosing those elements of the times that were most adaptable to family entertainment. The sexual revolution became Three’s Company (1977), feminism became single-mom comedies like One Day at a Time (1975), consciousness-raising became Mork & Mindy (1978), the sort of alien-comes-to-Earth sitcom that TV loved in the 1960s, now with a subtext of psycho-patter and cokehead mania from the improv comic Robin Williams. These shifts fit a population that was turning inward, where Lasch’s culture of narcissism was taking hold. The 1970s wanted to mellow out. The LOP was happy to take the edge off.
So the population got bigger, but the number of major networks remained at three. Thus 1980, the cusp of the Reagan era, was the statistical height of mass-market television. The big fragmentation of the TV audience would come later in the 1980s and beyond, thanks to two trends that would begin to accelerate not long after Trump sat down with Brokaw.
The first was the weaponization of demographics—the idea that some people’s attention was worth more to advertisers than others. NBC, Trump’s future employer and partner, pursued the strategy aggressively. In 1981, the network was besieged after a string of flops, including historic stinkers like Supertrain (1979), about mystery and romance on a luxury locomotive. It also had one success, Hill Street Blues, a literate, rawly realistic police drama whose only drawback was that almost nobody was watching it.
But those almost-nobodies were young, urban, and well-off, and advertisers—increasingly focused on targeting specific consumer groups—were ready to pay a premium to reach them. As Time magazine put it in 1985, “Madison Avenue mavens were discovering that a rule long applied to magazines—that 1000 New Yorker readers are more valuable than 1000 National Enquirer readers—made sense in prime time as well.” In the 1984–85 season, Hill Street Blues had an overall rating 13 percent lower than the prime-time soap Knots Landing on CBS, yet commanded the same rate, $200,000 for a thirty-second commercial. Advertisers preferred rich viewers for obvious reasons. They preferred young viewers for less obvious ones: they watched less TV, which made them harder to reach (thus worth paying a premium for), and, supposedly, they were developing lifetime brand loyalties.
The second thing that would break up the mainstream TV audience was cable. In 1980, when Donald Trump sat down with Tom Brokaw, CNN had been in business for only two months. MTV would go on the air a year later. As cable spread, it would transform a mass experience into a customized one. If broadcast networks began with the idea of TV for everyone, cable channels were by definition TV for some, and only some. You watched ESPN because you really wanted to see sports—because you only wanted to see sports.
There was a channel for music, and a channel for music for slightly older people, and a channel for country music. There was a channel for news and a channel for business news and a channel for weather. Every network-TV genre—kids’ shows, cooking, game shows—became a channel, and then it became several channels, more targeted, more specific, each subdivision subdividing, and so on, like an exploding fractal pattern. In 1980, according to Nielsen, about 20 percent of American TV households had cable or satellite TV; by the end of the century it was 76 percent.
(Oh, I haven’t mentioned the Internet. We’ll get to the Internet, which in 1980 was barely reaching its first thin tendrils into American homes through boxy hobbyist computers and screeching modems. But suffice it to say, for now, that it would slice the already subdivided cable audience into micron-thin layers. The Internet gave us the dictum known as Rule 34: “If it exists, there’s porn of it.” That rule applies broadly to non-porn as well. If you exist, you are a channel, if perhaps a very, very small one.)
BUT WE’RE GETTING AHEAD of ourselves. In 1980, these shifts were still a long way off. National TV was still in the something-for-everyone era.
And Donald Trump, it’s already quite clear, was not for everyone. So say you’re creating the character “Donald Trump”—a local-media creation that you’re trying to get picked up for national syndication. How do you write him for this moment, the cusp of the ’70s and the ’80s, Carter and Reagan? What do you build him out of?
Pop culture in the 1970s did not exactly love rich guys. If you were watching a lot of TV in the ’70s, you saw that prime time was filled with working-class heroes. (One of Trump’s biographers, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, describes ’70s Trump at the end of his nights out, watching TV while eating through a bag of candy.)
The Waltons (1972) followed a rural Virginia family and community hanging together through the Great Depression. The Nielsen top 10 in the 1970s was full of people living from paycheck to paycheck, and even if the shows weren’t explicitly political, they were rooted in real-life challenges. On Alice (1976), a single mom raised her son on a waitress’s salary. In Welcome Back, Kotter (1975), a teacher went home to Brooklyn to teach a class of remedial learners from a range of ethnic backgrounds (one of them was Juan Epstein, the “Puerto Rican Jew”). TV’s favorite characters worked in garages (Chico and the Man and Happy Days) and breweries (Laverne & Shirley). When luxury was served, it was often with a side of judgment: on Fantasy Island (1978), guests paid to have their dreams come true at a tropical resort, but usually learned that they were better off learning to be happy with their real lives.
In the 1970s, if you were rich on TV or in the movies, you were likely the bad guy. Rich kids like Trump were the worst of all—the uptight upper-crust Omega House frat boys in Animal House (1978) and the snotty, entitled bullies from Camp Mohawk in Meatballs (1979). (The template would survive, in some form, into the Reagan era, when the screenwriter of Back to the Future Part II based his villain, Biff Tannen, on Trump.) On The Dukes of Hazzard (1979), the moonshining Duke boys, driving a Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag painted on the roof, outraced and outwitted the corrupt minions of backwoods oligarch Boss Hogg.
But by 1980, Hollywood’s attitude toward rich people, heralded by the likes of Rona Barrett, was beginning to turn. The wealthy were still mainly assholes. But they were, increasingly, our assholes. Nowhere was this more evident than on TV’s most popular show at the moment Donald Trump debuted on Today: a prime-time CBS soap about a lustily arrogant son of a bitch running a business handed down to him by his daddy.
Dallas, which had debuted in 1978, was in the middle of its “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger, in which the audience was left hanging on the fate of J. R. Ewing, a loathsome oil tycoon who was nonetheless charismatic and compellingly watchable. In the space-besotted 1960s, Larry Hagman had played an affable astronaut who became “master” to a magical genie (Barbara Eden, in belly-baring top and harem pants) in the fantasy/female-imprisonment-comedy I Dream of Jeannie. As J.R., he rolled up a lusty vision of America into one sinful package: glitz, sex, and cowboy hats.
J. R. Ewing, arriving on TV during the Carter-era moral response to Watergate, offered a refreshing highball of escapist amorality. He was hungry and transparent and had a silver forked tongue: scheming against family members over an inheritance, he quipped, “Like my daddy used to say, ‘Where there’s a way, there’s a will.’ ” There was nothing redeeming about anything J.R. did, but he enjoyed it so damn much—Hagman, the son of Broadway star Mary Martin, tore into the role like a plate of juicy brisket. Yes, there were good guys and less-bad guys on Dallas, like J.R.’s nice-guy brother Bobby, but you no more watched for them than you read Paradise Lost for the non-fallen angels.
When the mystery was resolved in November 1980, somewhere close to 90 million viewers watched—three-quarters of the total national TV audience. “Maybe it wasn’t completely coincidental,” David Bianculli wrote in Dictionary of Teleliteracy, “that Larry Hagman’s J.R. Ewing was regaining power, and confronting his would-be assailant, the same month that Ronald Reagan was elected president: both Reagan and J.R. Ewing would spend the decade perpetuating the private-enterprise excesses of the eighties.”
Dallas inspired clones throughout the Reagan years, as Ron and Nancy Reagan were reintroducing celebrity and French couture to the White House: its spinoff Knots Landing, ABC’s Dallas-in-Denver soap Dynasty (with Joan Collins sashaying into the J.R. role), and CBS’s Falcon Crest (essentially Dallas in wine country).
These shows assured you that money didn’t buy happiness. And they gave you an outrageous, jackpot-winner fantasy of what you would buy—screw the happiness!—if you had the chance. (This was one reason that The Beverly Hillbillies was a hit in the populist prime-time ’60s; the Clampetts were working-class and millionaires at the same time.)
Later, in a 1990 interview with Playboy, Trump would cite this kind of TV series as model and justification for his public flaunting: “Dynasty did it on TV. It’s very important that people aspire to be successful. The only way you can do it is if you look at somebody who is.” He realized, maybe more than most, the importance of TV in shaping people’s dreams and values.
All these long-running soaps featured rich people Americans loved to hate. But love-to-hate is the first step toward love.
WITH THIS RENEWED FASCINATION with the rich came the idea that there were gradations and categories of the rich. Maybe you could be rich and still be an outsider, a rebel.
A month before Trump spoke to Tom Brokaw—July 25, 1980—Harold Ramis’s Caddyshack came out in theaters. It was a modest success and tepidly reviewed. But over the coming decades, it would be embraced as a classic of American comedy.
Caddyshack has a lot in common with other underdog comedies of its time (The Bad News Bears, Meatballs, Stripes)—namely, scrappy rebels winning out over privilege and institutions. Set at an exclusive country club, it’s nominally about Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe), a hardworking caddy trying to make money for college by cozying up to the stuffed-shirt Judge Smails (Ted Knight). With the help of some oddball friends, Danny wins a golf tournament, and thus money for college. It’s the kind of slobs-vs.-snobs story, about ragged misfits beating the system, that wove the rebellious spirit of the 1960s with the Revolutionary spirit of the Bicentennial. You can see the theme running from sports movies of the time, like Breaking Away (the townies vs. the college kids), to blockbusters, like Star Wars (the rebels vs. the Empire).
But Caddyshack is also a class-war story in which the richest character is the ally of the proles. Danny is drawn into a larger rivalry between Judge Smails and the boorish, crass (and much wealthier) Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield). Czervik, a real-estate developer, is peacocky and boisterously insulting. He wears ridiculous loud jackets rather than the Judge’s ridiculous preppy nautical wear. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, he roars up in his giant yacht, spewing wake everywhere, and swamps the dock where Judge Smails and a group of swells are christening his tasteful new sailboat.
Czervik is among the rich country clubbers, but he isn’t of them. His wealth doesn’t give him membership in high society, just the independence not to care about its rules. It’s the working-class dream: fuck-you money. Judge Smails is the kind of rich prick everybody hates—superior, status-obsessed, jealously guarding the invisible barriers between himself and the riffraff. Czervik is you as a rich person, free to want what you want and like what you like. Watching Dangerfield—whose comic persona was of a schlub who “gets no respect”—depantsing the elitists is so exhilarating that the studio head, watching the dailies, told Ramis to rewrite the script to give him more screen time. Al Czervik was literally a scene-stealer.
This particular archetype of wealth especially served Trump later, particularly in the 2016 Republican primary, when he essentially ran as Al Czervik. (He intuited, correctly, that the Republican base was increasingly alienated from a party that continued to put forward Judge Smailses.) He sized up as his first punching bag the Smailsian Jeb Bush—soft-spoken, well-mannered, from a good family—and proceeded to spray him with yacht-wake at every opportunity. He called Bush “low-energy,” suggested that Bush was sympathetic to “illegals” because his wife was born in Mexico, then refused—at a live TV debate—to apologize. The bald public insult was a straight-up Czervik move; in Caddyshack he tells Smails’s wife, “You must have been something before electricity.”
The pop culture of 1980 was on the cusp of a turn. It was betting that whatever anti-materialism had come out of the ’60s, whatever populist idealism had come out of Watergate, wasn’t going to stick. People were not just going to stop ogling luxury. Covetous human nature had not been repealed.
The character “Donald Trump” was that bet in human form.
* Trump was thirty-four, not thirty-three. Brokaw may have picked up the age from an August 10 New York Daily News feature, which referenced the rumor that Trump was interested in the WTC and also shaved a year off Trump’s age.
† In 2016, when Trump ran, CNN literally promoted the debates as a prizefight, with a ringside-style announcer and graphics—“THIS . . . IS . . . IT . . . ROUND 3,” punctuated by a boxing-ring bell.
