DONALD TRUMP HAD ONE FRIEND WHO STUCK BY HIM HIS entire campaign, one partner who never left his service. When he spoke, he spoke to one audience: not the moderators at the debates, not the throngs at his rallies, not the “forgotten man and woman” that his speechwriters kept referring to.
He spoke to the red light.
The red light on top of the TV camera said that the machine was on. It said that a collective intelligence, in studios and control rooms, had decided you were worthy, for the moment, of attention. The red light had been there in Tom Brokaw’s Today show studio, on Donahue, on The Fresh Prince. It was on The Apprentice, when he gave it a floor of Trump Tower to live in.
Between the red light and every person watching at home ran the thinnest filament, through which they transmitted their love, hate, excitement, fear. All these filaments converged in the light and made it burn. It was bioluminescence, a glow powered by pure human emotion.
He knew what the red light wanted, because it was just like him. It didn’t care what you had given it before, only what you would give it next. If you didn’t have anything for it, you stopped existing until you did.
At his rallies, he once explained, he often didn’t look at the people. The people were easy. If they got listless, you’d yell, “Build the wall!” and they’d snap back.
But the red light’s tastes were more exotic. It wanted something new. It wanted something dangerous. If he sensed that it might blink off—meaning that he was no longer being carried live on cable news—he told the Washington Post, “I would say something new to keep the red light on.”
If what he said got someone punched in the face—well, he didn’t throw the punch, did he? If what he said was the opposite of what he said before, then that was what he believed now, until the next time.
If he kept the red light sated, it would help him. The red light put you into the unreal estate of TV, the place that was everywhere, that was better than the real world. When it turned off, you died, a little bit.
THE RED LIGHT needed a show, always. So he started with one. The morning of June 16, 2015, he appeared at the top of the Trump Tower lobby escalator with his wife Melania—sphinxlike as always, in a white skirt and shoulderless top—in front of a sign that read “Currency Exchange.” They descended toward a blue-curtained stage in the building’s food court. The PA system blared Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” a protest song from 1989, Trump’s first heyday, against exactly the consumer society he’d become famous personifying: “We’ve got department stores and toilet paper / Got Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer.”
Trump glided down the escalator, in front of cheering fans crowding the glass guardrail. The crowd was packed with actors who responded to a call from Extra Mile Casting, offering “$50 CASH” to “wear T-shirts and carry signs” at an unspecified, “exciting” announcement. “We understand this is not a traditional ‘background job,’ ” the e-mail listing read, “but we believe acting comes in all forms and this is inclusive of that school of thought.”
But the staging of the event had started years before that casting call. Trump riding down an escalator was a go-to visual on The Apprentice: the image, with “pimp walk” music, of the master ascending from on high. The framing—at a casino, an apartment building, a hotel—maximized the backdrop of gleaming metal and gilt.
Trump Tower was a stage made for TV, with its sensory overload of marble and brass and marble reflected in brass. Riding the escalator, he was like a voluptuary prince being carried on a palanquin.
The camera craned up at him. So did the reporters crowding around the stage, raising their iPhones for a memento of the time they covered what would surely be the brief, insane run for president of that guy from TV. They were on a lark, like the spectators packing picnic lunches to the First Battle of Bull Run.
THE PRESS IMMEDIATELY picked up on the analogy between the former Apprentice host’s announcement and reality TV. But Trump’s heavy-metal descent from his pink-marble Cloud Nine borrowed from one other kind of TV show he’d starred in: pro wrestling.
Wrestling was one of the earliest forms of TV entertainment. Starting in 1948, the first year of full prime-time schedules, the DuMont Network, ABC, and NBC each had wrestling shows, and they were mainstays through the 1950s. Little Donald Trump was a fan of Antonino Rocca, a New York favorite known more for his showmanship than his wrestling ability.
Each wrestler played a character, the more caricatured and broad-strokes the better. (P. T. Barnum was one of the first impresarios to dress up wrestlers in costumes and give them biographies.) Foreign stereotypes were reliable: Russians, Nazis, shadowy figures of the Orient like the “Sheik of Araby,” played by Detroiter Ed Farhat. The first megastar of TV wrestling was Gorgeous George, a melodramatic narcissist accompanied in the ring by a valet with a silver mirror.
Like reality TV, wrestling relied on caricature. It was telegraphic: “Each sign in wrestling,” wrote the French semiotician Roland Barthes, “is . . . endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot.” Each fight told a simple story: hero vs. villain (or “face” vs. “heel”), America vs. the world, the masculine vs. the effeminate.
Pro wrestling toyed with the line between real and fake. It was rooted in the concept of “kayfabe”—the insistence that the fights and rivalries were real. Early audiences bought it; by the 1980s, fans’ relationship to it was more complex. You believed and didn’t believe. The fights were fake but the way they made you feel was real. As Lou Thesz, one of the first wrestlers to break kayfabe, put it: “The ‘winner’ wasn’t the wrestler whose hand was raised at the end, but the one whose performance stuck in the minds of the fans.”
In the 1980s, Trump lured WrestleMania 4 and 5 to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. In the 2000s, wrestling, like Trump, got a second life from reality TV. WWE Smackdown and Monday Night Raw became hits, driven by sex appeal, conflict, and their own antiheroes. At WrestleMania 20 in 2004, Jesse “The Body” Ventura—elected governor of Minnesota in 1998 with Ross Perot’s Reform Party—interviewed the host of NBC’s new hit, The Apprentice. Ventura asked Trump for his endorsement for president: “I think we may need a wrestler in the White House!” Ventura declared. (The announcers laughed. “Yeah. And maybe a millionaire vice-president!”)
The World Wrestling Entertainment’s owner, Vince McMahon, recruited Trump as a guest in 2007. McMahon was one of his league’s own best heels, a muscular and veiny loudmouth who loved to preen and insulting his paying customers, who loved it right back. The script pitted Trump against him as the cocky, beneficent people’s champion. On Monday Night Raw, Trump appeared on a massive video screen—magnified, elevated—to taunt McMahon and make money rain from the rafters on the delighted crowd.
The feud built to “The Battle of the Billionaires,” a proxy fight at WrestleMania 23 where Trump and McMahon each backed a wrestler. Their wager: the loser would get his head shaved. After a melee that included Trump tackling McMahon at ringside and taking a flying Stone Cold Stunner from wrestler Steve Austin, McMahon’s guy lost. McMahon was strapped into a chair, and Trump, tag-teaming with wrestler Bobby Lashley, shaved him bald.
As in his sitcom cameos, Trump was stiff in the scripted parts of the battle. But fighting McMahon, something primal seemed to come over him. He jumped McMahon wildly, pummeling him with punches (though he’d been coached to pull them). He raised his fist and roared, surging with energy as the crowd howled for his enemy’s humiliation. It was a pretend victory, but the exultation was real.
CANDIDATE TRUMP’S DEFINING EVENTS, his campaign rallies, were pure WWE spectacle. He took the stage at his first big rally—July 11, 2015, Phoenix, Arizona—to the tune of Rick Derringer’s “Real American,” the theme song of 1980s wrestler Hulk Hogan. In the song’s 1985 video, Hogan plays a stars-and-stripes electric guitar over an American flag backdrop, which morphs into images of Washington crossing the Delaware, Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Sitting Bull, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War memorial, Fourth of July fireworks, and the Hulkster taking down foes in the ring.
Like wrestling itself, you can take the “Real American” video as sincere or as camp. At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the song played ironically over a parody of the video, featuring Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, while Trump sat stewing in the audience.
There was not a lot of irony among the crowd in Phoenix. (The fire marshal reported capacity of the hall at just over 4,000. Trump later claimed it at 10,000, 15,000, and 20,000.) It was, as Trump’s rallies would become, a rejection of coolness and detachment, the crowd—mostly old, mostly white—coming together to howl against their perceived extinction.
A Trump rally, with the candidate holding forth for an hour-plus, chasing butterflies of thought, wasn’t a political speech like we’d come to know them. His language was rambling but direct: win, hit, bomb the shit out of them. Things were huge and beautiful. He played on existing American themes—vastness, dynamism, ambition—but stripped of the noble pretense: What was in it for you?
It was like a variety show, a stage revue. He gave you a little of everything. And as a spectator you were yourself a contributor to the show that was going out everywhere, through “all these cameras,” which Trump gestured to repeatedly.
He began in Phoenix in Don Rickles mode, riffing on his doubters and haters and antagonists. The pundits who said he’d never run (“These are real knowledgeable people, they don’t know anything”). His business partners who’d dropped him over his racist anti-Mexican remarks, like NASCAR—he got a Republican crowd to boo NASCAR!—which canceled a rental at one of his properties (“I took their deposit”). His primary opponents (he pronounced “Jeb Bush” in a mopey, turtle-like drawl). His TV rivals who imitated The Apprentice. (“I could give you some names, but I don’t want to embarrass people. [beat] Ah, I’ll give you some names.”)
He was easy and familiar in these parts. You were like a business associate that he was regaling over well-done steak and shrimp cocktail at Mar-a-Lago.
The crowd laughed gamely, easing into these practice grievances. But what really riled them up: conflict, anger, death. About twenty minutes in, a protester was hustled out by security. The crowd howled, chanted “USA!” Now the good stuff was starting; Trump got red and squinted and barked out his lines. “It’s OK, you can shout,” he told them. They did, and he let the pitch rise, stepping back from the podium, raising his arms thumbs up, like Hulk Hogan in the ring.
Mid-speech, he brought out a guest, Jamiel Shaw, whose son had been shot to death by an undocumented immigrant. “What would you do,” Shaw asked, “if somebody killed your kids?”
You were often asked to reflect upon death at a Trump rally. It was memento mori theater. China was “killing” us metaphorically, and Mexicans and ISIS were doing it literally. Even opinion polls were kill-or-be-killed. “The only thing I’m not killing,” Trump said of his poll numbers, “a lot of people don’t like me. I said, ‘What difference does it make?’ ”
This was the antihero pitch. Life was not some cooperative exercise like smug, comfortable politicians told you it was. It was hand-to-hand combat. If people were out to erase your culture, to take food off your table, to kill you—to kill your children—who gave a shit if the president was nice?
“We’re living in medieval times,” Trump said, amid a ramble about terrorist beheadings. “You always think we’re all civilized. It’s a jungle. It’s HAH-ribble out there!”
THE PHOENIX CONVENTION CENTER is an enclosed space, cavernous, well lit. Though the ceiling is treated with metallic fabric kites “designed to replicate the desert sky,” you do not forget that you are indoors. But every Trump rally—whether in a hall, a theater, an airplane hangar—felt like it was held in a roiling public square, or before a blazing bonfire.
Barthes anticipated this. Even when it takes place indoors, he wrote, wrestling is an open-air performance:
What makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Trump’s solar spectacle was the rally. He was the sun; the audience reflected and concentrated his heat. Like die-hard followers of a rock tour, they knew the set list. They would roar for him, and he would rhythmically clap for himself, slap, slap, slap. There was the pre-rally music, chosen by the candidate, including Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” There was the call-and-response. (“Who’s going to pay for the wall?” “Mexico!” “Who?” “MEXICO!”) There were the insults. (Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 election.) There were the protesters, who were themselves as much a part of the show as the lion’s dinner in a Roman colosseum: they got attention, and the energy of the rally fed off the interruptions.
There was even poetry, of a sort. Trump would don reading glasses and recite the lyrics of a 1960s soul song, “The Snake,” about a “tender hearted” woman who takes in a poisonous animal and gets bitten by it. He used it as an allegory for the dangers of foreign refugees: “ ‘Oh, shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin / ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’ ” But the little fable, with its suggestions of the animal nature of man (and the womanly weakness of sympathy), also recalled Tony Soprano waxing philosophical: “Frog and the scorpion, ya know?”
Journalists at the rallies described attendees who were civil and polite outside the venue, cheerful, chatty, like they were out for a night at a theater or a concert. Which they were; Trump’s crowds often described the rallies, foremost, as entertainment, a good time. They were used to feeling left out by Hollywood liberals, whom the commentators on Fox News always said should keep their politics to themselves. But now here was a big star, a genuine TV celebrity, who was on their side, and they loved it. They couldn’t wait for the free show.
Then they went inside and grew agitated, restless, became charged with free-floating adrenaline. Trump knew what wound them up; he would later tell his staff that the crowd would roar when he recited the names of Hispanic criminals, making up some names to prove his point. The flame would leap from listener to listener, until the whole crowd was ignited. “Trump was able to take them up to the line of good taste,” wrote journalist Jared Yates Sexton, “and let them take over where he could not.” The New York Times caught it on video: “Build the wall! Fuck those dirty beaners!” That adrenaline would surge toward the journalists, whom Trump kept in pens and called out from the stage—sometimes by name—as “lying disgusting” people.
The Trump fans were seeing, on stage, what they’d seen on reality shows and Fox News: anger as entertainment. They were seeing TV, personified.
It really was TV—Donald Trump! From The Apprentice!—and they were inside the show, because as Trump kept telling them, those cameras were there in the back, transmitting and recording. It was intoxicating and disorienting. And it was agitating, because Trump kept reminding them that there were also reporters with those cameras, waiting to twist everything, to lie, to show the worst parts, to go back to their offices and studios and laugh at them.
It just made them want to, it made them want to—sometimes they’d leave amped up and get in a fight, or haul off and punch a protester inside. Early in the campaign, Trump was easier on the demonstrators—“Don’t hurt ’em,” he’d say, as security escorted them out.
But like on a reality show, stasis wasn’t interesting. The red light would get bored, blink off. Every new episode had to one-up the last. The twists had to be bigger, the stakes higher.
Like the You’re Fired Guy in each season of The Apprentice, the Rally Guy became a bigger, nastier version of himself each month. In August, he mimed holding a rifle and shooting Bowe Bergdahl, an army sergeant who had walked off his post in Afghanistan. In November, he was asked on Fox about a black protester who was punched and kicked by a half-dozen rally attendees: “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump said. By February, he mocked guards from the podium in Las Vegas for going too easy on a protester: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
Historically, presidential candidates avoided being associated with chaos—at least candidates with a prayer of winning did—because it was alienating. The live TV images of the police riot in Chicago, outside the Democratic National Convention, helped doom Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in 1968. Swarms of blue-helmeted officers pummeled antiwar protesters in the street, swinging clubs wildly, blanketing the street with so much tear gas that you could smell it inside the Conrad Hilton hotel. The violence yoked Humphrey to the image of an America out of control and beating its own children.
But in a niche-media era, what alienates one audience strengthens the resolve of your own. They like your programming because it is not for everybody, and the revulsion of another subculture or of the mainstream—“mainstream media” had long since become a conservative insult—only strengthened their attachment.
In March, every news channel went live from Chicago, where a Trump rally was canceled as protesters and Trump supporters scuffled inside the rally while thousands of marchers converged on it. It seemed that night like the city, or the whole country, might explode.
It was volatile. It was dangerous. Atavistic, wild things were being exhumed. It could go in any direction.
The red light liked things that could go in any direction. It stayed on.
IN 1985, NEIL POSTMAN wrote that “the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.” He was speaking figuratively—the thirty-second TV spot, which relied on emotion and image rather than reason and prose, had become the dominant model of persuasion in a TV society.
But at the time it was also true literally. Reagan had just won reelection on the strength of Hal Riney’s “Morning in America” ad campaign. For decades before and decades after, candidacies were defined by their best and worst TV ads. Pundits analyzed and critiqued them like film critics dissecting a summer’s blockbuster movies.
But 2016 would be different. Trump didn’t make many ads per se. The ones he did release were forgettable, clumsy, or disturbing. His two-minute closing ad was a rant about the “global special interests” who “control the levers of power”—paranoid dog-whistle rhetoric that, paired with images of Jewish financiers and officials, played like a TV remake of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Mostly, Trump was the ad. As long as he kept himself on cable news, he would be the protagonist of the election: every story would be about him or about others in relation to him. He and cable news were in a mind-meld. He knew what it wanted: celebrity, outrage, volatility, novelty. Give the twenty-four-hour news panelists something to talk about, and the red light will stay on. He didn’t even need to be on camera. A tweet would do, like after a mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub, by a man who swore allegiance to ISIS in a call to 911: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
It didn’t just work on Fox, where Trump had been a virtual costar. CNN was now run by Jeff Zucker, who’d signed up The Apprentice when he was the head of NBC. Zucker’s programming philosophy was: if something’s working, do ten times as much of it. In Zucker’s era, NBC ran “supersized” gimmick episodes of hit sitcoms, added a third and fourth hour to the Today show, and attempted a second Apprentice, hosted by Martha Stewart, along with Trump’s.
At CNN, he found this tactic worked with news too. If people were watching something, you covered it nonstop, be it the “Poop Cruise”—a Carnival cruise ship whose sewage systems were disabled at sea—or a Malaysian Airlines flight that vanished in 2014, never to be recovered. CNN covered it for weeks, at one point polling Americans on whether they believed the cause might be “beings from another dimension.”
Well now, here was Donald Trump running for goddam president. Trump was a plane that crashed every day, a Poop Cruise in perpetuity. His Trump Tower announcement, where he slurred Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” began an outrage cycle that Trump kept renewing. He was a one-man solution to the problem of what to do when there’s no breaking news. The news was breaking as long as his lips kept moving—calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States or insulting a female opponent, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, with “Look at that face!”
Where Fox News worked in lockstep with Trump, CNN confronted him. Anchor Jake Tapper grilled him on his comment that a “Mexican” judge (who was in fact born in Indiana) could not treat him fairly because of his heritage, asking, “Is that not the definition of racism?” When Trump evaded an answer, Tapper rightly pressed him, following up his question twenty-three times. Trump stopped giving CNN interviews. But even tough coverage, while well deserved, made Trump the protagonist of the election. The ratings boosts were just as real if your audience hated Trump. Love, hate—it was all currency, and it spent just the same.
Media critics of the twentieth century envisioned a political dialogue for a country of ever-shortening attention spans—we would ultimately end up with something like the one-second-long “blipverts” of the dystopian TV show Max Headroom.
The Trump campaign was something different. It was made for an audience that either had an intense attention span or none at all. If you were in the niche, a Trump diehard, you could immerse yourself in endless fan content—those rallies, reposted online, could last for hours, and forums like The_Donald on Reddit were endless rabbit holes of Trumpiana. The algorithms of social media amplified the message; once you’d shown an interest in Donald Trump videos, YouTube would suggest more and more, hours and hours, a virtual Trump Channel.
And if you had no interest, there was just the ambient noise of the campaign everywhere—the cable news playing in your gym, the comics on late-night, Trump Trump Trump.
TV COULDN’T RESIST IT. The idea that Trump might say something wild at any moment meant, to producers, that he was inherently newsworthy. That he might say the opposite thing tomorrow didn’t matter—that just meant more material. “Newsworthy” and “entertaining” had long since become synonyms.
Cable news carried his rallies beginning to end. Sometimes the channels would show his empty lectern, waiting for him to take the stage. The ratings went up, and Trump took his cut of the profits: $5.6 billion in free media over the election, more than every competitor, in both parties, combined. “It may not be good for America,” CBS chairman Les Moonves said of Trump’s campaign, “but it’s damn good for CBS.”
A few media outlets resisted, like the Huffington Post, which relegated Trump coverage to its entertainment section. (My Times colleague Amy Chozick, in her memoir Chasing Hillary, writes that when Trump announced his run, an editor initially told her that political reporters would not be writing about him: “Let the TV writers do it.”) More of them succumbed, like the news programs that bent their usual rules and let Trump phone in for interviews rather than turn up in-studio—which allowed him to cram in more appearances and refer to notes to answer questions.
Either Trump was dismissed as a celebrity, or he was deferred to as a celebrity. Sometimes it was both, to his benefit, like on a September 2016 NBC forum on military issues. Matt Lauer, who for years had done promotional interviews with Trump about NBC’s The Apprentice on NBC’s Today show, grilled Hillary Clinton for specifics, while telling Trump that “nobody would expect you” to have read deeply into foreign policy. Meanwhile, NBC’s Jimmy Fallon invited him on the Tonight show, where he tousled Trump’s cotton-candy hair and performed a skit with the candidate, playing his reflection in a dressing-room mirror—Trump seeing himself in the magic mirror the way he saw himself in the magic mirror of TV.
He played by celebrity rules. He was the only candidate to host Saturday Night Live during the campaign (which he’d done in 2004 as host of The Apprentice). The show had guest Larry David yell, “Trump’s a racist!” because a group had offered a $5,000 bounty to any audience member who disrupted the broadcast, letting SNL flagellate itself all the way to the bank while making an in-kind contribution to Trump’s campaign.
In another sketch, Trump played himself as president, three years in the future, having easily defeated ISIS and made Mexico pay for a border wall, just as he’d airily promised. The sketch’s premise was also the justification for letting him host—and for the rest of the media’s gorging at the Trump trough: everybody knew he was never actually going to win, so why not have a little fun and make a dollar?
It was just so crazy! Donald Trump was running for president! It was like we were living in a movie—President Billionaire, a raunchy ’80s comedy about a crass tycoon who upsets Washington high society by buying his way into the Oval Office. He gave his opponents insulting nicknames, the way Muhammad Ali did to Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier (“Big Ugly Bear” and “The Gorilla”). Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low-Energy Jeb Bush, Crooked Hillary Clinton. It was outrageous, it was surreal—who does that?—so the press repeated the names and with them, the message: Ted Cruz is a liar, Jeb Bush is low-energy, Hillary Clinton is crooked.
When you ran as an entertainer, you could claim an entertainer’s prerogative—especially the prerogative of “joking.” It was a joke, Trump said, when he wished aloud at a press conference that Russia would hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails; and when he mocked a New York Times reporter’s physical disability; and when he said that climate change was a “hoax” invented by the Chinese; and when he called Barack Obama “the founder of ISIS.”
Jokes! If you made a big deal of them, you were too sensitive, a “snowflake.” A lie, a mistake, a bigoted insult could be dismissed because the real point was how the other side reacted to them—Trump was just “triggering the libs” again.
There was a whole school of punditry that enabled this, by insisting that critics take him “seriously but not literally.” Of course, if you liked what he said and wanted to take it literally, he wasn’t going to stop you. That’s what he’d been doing since his first appearance on Fox & Friends in 2010, demanding that Al Gore be stripped of his Nobel Prize: “Yes, I was kidding . . . But when I get down to it, was I really kidding?”
He was like the WWE: he didn’t care if you thought the kayfabe was fake or real as long as you bought the pay-per-view.
Jason, a young Cuban American man in Florida, told a reporter for Politico that he believed “Trump is fucking crazy,” as well as racist against Hispanics like himself. But he planned to vote for him anyway. “The whole system is fucked, so why not vote for the craziest guy, so we can see the craziest shit happen? . . . At least Trump is fun to watch.”
AT LEAST TRUMP IS FUN TO WATCH is a horrifying statement on a civic level. But give Jason credit for seeing Trump for what he was: the number-one TV show in America.
The Trump Show played out across multiple platforms: it was the news programs, and the debates, and the interviews, and the late-night talk shows, and the jokes on sitcoms like Netflix’s Fuller House, and the Twitter meltdowns. In a time of a thousand channels, he was the one program that everyone was watching.
Trump used his years of on-camera experience like Caesar used his military skill to take Rome. In news studios, he would request specific camera angles and “gold gel” lighting-filter sheets to bathe him in a honeyed glow. (The camera would literally sheathe him in gold, like one of his high-rises.) After TV interviews, he would ask for a playback and watch his entire appearance with the sound off, just to see how he looked.
Politicians had gone on TV for generations to ingratiate themselves with the public. Nixon said “Sock it to me” on Laugh-In, Bill Clinton put on shades and blew the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. Barack Obama filled out his NCAA brackets on ESPN. But the pilgrimage always went in one direction: the politician went to the show, which allowed the politician into its space.
With Trump, the dynamic was reversed. TV came to him. He was a master narrative, allowing one program or another to have a part of him. He badgered CNBC into shortening a Republican debate to two hours, then bragged about the coup at another debate, the way a past candidate might have cited negotiating a peace treaty.
Donald Trump didn’t really guest-host Saturday Night Live for a night. He let Saturday Night Live guest-host him for a night.
As Trump’s campaign defied predictions that it would flame out—by fall, by the new year, by the primaries—analysts reached for a familiar comparison: Ronald Reagan, the former actor and General Electric Theater host. But the differences between Reagan and Trump were as important as their similarities.
Reagan was an actor; Trump was a reality-TV star. Reagan came from the world of fiction; Trump came from nonfiction-based entertainment. Reagan played characters; Trump played an amplified version of himself. Reagan’s job was acting; Trump’s job was acting out.
Reagan’s preparation for being president, in other words, was years of imagining himself in the heads of other people. “Reagan’s experience as an actor,” wrote film scholar Leo Braudy, “far from trivializing his performance as president, allowed him to project a much more complicated character than he may have actually possessed.” Reagan’s own assessment, to his biographer Lou Cannon after leaving office, was that “being an actor had taught him to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”
Reality TV did not require you to do that. You needed to understand other people as obstacles, or as creatures who would react to stimuli, but not necessarily as full human beings with the same complexities as you. If anything, too much empathy was a liability. It was noise that kept you from expressing your fullest you. (In the words of Omarosa, who became the most famous Apprentice contestant by styling herself as a “mirror” of Trump: “My objective was to methodically eliminate each contestant, one by one, so why would I want an emotional attachment to any of them?”)
Reagan had trouble separating movies from reality. He often recounted a heroic scene from the WWII film A Wing and a Prayer as if it had actually happened. Trump did not have the problem of losing himself in character. Just the opposite: he did not seem to recognize that other people were fully real, that they continued to exist when they were not interacting with him.
Some observers suggested that he had never completely achieved “theory of mind”: the cognizance, which most people develop at age two or three, that other people have consciousness and emotional states. Instead, like the crowds at his rallies, they were objects that yielded outputs (anger, approval, love) in response to inputs (Lock her up, build the wall, we’re going to say Merry Christmas again).
This is a frightening attribute for a person who has power and responsibility for others. But on live TV, it is damn near perfect. It is the mentality of the red light: no memory, no empathy, just on-state and off-state and the reaction in the moment.
It’s the difference between being on television and being television.
LATER, JOURNALIST MICHAEL WOLFF would describe President Trump, who did not like to read one-page documents, much less books, as “postliterate—total television.” But he was also preliterate, or at least pretextual. He was an electronic-era phenomenon, and his rallies were like something out of ancient, tribal oral tradition. His effect was to erase everything between Gutenberg and the cathode-ray tube.
The Trump campaign did, however, produce one memorable text. It was a hat.
A wide-brimmed rope hat, usually red and white, sometimes white and navy, that said MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, a phrase Trump trademarked two weeks after the 2012 election. He didn’t invent the slogan. Ronald Reagan, for one, campaigned on it in 1980. But, Trump told the Washington Post, “He didn’t trademark it.”
The four words announced that the Trump campaign was a nostalgia act. The phrase was, like many successful branding slogans, consistent with the product: a white senior citizen who was as associated with the 1980s as Pac-Man and shoulder pads. It was strategically vague. Maybe America was last great in the 1980s, or the 1950s, or before. Maybe it was when you were young and happy and healthy; maybe it was a time your grandparents told you about; or maybe—best of all—it existed only in your imagination. You could bring to it whatever you liked.
What Trump liked about the old days was the violence. The violence was first-class in the old days.
In the old days, football players didn’t get penalized for violent hits. “You used to see these tackles and it was incredible to watch,” he told a crowd in Iowa. “Now they tackle, ‘Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yards’ . . . Football has become soft like our country has become soft.”
“In the old days, spies used to be executed,” he said about Edward Snowden, who’d leaked classified secrets about government surveillance. Likewise the fugitive soldier Bowe Bergdahl: “In the old days, when we were strong and wise, we’d shoot a guy like that.”
“In the old days, when we were strong and respected,” he told another rally, General Pershing would have Muslim insurgents in the Philippines shot using bullets dipped in pig’s blood. (This never happened in real life, but it did in the crowd’s shared dream of the old days.)
“In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast,” he said about a protester in Oklahoma. “In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough,” he said of another protester in North Carolina. “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” he complained at a rally in St. Louis.
“I love the old days,” he told a crowd at a Las Vegas rally disrupted by a protester. “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
I love the old days. Guys like that. A place like this. You could interpret it any way you wanted.
At a Trump rally in March, a seventy-eight-year-old white man interpreted it by sucker-punching a young black protester being walked out of the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The angry white past was smacking down the young brown future. The crowd cheered. It had no illusions about what “Make America Great Again” meant, or whom America was to be made great again for.
Trump brought his nostalgia act to places like my home state, Michigan. (In Warren, he promised that if anyone hurt a protester, “I’ll defend you in court.”) To have grown up in southeast Michigan was to have grown up in a culture soaked in nostalgia. It was to hear, generation after generation, about how life was better before you were born, when the car factories were pumping out Fords and Chevys and paychecks. It was to see the skyline of Detroit, whose dominant feature, the Renaissance Center, has been named after a promise to bring back better days since it opened in 1977. It was to hear about the 1967 Detroit riots and suburban white flight. It was to see, in a state that sent soldiers to die for the Union, Confederate flags on Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts and baseball caps and pickup trucks. It was to hear wistful nostalgia in the young-old-man songs of Bob Seger, who sang about “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” and reminisced about “the back seat of my ’60 Chevy” in “Night Moves”—an elegy for lost youth he released when he was thirty-one years old. And it was to see nostalgia gone ugly and curdled in Ted Nugent—the deer-hunting used-to-be rock star who once called Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel”—and to know the dog-whistle tune Nugent was playing when he opened an election-eve Trump rally in Sterling Heights, insulting black former Detroit mayors, longing for the “real Michigan . . . the old, real Michigan” from when he was born in 1948, and asking, “Are there enough working-hard, playing-hard, American Michigan shitkickers left to take this state back and vote Trump for president?” (There were, barely; Trump would win the state by 10,704 votes, his narrowest margin in America.)
The old days had their own old days. Archie Bunker, Trump’s sitcom John the Baptist, opened All in the Family in 1971 singing “Those Were the Days,” whose verses pined for the early twentieth century. The early twentieth century had Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith film that lionized the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, which President Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House in 1915. And the Civil War was in one sense a nostalgia product itself. The battle to preserve slavery and a racist slaveholding society was bound up with the self-valorizing self-conception of white Southerners, which had been fed by a craze for the idyllic romances of Sir Walter Scott. In the faded medieval English nobility of Ivanhoe, the slaveholding South saw itself, self-aggrandizingly then self-pityingly. “It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel. . . . He is in great measure responsible for the war,” wrote Mark Twain, who later painted Scott’s name on the wreckage of a steamboat in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
There’s a whole popular culture trope about how the past is white-man territory. Science-fiction franchises from Men in Black to Hot Tub Time Machine include minority characters who can’t be as carefree with time machines as their white peers. The black engineer Rufus in the 2016 NBC time-travel series Timeless protests, “There is literally no place in American history that will be awesome for me.” Whereas for white characters, everywhere and everywhen is awesome. (At least as long as they’re traveling backward, unlike Charlton Heston’s white astronaut in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, who lands on a future Earth and ends up among the enslaved humans in a racial allegory.) In Back to the Future, 1985 white boy Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels to 1955 and “invents” rock and roll by teaching a black band Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
So you don’t have to come out and say who “Make America Great Again” is for. You just set the dial on the time machine and see who climbs in.
THE HAT ITSELF was a text. Donald Trump wearing the hat was a text. A red trucker-style hat on top of a business suit. This was a Trump motif—high and low visual-status markers, paired together, over and over. A photograph of Trump, in his calfskin leather seat on the private jet with his name painted on it, eating a bucket of KFC chicken with a knife and fork. A tweeted picture of the candidate in his Trump Tower office, eating that most Anglofied of Mexican foods, a taco salad. (“I love Hispanics!”)
That was Duck Dynasty. That was The Beverly Hillbillies. It was the fantasy of being prosperous and triumphant and respected, without making any concession to the tastes and language and social mores of an alien group. It was Trump as, in a phrase Fox News took to repeating, the “blue-collar billionaire.”
That was a ludicrous idea: Trump grew up in a mansion; had a chauffeur to take him on his paper route when it rained; had once told Playboy, “If I had been the son of a miner, I would have left the damn mines.”
But that didn’t matter as long as you wanted to believe. You made yourself believe because you were on the team, you belonged to something, and every time you made yourself believe, it cemented your commitment. You were invested; you couldn’t back out, no matter what he said, no matter what evidence anyone produced, without loss of face. This enabled Trump, at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, to don a miner’s helmet and mime shoveling coal—Donald Trump, whose closest experience to mining was breathing the recirculated air in Trump Tower—and not be received as an absurdity like Michael Dukakis riding a tank in 1988.
The Republican party was used to running against pop culture. George H. W. Bush went to war with The Simpsons, Bob Dole with Hollywood and rap music. In 2008, John McCain ran an ad that disparaged Barack Obama, with his massive, rock-star crowds, as a “celebrity.”
Donald Trump was an actual celebrity. It was his job. Without pop culture, he would be one more New York rich kid who inherited his dad’s business. This allowed him to forego the Clinton campaign approach of surrounding the candidate with stars—guest-starring on Comedy Central’s Broad City, holding an election-eve rally with Beyoncé and Jay-Z—in the hope that their fans’ enthusiasm would transfer to her, a hoary TV-era strategy that dated back to Eisenhower and his “Ike Day” CBS special.
But Trump’s argument was that he was of your pop culture—not like Obama, palling around with rappers and poets and the cast of Hamilton—and he would defend your culture, your totems, from the enemy.
Because Trump saw life in terms of fighting, he understood pop culture as a political war, which it had become, and which he gladly exacerbated. A 2014 poll found a thirty-eight-point gap between the parties on whether Twelve Years a Slave should win an Oscar (Democrats pro, Republicans con). Neither party had taken a position on the film; partisans simply intuited where their tribe would line up. To white-male pop conservatives, as described earlier, the female remake of Ghostbusters was an attempt by feminist Hollywood to climb into the Back to the Future DeLorean time machine and erase them from history, like Marty McFly fading out of his family photos. Trump’s rallying cry was that they—that polymorphous, alien them—were taking away your status, your dignity, your pride of place, even your childhood memories, and he would give them back to you, starring a white man.
In 2014, during the Super Bowl (the most American TV show there is), an ad for Coca-Cola (the most American beverage there is) was set to the music of “America the Beautiful”—with the lyrics sung in English, Spanish, Keres, Hindi, Tagalog, Senegalese French, and Hebrew. Coca-Cola had long sold itself as an American beachhead in every inhabited square inch of the Earth. But it had been about projecting America outward—“I’d like to buy the world a Coke”—whereas this ad, with its panoply of faces in cowboy hats and hijabs, was about bringing the world in to America.
The culture-right did not care for it. To Coca-Cola, said a columnist on Breitbart, America was no longer “a nation governed in the Anglo-American tradition of liberty. It is instead a nation governed by some all-inclusive multi-cultural synthesis of the various forms of government in the world.” This was the atmosphere of carbonated nationalism in which Trump ran his campaign. He understood the power of nostalgia as a political force. But as a pop figure, he could express it culturally, where it comes across on a gut, nonliteral level.
During the campaign, and especially after Trump won, there was a long debate about what really motivated his voters. Were they dispossessed workers? Status-anxious bourgeois? Nationalists? Xenophobes? Racists?
But to argue about whether Trump’s appeal was economic or racial or religious or xenophobic misunderstands how figurative language works. “Make America Great Again” is a branding slogan, an appeal to nostalgia—and the political power of nostalgia is that it can be all of those things at once without having to say that it is any of them. “Have a Coke and a smile” doesn’t mean one thing. It’s a palimpsest of nonliteral messages: Coke tastes good; you feel good drinking Coke; you drink Coke when you feel good; you, drinking Coke, are good. Whatever makes you smile—that’s Coke.
Just so, “Make America Great Again” translates into: Make America like it used to be, when people like me had it better, when we got respect, when we didn’t have to press goddam one for English, when we were the main thing in America.
This halcyon past does not need to ever have actually existed to be appealing, any more than the medieval Britain in a Sir Walter Scott novel. It doesn’t have to make logical sense to say, as a Trump voter would tell Oprah Winfrey after the election, that she felt “safer” because “I can say Merry Christmas to anyone I want wherever I want.” It makes advertising sense; it operates on that narcotic dream-level of emotion and image where safety is Christmas is freedom is a red hat and a bucket of KFC.
AT SEVENTEEN CANDIDATES, the 2016 Republican primary was almost precisely the size of a cast of The Apprentice. Donald Trump, having presided over fourteen seasons of that show, recognized intuitively what the televised debates were: an elimination-based reality show.
Traditionally, a candidate’s biggest fear in a TV debate was making a memorable mistake: cosmetic, like Nixon sweating opposite JFK, or rhetorical, like Gerald Ford implying that Poland was not under Soviet domination. But in a reality-TV debate, the biggest sin was being forgettable. You’d get a bad edit, become part of the wallpaper. In 2016, that had cascading practical effects. There were so many candidates that the hosting networks exiled the lowest-polling ones to “undercard” debates before the prime-time main events. These were the cannon fodder, the contestants doomed to be eliminated in the early rounds.
You stood out, like Omarosa, by getting in fights. That was what got you a meaty edit, in the form of heavy rotation on the news clips the next day. The substance of the fight didn’t matter. Trump’s pugilism could be petty and indiscriminate. He’d tell Senator Rand Paul, whose polling numbers were barely a rounding error, that he “shouldn’t even be on this stage.” You fought even if you didn’t need to; you fought because you didn’t need to. The point of the fight was to prove that you were a fighter.
It was like the adage that a new prisoner should punch out another inmate on the first day. Better to be the instigator than the instigated-upon: this allowed you to set the agenda, get in people’s heads, change the narrative. For the partisan audience cultivated by Fox News, politics wasn’t ideological but attitudinal. Its ultimate goal wasn’t policy so much as the lamentations of one’s enemies, and every petty debate attack was a promise to deal more satisfying pain in the future.
As The Real World taught, the highest value was to “stop being polite.” Trump got stronger every time he committed a foul that would have disqualified a past candidate. At a debate in August, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly questioned his temperament: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ ” Later, he complained on CNN about her questioning: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”
If you supported Trump, maybe you believed him when he denied what seemed obvious—that he was saying Kelly was on her period and therefore irrational. Maybe you didn’t believe him, but thought it was one more case of people being oversensitive. Maybe you heard it as a man being unapologetic about being a man. Maybe you just liked how Trump talked: that blunt Northeast alpha-male get outta heah of Archie Bunker, of Tony Soprano, of reality stars like “Boston Rob” Mariano of Survivor, which TV had taught us registered as authenticity.
Trump’s behavior was reality-TV provocation, a Survivor “rat and snake” speech, a Real Housewife of New Jersey flipping over a restaurant table. Every fight provided enough material for another episode.
His poll numbers went up. Pundits were sure it couldn’t last. Trump was too offensive. He had no traditional qualifications. What they didn’t see was the audience for whom smacking down people on TV was the qualification. Argument and insult and dominance weren’t simply indicators that someone might be tough enough to govern. To an audience that was used to seeing politics exercised in the form of arguments on Fox News, they were the act of governance.
Of course it was shocking. The shock was the point. Demagogues and would-be tyrants in other times and in other countries came to power through stunning acts of rule-breaking and dominance. Mussolini’s Italian Fascists in the 1920s assaulted government officials and beat men in the streets, which not only terrified their opponents but made the opposition look weak in the eyes of its own supporters. All this sent a message: the old rules are gone, the old proprieties can’t protect you, best to get on the side of this terrifying and virile force creating its own rules. Trump’s followers didn’t practice organized mass violence, though there were some incidents, like two men who assaulted a Hispanic man in Boston in August 2015, one of them telling police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” Trump dismissed the incident at a news conference, saying, “People who are following me are very passionate.”
But Trump’s campaign was a twenty-first-century version of dominance politics, a reality-TV version, where unprovoked attacks—retweeting a meme that insulted the looks of Ted Cruz’s wife, say—argued that your leader was strong, that his opponents could not adequately protect themselves or their loved ones, and therefore, how could you expect them to protect you? If Trump didn’t (for the most part) have thugs carrying out beatdowns in the streets, there were swarms of them online. They enlisted once-harmless cartoon frog Pepe as an alt-right mascot. They harassed liberals and Jewish Twitter users and insufficiently Trumpist conservatives. (They called the latter “cucks,” short for “cuckservative,” derived from “cuckold”—implying that their targets were emasculated and adding a bonus layer of racism by referencing interracial cuckoldry porn.) They spread violent cartoons and altered images, which Trump would sometimes retweet: such as a hurtling “Trump Train,” like an image out of Italian Futurism, crushing a person with a CNN logo for a head. The assault was virtual, but the message was plain: The old order is being overturned, this election is about the strong vs. the weak, and you want to be on the side of strength.
Trump’s campaign ran on reality-TV morality, which deflected conventional attacks of dishonesty (It makes me smart!) and impropriety (I know the crooked system!) and flip-flopping (I did what I had to do!). When he was called out for hypocrisy—such as giving money to the politicians he now disdained—he owned it as shrewdness. This argument was Richard Hatch in the first Survivor finale: Like me or not, you’ve got to admire how I played the game. It substituted brazenness for truthfulness.
So it didn’t hurt Trump either that he lied. A lot. Blatantly and obviously. When the fact-checking outfit PolitiFact named his campaign statements, collectively, 2015’s “Lie of the Year,” it was as damaging as a marshmallow gun. “He says what he means,” his supporters said, which did not mean, “He tells the truth.” It meant he did not consider whether his words were kind or responsible or pleasing—or true—but simply whether he wanted to say them. That was being real, which was better than being honest, more liberating than being tethered to fact.
When he said he saw thousands of Muslims cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center in Jersey City (it never happened) or tweeted a claim that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks (it was 15 percent)—well, he was right about their feeling, that a chaotic brown tide was washing over the world. When he connected Ted Cruz’s father to the JFK assassination, it said that he would not be squeamish in attacking his enemies. When he embraced the right-wing base’s darkest hoaxes and conspiracy theories—like the big one, birtherism—it said he wanted what they wanted, that he supped from the same table they did, that he truly got them.
Trump was building on twenty years of groundwork by Fox News, whose audience Roger Ailes severed from the rest of the media. “Fair and Balanced” implied that no one else was balanced, and thus any contradictory information could be dismissed. Forget newspapers, scientists, egghead fact-checkers. There was only Fox.
This was a powerful tactic for Fox against CNN, but it left it vulnerable to someone like Trump, who would channel it so purely that its audience would imprint on him, transferring their allegiance. When Trump challenged Fox in the primaries, first with Megyn Kelly, later by skipping a Fox debate in January, he was asking the base to choose: him or Fox. They chose him. Fox, through the gradual Trumpification of its commentators, sued for peace. Fox would have to access its viewers through Trump, on his terms. When Trump showed that he could delegitimize Fox to his followers, there was no countervailing authority left. Now there was only Trump.
THE LAST REAL Republican challenge to Trump came in early March. Mitt Romney, the previous Republican nominee for president, gave a televised speech against Trump—“a phony, a fraud,” running on “bullying” and “misogyny” and “third-grade theatrics.” If Trump were to become president, Romney said, “his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.”
For Trump, who preferred shining casinos on the boardwalk, Romney’s disdain was perhaps the most important endorsement of the campaign. Romney made himself into a stuffed-suit sitcom neighbor—Milburn Drysdale, the snooty banker on The Beverly Hillbillies, Ned Flanders on The Simpsons—and the Fox News Republican subculture knew whom they were supposed to root for in that showdown. Romney was a “loser,” Trump answered that day, who by the way wasn’t too morally repulsed to ask for Trump’s support in 2012: “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”
Trump didn’t so much win the argument as prove the argument no longer existed. Its terms were moot. Romney might as well have donned a powdered periwig and slapped Trump with a white glove.
That night, at a Fox News debate in Detroit, Trump turned against Marco Rubio, one of Romney’s preferred candidates, who had tried to tweak Trump in kind by reviving a Spy magazine insult about his small hands. It was an awkward attack for Rubio, a programmable android of a politician whose gift for glib soundbites made him a 2016 frontrunner until Trump rendered it instantly antiquated. Trump seized on the insinuation—that his penis must be small—and spelled it out: “I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
Come at Donald Trump with Marquess of Queensberry rules and he would go below the belt, possibly his own. Bring coy, prime-time broadcast-TV insults, and he would go late-night cable. It was a deliberate redrawing of cultural terms. He reverse-polarized the Republican argument from decency to indecency.
Trump won the next Tuesday’s primaries in Michigan and Mississippi. He celebrated with a speech, live on cable, at his golf club in Jupiter, Florida, flanked on one side by American flags and on the other by a table of Trump-branded products, among them a heap of raw “Trump Steaks,” though that brand had gone out of business years before and the label on the packaging said “Bush Brothers,” a local Florida meat company.
But like in the soundstage boardroom of The Apprentice, the symbolism—bloody red meat, abbondanza—spoke louder than the reality. A Trump Steak was a Trump Steak because you wished it to be a Trump Steak. These were the terms of the arrangement: Trump would win, would cause woe to the enemy, and you would agree to take his word over the evidence of your senses. You had gone this far. You were invested. You were in too deep to back out.
TRUMP’S REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION in July was a disaster. Everybody knew it. His wife Melania’s speech plagiarized, of all people, Michelle Obama. The schedule was undisciplined, leaving the night’s climactic speeches to end well after prime time. The energy was angry and ugly. Video monitors went on the fritz. The endorsements by Republican politicians were tepid. The celebrity appearances were the likes of Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr., each of whom had starred on separate VH1 dating shows. This was the nominating convention of a network TV star?
The convention was a disaster, in other words, by the established standards of political TV, which made running a four-night miniseries a synecdoche for running the country. Chaos was bad; a smooth, choreographed build to an uplifting speech and balloon drop was good. It signified competence and management skill. The parties had gotten so good at this competency that the broadcast networks, in recent elections, had cut back on their coverage of the slick, boring infomercials.
By this measure, the Democratic National Convention the following week was orders of magnitude better. It ran on time. It looked good. Big stars offered musical tributes. It was coherent, showcasing speeches on the upbeat themes of inclusion and tolerance as a small-d democratic virtue.
There was some disorder—protests in the stands from disappointed delegates for Bernie Sanders—but the most attention-getting theatrics were targeted at the opponent. (In particular, an emotional speech by Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American soldier killed in action, baited Trump into a public feud over his Islamophobia.) The DNC promised a Hillary Clinton presidency not as reality-TV chaos but professionally scripted drama: a reliable, top-shelf sequel from the producers of Obama!
Maybe the starkest example of how America’s political camps were speaking different cultural languages came when Vice President Joe Biden turned Trump’s most famous phrase against him: “No matter where you were raised, how can there be pleasure in saying, ‘You’re fired’?” To one audience, it was a devastating moral takedown. But to another—one that enjoyed The Apprentice, that chanted “Lock her up!” at rallies—it was a free ad for Trump, a sign that Biden was an old pearl-clutcher who didn’t get the joke.
The only TV world in which Trump’s convention made any kind of sense was the TV world he’d thrived in. Fox News, where life was assumed to be a continual zero-sum struggle. Reality TV, where unpredictability signified authenticity. Conservative pop culture, where the scorn of hoity-toity sophisticates bound the audience in fraternal resentment.*
And pro wrestling, in the form of a WWE-style showdown with Ted Cruz. Cruz, Trump’s bitter primary rival, had not backed Trump but was given a prime-time speaking slot anyway. It was the sort of “dramatic showdown” decision moment that reality TV thrived on: Would he endorse? Cruz—the sort of politician who seems to draw sustenance from the animus of his fellow man—maintained the suspense for eighteen minutes before urging the audience to “vote your conscience.” The crowd, knowing that “conscience” was the opposite of “Donald Trump,” bayed and howled. Cruz held a tight little coin purse of a smile on his lips.
Suddenly, the boos became mixed with cheers—angry, lusty cheers. Trump had walked into the hall, on an upper level, scowling but clapping, slap, slap, slap, and waving to the delegates. The red light took interest. CNN quickly put him picture-in-picture with Cruz, Trump’s image larger and higher on the screen, dominant—just like when he’d appeared on a WWE Jumbotron and insulted the supercilious Vince McMahon before making dollar bills rain from the sky.
It was the opposite of the thing TV conventions usually strove so hard to broadcast, unity. It was the promise of disunity, because that was the state of man. The fight would go on and on, against enemies and insufficiently zealous friends, and it would be good, because fighting is productive and enriching and sustaining—and you would be winning that fight, forever, perched on the high ground like Trump against McMahon, punching down, over and over, against your enemies and into their stupid, shit-eating, “Vote your conscience” grins.
That promise, the forever fight, would be ratified the next night in Trump’s acceptance speech. The house lights cut out, and the PA played Queen’s “We Are the Champions”—“We’ll keep on fighting ’til the end”—as Trump walked out, backlit and silhouetted, from a rectangle of blinding light. It was the mirror image of the opening credits of The Apprentice, in which a shadowed figure walks to the camera from a golden-lit rectangular doorway.
Unlike at his rallies, he stuck to a script: upholding “law and order” in a world of “death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness.” It was not an optimistic speech, or rather, it was the optimism that, very soon, you would beat someone instead of them beating you. Only when he mentioned his campaign’s naysayers did he allow himself a brief, improvised aside: “We love defeating those people, don’t we?”
It was the one moment in the speech when he sounded truly happy.
A PARTY PRIMARY is to a general election as cable TV is to broadcast TV. There are many options, as opposed to two or three. The audience—in this case, voters—is divided into more, smaller niche groups.
In TV, as we’ve seen, different environments reward different kinds of programming. The move from three major networks to hundreds of cable channels meant a move away from the Least Objectionable Program and toward programming designed to stand out and attract a smaller but passionate following.
Winning a primary, especially one the size of 2016, is nichecasting. You develop a strong brand, you make sure you don’t blend into the background, and as one competitor after another goes off the air, you absorb their followers until you have a plurality.
Candidate Donald Trump, in other words, was a successful niche product. But a general election for president is, by constitutional mandate, a mass-market enterprise. You need a majority of the Electoral College. Two candidates, in this system, have a realistic chance of winning. Its incentive structure is much more like broadcast TV in the mid-twentieth century.
How does a niche-media product win in a broadcast environment? Trump’s campaign aimed to do what network reality TV did: sell the figure of the antihero to a mass audience.
This meant making the Vic Mackey argument, that if you’re in a struggle against extinction, no one cares if the president is a scoundrel so long as he’s your scoundrel. It meant making the Survivor argument, repositioning the villain as a rogue who played the game well. (“Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said at the convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.”) It meant doing what Breaking Bad did with Walter White—keeping the audience on the side of the antihero by convincing them that his enemies were even worse. It meant casting Trump as the wrestling figure that Barthes called “the bastard”: “Someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes.”
But also, specifically, Donald Trump was running against a woman. He framed Hillary Clinton the way antihero stories so often framed their female characters—or, at least, the way male fans of the shows often saw those female characters: as the killjoy, the try-hard, the scold, the ice bitch, the phony, the hypocrite, the wet blanket who holds men back from being awesome.
Ta-Nehisi Coates would later call Trump, with his bald appeals to racism, “the first white president”—the first not only to be white but to put the preservation of white privilege at the center of his agenda. Likewise, running against the first female major-party nominee for president, he made himself the first male candidate for president.
There was a long history of presidential candidates campaigning on virility and their physical exploits—Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt—and attacking political opponents as unmanly or effeminate. Bill Clinton’s expressions of empathy (“I feel your pain”) were so widely mocked as feminizing that sketch comic Dana Carvey once portrayed him exposing a breast and nursing a baby. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, California governor, action-movie star, and future Celebrity Apprentice replacement host Arnold Schwarzenegger dismissed Democratic nominees John Kerry and John Edwards as “girly men,” quoting one of Carvey’s old Saturday Night Live sketches. Modern Republicans routinely positioned themselves as the “daddy party” vs. the Democrats’ “mommy party.”
But implicitly and sometimes explicitly, Trump ran on masculinity as an idea, a Strangelovian value, a vital essence to be preserved.
From his first days in the tabloids, the character of Donald Trump was a performance of hyperbolic maleness. He cultivated gossip columnists to describe him as an alpha ladies’ man. He echoed Hugh Hefner, the fantasy of a sultan-letch who can indulge his every carnal desire. The Apprentice styled him as a “pimp,” the WWE as a wild man. He underlined his harem-keeper image by buying Miss Universe, a pageant which distinguished itself from Miss America by dispensing with the pretense of a talent competition and focusing on T&A. “If you’re looking for a rocket scientist, don’t tune in tonight,” he told Howard Stern about the pageant in 2005. Stern’s show was basically an Animal Planet mating display for Trump, who would list the celebrity women he wanted to have sex with, critiqued their plastic surgery, and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10.
If Trump seemed to represent an antiquated, Rat Pack, ring-a-ding-ding sexuality—well, that too was the point. I love the old days.
He emphasized his physicality. He had “stamina” and Clinton did not, he repeated over and over, which made no literal sense—he was a creature of conveyances, taking the escalator and riding in golf carts. But it implied a message: Man strong, woman weak. He highlighted his testosterone level in a medical report that he brought on daytime TV’s The Dr. Oz Show. He marketed himself as a political Viagra pill for a following anxious about its potency. (Quite literally: psychological researchers found that Trump’s 2016 support correlated to regions of the country with a high rate of Google searches for terms like “erectile dysfuction,” “penis enlargement,” and “how to get girls.”)
And his attacks on Clinton relied on a dynamic of antihero fiction: the audience will punish women for qualities—ambition, aggression, self-assuredness—that they reward in men. For Trump, having worked the system meant he alone could fix it; for Clinton, it meant she was corrupt. For him, greed meant he would be greedy on behalf of the country; for her, it meant she was in it for herself. If she knew her material, it meant she was “overprepared,” dull, and inauthentic, whereas he was an improviser who went with his gut. If she was sarcastic, she was a “nasty woman,” whereas he was a rogue. If she was angry, she should learn to smile more, whereas he was a fighter.
As journalist Rebecca Traister wrote, “There is an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival.” Everything that defined Clinton as a woman defined Trump as a man, the Man-in-Chief, the defender of men’s glory days. This too was a mark of the cable-TV antihero: Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Nucky Thompson of Boardwalk Empire were all men raging against a dying era, against the feeling, as Tony put it, of coming in “at the end” of something.
Trump showed up to their debates in Tony Soprano mode, hulking and heavy breathing, stalking Clinton like a mob goon around the stage. (He had taken on Fox News’s Roger Ailes as a debate consigliere, Ailes’s ouster from Fox over sexual harassment no apparent liability in the Trump campaign.) Like James Gandolfini’s, Trump’s bearing emphasized his size. Clutching the sides of his debate lectern, he became Tony Soprano squeezed into the chair of his therapist’s office, as if the constraints of a civilized setting strained to contain him. Their first debate often played like a therapy session, with Clinton as the Dr. Melfi, prodding for psychological pressure points (she rattled him with a story of a Miss Universe contestant whom he ridiculed for her weight by calling her “Miss Piggy”) while he snapped at her in punchy sentences: “Typical politician. All talk, no action. Sounds good, doesn’t work.”
Which one of them won depended on which version of the show you wanted to be watching.
ONE MONTH BEFORE election day, the campaign was interrupted by a very special episode of The Apprentice.
On Friday, October 7, 2016, the Washington Post unearthed a video from 2005 of Trump having what it tactfully called an “extremely lewd conversation about women.” It originated in a trifecta of corporate synergy: Trump, whose Apprentice was then near its peak on NBC, rode on a bus with Billy Bush, host of NBC’s entertainment-news show Access Hollywood, to tape a cameo on the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives.
As the Access camera crew rolled audio, Trump regaled the giggling Bush with a story of trying to seduce Bush’s cohost Nancy O’Dell (“I moved on her like a bitch”). After Bush pointed out the Days star Arianne Zucker waiting for the bus—“Your girl’s hot as shit!”—Trump said,
I better use some Tic-Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
It’s not just what Trump and Bush say but how they say it: chuckling about life as an endless dim sum buffet of pussy, Bush griping when another woman briefly disturbs his line of sight to Zucker’s legs. It’s what we see: Trump stepping off the bus, politely greeting Zucker, who has no idea that the two men whom she’s professionally obligated to be nice to were just discussing her like an item on the à la carte menu. “How about a little hug for the Donald?” Bush asks, and Zucker acquiesces. This is showbiz. You’ve got to keep the talent happy.
The tape was a disaster. Everybody knew it. The video played on repeat in the news, and more women came out in the press with stories of having been groped and attacked by Trump—a passenger on an airplane, a contestant on The Apprentice, a reporter for People. It would be the end for any candidate, but for Trump especially, it cemented his image as a pig, a lecherous boor, a toxic, selfish caveman. TV had made Donald Trump, and now TV would end him.
IN SEPTEMBER 1952, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon was facing his political death over reports of a “secret fund” set up by supporters for his political travel. His running mate Dwight Eisenhower, who never much liked him, let him twist while Republicans called on him to drop Nixon from the ticket.
Nixon’s one chance was to throw himself at the mercy of the red light. Television sets were then in only about 15 million households, many of them well-to-do Republican ones like Fred Trump’s. (Intellectual Adlai Stevenson liberals, Rick Perlstein wrote in Nixonland, “were the types who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them.”) He bought a half hour on NBC after Texaco Star Theater, the network’s biggest lead-in. He built suspense by not addressing rumors that he might quit the campaign on-air.
Nixon began solicitously: “The best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth.” His version of the truth was a story of humility with a subtext of resentment. Sitting at a desk on a suburban-den-like stage set—his wife Pat gazing lovingly at him from a floral-print chair in the corner, hands clasped on the lap of her sensible skirt—he laid out his assets and debts (a 1950 Oldsmobile, two mortgages, and $3,500 owed to his parents) and reminded the audience that “I don’t happen to be a rich man.” His script was plain dollars-and-cents talk, George Bailey explaining how the old building-and-loan worked in It’s a Wonderful Life. Finally, in the moment that would give the “Checkers speech” its name, he confessed one gift from a supporter that he would not return: “a little cocker spaniel dog” that his daughter Tricia named Checkers.
Viewers sent two million telegrams to the Republican National Committee, nearly all in Nixon’s support. That little cocker spaniel gave America another twenty-two years—that’s 154 in dog years—of Richard Nixon in public life.
The night of October 7, 2016, Trump released what you might consider the anti-Checkers speech to Facebook, Twitter, and cable news. He shot it at home—Trump Tower—sitting not in a bourgeois den but against a night-lit sea of Manhattan skyscrapers. His face was red, his voice crabbed and defiant. He read his lines as if submitting to an uncomfortable medical exam. (Few sights convey unhappiness as much as Donald Trump having to read something.)
“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person nor pretended to be someone that I’m not,” he said. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” The apology portion of the video took precisely twenty seconds. The remaining minute and change pivoted back to his sales pitch: “We’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we are facing today.” Then he counterpivoted to an all-out attack: “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
Nixon, who like his audience grew up with pre-televisual ideas of rhetoric and argument, took thirty minutes to lay out a case. Trump, whose motor idled at the speed of 2016 media, went from contrition to intimidation in ninety seconds.
Did any person with eyes and ears believe the guy in the video was sorry for anything? The guy in the video sure as hell didn’t. “If anything,” political reporter Maggie Haberman wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s videotaped statement was a truncated version of a speech that he had given countless times.”
The recording was the illustration of the Most Objectionable Program principle of polarizing the audience. Whatever you thought of Donald Trump before it, you believed twice as much now. It changed nothing.
But.
ON NOVEMBER 8, what everyone knew was going to happen, didn’t. The evening’s election coverage began telling the story of how Donald Trump lost before the returns even came in. The news anchors reported the results of exit polls that suggested that Americans didn’t respond to his fearmongering. Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway blamed the Republican establishment for insufficient support. It was over. Everybody knew it. And then, as Wolf Blitzer and John King stood before CNN’s “magic wall” touch screen going over the returns from Florida early in prime time, the margin between the candidates started wobbling—Clinton was ahead, then Trump, then Clinton, then Trump—as Blitzer excitedly pointed to the flip-flopping graphic like a child watching fireworks. At the New York Times website, the “needle”—the data-driven prediction meter that began the night at a high confidence of Clinton winning, slammed toward Trump’s side like the altimeter on a crashing airplane.
Donald Trump lost the popular vote by almost three million. He won the presidency by a margin of fewer than 80,000 votes in the decisive states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He was a TV program that lost the total audience but won in the key advertising demo.
In an election that close, any number of things could be the deciding factor. The proffered explanations have included: FBI director James Comey’s reviving, days before the election, the issue of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server; computer hacking and online propaganda by the Russian government; the release of stolen Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign e-mails and their blanket coverage in the media; “economic anxiety”; “identity politics”; third-party candidates; the strategy of the Clinton and Trump campaigns; sexism; racism; nationalism; populism; fake news; mainstream news; Fox News; the collective assumption by everyone—the media, protest voters, the Obama administration, the Trump campaign itself—that Clinton was going to win, so nothing that they did would really matter.
Someone else can sort that out. But to get into the position where it was even possible, where the election of the guy from The Apprentice as leader of the world’s singular superpower was more than a premise for an SNL skit, a large enough portion of America had to accept the idea of cheering for the antihero, for the Tony Sopranos and Richard Hatches of the world. They had to accept the sales pitch that the president did not need to be morally admirable, or trustworthy, or empathetic, or self-sacrificing, or curious, or self-reflective, or capable of acting as though other people’s interests were as important as his own—as long as they believed he could do the job they wanted done. That was the real argument of his Access Hollywood “apology”: We’re living in the real world.
Even Richard Nixon felt the obligation to go on TV and tell Americans that he was not a crook. Donald Trump only had to promise his voters that he’d give them their cut—conservative judges, or tax cuts, or the punishment of immigrants, or the pain of the liberals.
It’s not as simple as saying that TV “made” people vote for Donald Trump (though it surely helped him) or that people were misled by reality TV into seeing him as other than he was (though surely some were). One psychological study found that Apprentice fans developed a “parasocial bond” with Trump—the kind of empathic connection TV viewers feel with characters they visit every week, because our brains didn’t evolve to distinguish mediated relationships from real ones. But what little polling there was on the preferences of Apprentice viewers in 2016 was wildly inconsistent; one poll found Trump with a twenty-plus lead among fans of the show, another found a nearly identical margin for Clinton among the same group.
But once a set of ideas and archetypes enter the culture, they become part of the common language that a politician can build a story from. Trump made that sale—You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in—and having done it, anything he did in the campaign or could be shown to have done in the past simply solidified his support by solidifying his opposition.
Sometimes he boggled at it himself. He had a way of stepping out of his body and commenting on his own campaign like an analyst, as if he were a show that he was watching on TV. At a rally in Iowa he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody”—he made a little finger gun, dead at the camera—“and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Why would he lose any for shooting his mouth off on the NBC lot?
When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
IN THE BLUE-CURTAINED BALLROOM of the New York Hilton Midtown—“Manhattan’s largest self-contained function space”—Donald Trump walked onstage election night with his family, to the theme “The Parachutes,” from Air Force One, a 1997 Harrison Ford action movie about a president who kills terrorists. He passed a “Bikers for Trump” sign. He clapped rhythmically, slap, slap, slap. He smiled tightly, almost a grimace, and gripped the podium.
It was 2:49 in the morning. Before he started his victory speech, he searched one more time, over the heads of the crowd, for the red light of the TV-news camera, the one thing on Earth that was most like him. It never slept. It was always hungry. It ate and ate and ate, and when it had eaten the entire world, it was still empty.
* Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty, in a stars-and-stripes bandana, addressed the RNC with a prayer—the same way every episode of the show ended—and mocked the “media experts” who “don’t hang out with regular folks like us, who like to hunt and fish and pray and actually work for a living.”