Ronald Reagan was once asked what it was like to be president after being an actor, and he reportedly said, “How can a president not be an actor?” You can imagine Trump thinking the same thing about being a reality TV star.
Trump’s mastery of the genre was pivotal in the construction of his branded empire and it was essential to his successful run for president. And now Trump is using those same skills he learned on The Apprentice—the belief that he can cut, edit, and reshape reality to fit a largely pre-scripted, self-aggrandizing outcome—to transform not just the White House, but large parts of the world.
The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same recurring characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows where the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to be on display. Tens of millions were glued to their sets as participants were voted off the island on Survivor, voted out of the mansion on The Bachelor—and, eventually, fired by Donald Trump.
The timing makes sense. The first season of Survivor—so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators—was in 2000. That was two decades after the “free-market revolution” had been kicked into high gear by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society. It was now possible to peddle as mass entertainment the act of watching people turn on each other for a pot of gold.
The whole genre—the alliances, the backstabbing, the one person left standing—was always a kind of capitalist burlesque. Before The Apprentice, however, there was at least the pretext that it was about something else: how to survive in the wilderness, how to catch a husband, how to be a housemate. With Donald Trump’s arrival, the veneer was gone. The Apprentice was explicitly about the race to survive in the cutthroat “jungle” of late capitalism.
The first episode began with a shot of a homeless person sleeping rough on the street—a loser, in other words. Then the camera cut to Trump in his limo, living the dream—the ultimate winner. The message was unmistakable: you can be the homeless guy, or you can be Trump. That was the whole sadistic drama of the show—play your cards right and be the one lucky winner, or suffer the abject humiliation of being berated and then fired by the boss. It was quite a cultural feat: after decades of mass layoffs, declining living standards, and the normalization of extremely precarious employment, Mark Burnett and Donald Trump delivered the coup de grâce: they turned the act of firing people into mass entertainment.
Every week, to millions of viewers, The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer. That’s how you help the economy and, more importantly, yourself.
In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more sadistic. The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion—drinking champagne in inflatable pool loungers, zipping off in limos to meet celebrities. The losing team was deported to tents in the backyard, nicknamed “Trump trailer park.”
The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the “have-nots,” didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates, and slept to the sounds of howling dogs. They would peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the “haves” were enjoying. In other words, Trump and Burnett deliberately created a microcosm of the very real and ever-widening inequalities outside the show, the same injustices that have enraged many Trump voters—but they played those inequalities for kicks, turning them into a spectator sport. (There was a slight Hunger Games quality to it, though hemmed in by network television restrictions on non-simulated violence.) On one show, Trump told the tent team that “life’s a bitch,” so they’d better do everything possible to step over the losers and become a winner like him.
What’s interesting about this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, is that the pretense sold to a previous generation—capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds—is completely absent. No: this is a system that generates a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you are on the winning team.
This reflects the fact that, for well over a decade now, the ideological and intellectual side of the neoliberal project has been in severe crisis. In 2016, Credit Suisse estimated that there is roughly $256 trillion in total global wealth—with a staggeringly unequal distribution: “While the bottom half collectively own less than 1 percent of total wealth, the wealthiest top 10 percent own 89 percent of all global assets.” Which is why there just aren’t many serious people left who are willing to argue, with a straight face, that giving more to the wealthy is the best way to help the poor. Trump’s pitch has always been different. From the start, it was: I will turn you into a winner—and together we can crush the losers.
It’s worth remembering that Trump’s breakthrough to national celebrity status came not via a real estate deal, but a book about making real estate deals. The Art of the Deal, marketed as holding the secrets to fabulous financial wealth, was published in 1987—the peak of the Reagan era. It was followed up over the years with crasser variations on the same theme: Think Like a Billionaire, Think Big and Kick Ass, Trump 101, and How to Get Rich.
Trump first started selling the notion that he held the ticket to joining the top one percent of income earners at the precise moment when many of the ladders that provided social mobility between classes—like free quality public education—were being kicked away, and just as the social safety net was being shredded. All of this meant that the drive to magically strike it rich, to win big, to make it to that safe economic stratum, became increasingly frantic.
Trump, who was born wealthy, expertly profited off that desperation across many platforms, but most infamously through Trump University. In one ad for the scandal-plagued and now-defunct “university” (actually a series of dodgy seminars in hotel meeting rooms), Trump declared, “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”
And then there were the casinos, a large chunk of Trump’s US real estate portfolio. The dream at the center of the casino economy is not so different from the dream for sale at Trump University or in How to Get Rich: you may be on the verge of personal bankruptcy today, but if you (literally) play your cards right, you could be living large by morning.
This is central to how Trump built his brand and amassed his wealth—by selling the promise that “you too could be Donald Trump”—at a time when life was becoming so much more precarious if you weren’t in the richest one percent. He then turned around and used that very same pitch to voters—that he would make America a country of winners again—exploiting those deep economic anxieties and using all the reality-simulation skills that he had picked up from years at the helm of a top-rated TV show. After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Donald Trump understands exactly how little needs to be behind the promise—whether on renegotiating trade deals or bringing back manufacturing—if the desperation is great enough.
Well before Trump’s rise, elections had already crossed over into ratings-driven infotainment on cable news. What Trump did was to exponentially increase the entertainment factor, and therefore the ratings. As a veteran of the form, he understood that if elections had become a form of reality TV, then the best contestant (which is not the same thing as the best candidate) would win. Maybe they wouldn’t win the final vote, but they would at least win wall-to-wall coverage, which from a branding perspective is still winning. As Trump said when he was contemplating a presidential run in 2000 (he decided against it): “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”
Since the election, we’ve heard a few mea culpas from media executives acknowledging that they helped Trump’s electoral rise by giving him such an outsized portion of their coverage. And that’s true, they helped enormously, but the hand-wringing doesn’t go nearly far enough. They are also responsible because the biggest gift to Trump was not just airtime but the entire infotainment model of covering elections, which endlessly plays up interpersonal dramas between the candidates while largely abandoning the traditional journalistic task of delving into policy specifics and explaining how different candidates’ positions on issues such as health care and regulatory reform will play out in voters’ lives.
The Tyndall Report found that, through the entire election, the three major nightly network news shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on “issues coverage”—down from an already paltry 220 minutes in the 2008 election. The rest was the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll where. For millions of viewers, the result was highly entertaining. (Which is likely why French media followed a markedly similar formula to cover its high-stakes 2017 elections.)
This is worth underlining: Trump didn’t create the problem—he exploited it. And because he understood the conventions of fake reality better than anyone, he took the game to a whole new level.
Trump didn’t just bring reality TV expertise to electoral politics—he mashed that up with another blockbuster entertainment genre that is also based on a cartoonishly fake performance of reality: professional wrestling. It’s hard to overstate Trump’s fascination with wrestling. He has performed as himself (the ultrarich boss) in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) appearances at least eight times, enough to earn him a place in the WWE Hall of Fame. In a “Battle of the Billionaires,” he pretended to pound wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon and then celebrated victory by publicly shaving McMahon’s head in front of the cheering throngs. He also dropped thousands of dollars in cash into the audience of screaming fans. Now, he has appointed the former CEO of WWE, Linda McMahon (wife of Vince), to his cabinet as head of the Small Business Administration, a detail that has largely been lost amidst the daily deluge.
As with The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience—in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be largely invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but WWE generates close to a billion dollars in annual revenue. And Trump did more than pick up votes from this experience—he also picked up tips.
As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Trump’s entire campaign had a distinctly WWE quality. His carefully nurtured feuds with other candidates were pure pro wrestling, especially the way he handed out insulting nicknames (“Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted”). And most wrestling-like of all was the way Trump played ringmaster at his rallies, complete with over-the-top insult-chants (“Lock her up!” “Killary”) and directing the crowd’s rage at the arena’s designated villains: journalists and demonstrators. Outsiders would emerge from these events shaken, not sure what had just happened. What happened is that they had just been to a bizarre cross between a pro-wrestling match and a white supremacist rally.
What reality television and professional wrestling have in common is that they are forms of mass entertainment that are relatively new in American culture, and they both establish a curious relationship with reality—one that is both fake and still somehow genuine at the same time.
With WWE, every fight is fixed, everybody knows that it’s rehearsed. But that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment in any way. The fact that everyone is in on the joke, that the cheers and boos are part of the show, increases the fun. The artifice is not a drawback—it’s the point.
Wrestling and reality TV both thrive on the spectacle of extreme emotion, conflict, and suffering. They both involve people screaming at each other and pulling each other’s hair out and, in the case of wrestling, beating the crap out of each other. But at the same time as you’re watching it, you know it’s not real, so you don’t have to care; you get to be part of the drama without having to feel any empathy. Nobody cries when wrestlers get slammed and humiliated, any more than we were meant to cry for The Apprentice contestants when Trump fired or humiliated them. It’s a safe place to laugh at suffering. And it was all part of preparing the ground for that Igor of all things fake, Donald Trump. Fake body parts, fake wrestling, fake-reality TV, fake news, and his whole fake business model.
And now Trump has grafted this same warped relationship to reality onto his administration. He announces that Obama wiretapped him in the same way that a wrestler declares he’s going to annihilate and humiliate his opponent. Whether or not it’s true is beside the point. It’s part of rousing the crowd, part of the theater. The Apprentice may be off the air, and Trump may have retired his WWE career, but the show is still on. Indeed, it never stops.
Newt Gingrich, who has been a pretty faithful cheerleader of Donald Trump, was asked shortly before inauguration what he thought of the president-elect’s decision to keep his position as executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice. His answer was quite revealing. He said Trump was making a mistake because he “is going to be the executive producer of a thing called the American government. He’s going to have a huge TV show called ‘Leading the World.’ ”
And that’s exactly what’s happening. The Trump Show is now broadcasting live from the Oval Office. And from Mar-a-Lago, which is even more like a TV show because its well-heeled members provide a built-in live studio audience. And it’s clear that this is precisely how Trump sees his presidency too, as the executive producer of a country, always with an eye on the ratings. Responding to the suggestion that he might fire his gaffe-machine of a press secretary, he reportedly said, “I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”
It’s with the same brash showmanship that Trump is now navigating—or failing to navigate—the promises he made to bring back the bygone days of booming factories and blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages, promises that he would impose a “Buy American, Hire American” policy (never mind that his own empire is built on outsourcing and exploited labor).
This posture is as authentic as the violence he enacted when he appeared to take on a WWE wrestler in the ring, or when he was choosing from among contestants on Celebrity Apprentice. Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many US companies are no longer manufacturers at all, but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors. He may be able to bring back a few factories, or claim that he did, but the numbers will be minuscule compared with the need. (There is a real way to create a great many well-paying jobs—but it looks nothing like the Trump approach. It requires looking to the future, not the past, as we’ll see in the final chapter.)
Trump’s game plan, which is already under way, is to approach the unemployment and underemployment crisis in the same way he approaches everything—as a spectacle. He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs—most of which would have been created anyway—and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the job numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative, just as he learned to do on The Apprentice, and just as he did on his very first day as president, insisting, against all objective evidence, that his inauguration crowds had been historic.
This is what Trump does, and has always done. In 1992, when his empire was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy thanks to a series of bad investment decisions, he didn’t deal with the situation by getting his finances in order. Instead, he threw an elaborate “comeback party” for his investors and financiers at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which culminated in Trump—wearing satin boxing shorts and red boxing gloves—punching through a paper wall to the theme song from Rocky. This is a man who thinks he can solve anything with the right stage-managed performance, and very often in the past he’s been proven right. So just as he spun and performed his way out of bankruptcy, he is convinced he can do the same with the country’s economy.
If we know anything for certain, it’s that hard facts don’t matter in Donald Trump’s world. With Trump, it’s not so much the Big Lie as the Constant Lies. Yes, he tells big ones, like the time he implied Ted Cruz’s dad had a role in assassinating JFK, and his years of lies about Obama’s place of birth. But it’s the continuous stream of lies—notoriously offered to us as “alternative facts”—that is most dizzying. According to a Politico investigation, this is quite deliberate: “White House staffers do much of their lying for sport, rather than to further any larger agenda,” even competing over who can “smuggle the biggest whoppers into print.” Though these claims are based on anonymous sources, and so may themselves be lies, the story fits with what we know about Trump: what good is reaching the pinnacle of power if you can’t bend reality to your will? In Trump’s world, and according to the internal logic of his brand, lying with impunity is all part of being the big boss. Being tethered to fixed, boring facts is for losers.
And so far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized upon this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created—the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing first family free of major scandals for eight years. And these were all good things. But, too often, these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians, or the deportations of roughly 2.5 million immigrants without documents during Obama’s term, or his broken promises to close Guantanamo or shut down George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”
In Canada, many liberals are displaying the same kind of selective blindness. Dazzled by the progressive messaging of our handsome prime minister, they are letting him hang on to many of his predecessor’s disastrous policies, from the indefinite detention of many immigrants to ramming through tar sands pipelines (more on that later). Politically, Justin Trudeau is very different from Donald Trump, but for his staunchest supporters—who often behave a lot like fans—his celebrity has a similarly distorting effect. This new “Trudeaumania” reminds us that conservatives aren’t the only ones capable of confusing engaged citizenship with brand loyalty.
Of course, Trump’s successful attempt to sell his white working class voters on the dream of a manufacturing comeback will eventually come crashing down to earth. But what is most worrying is what Trump will do then, once it’s no longer possible to hide the fact that coal jobs aren’t coming back, and neither are the factory jobs that paid workers enough to provide their families with a middle-class life. In all likelihood, Trump will then fall back on the only other tools he has: he’ll double down on pitting white workers against immigrant workers, do more to rile up fears about Black crime, more to whip up an absurd frenzy about transgendered people and bathrooms, and launch fiercer attacks on reproductive rights and on the press.
And then, of course, there’s always war.
Acknowledging that Trump’s presidency is being produced like a reality show in no way diminishes the danger it represents—quite the opposite. People have already died in this show—in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in the United States—and many more will meet the same fate before it goes off the air. In March alone, a UK-based monitoring group recorded allegations of more than 1,500 civilian deaths from US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, higher than ever recorded under Obama.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show. Blood-sport reality TV is, after all, a science-fiction cliché. Think of The Hunger Games, with its reality TV spectacle in which all the players die but one. Or The Running Man, another film about a televised event where the stakes are life or death. (Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, reportedly described the bombing of Syria as Mar-a-Lago’s “after-dinner entertainment.”)
The most chilling part is that, as I write, Trump has only just started playing his version of The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games with the full arsenal of US military power as his props—and he is getting plenty of encouragement to keep upping the ante. When Trump launched Tomahawk missiles on Syria, MSNBC host Brian Williams declared the images “beautiful.” Just one week later, Trump went for more spectacle, dropping the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal on a cave complex in Afghanistan, an act of violence so indiscriminate and disproportionate that analysts struggled to find any rationale that could resemble a coherent military strategy. Because there was no strategy—the megatonnage is the message. Mass communication through bombs.
Given that Trump ordered the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in combat before, and given that he did this just twelve weeks into his presidency and with no obvious provocation, there is little reason to hope he will be able to resist putting on the show of shows—the televised apocalyptic violence of a full-blown war, complete with its guaranteed blockbuster ratings. Well before Trump, we had wars fought as televised entertainment. The 1990 Gulf War was dubbed the first video-game war, complete with its own logo and theme music on CNN. But that was nothing compared with the show put on during the 2003 Iraq invasion, based on a military strategy called “Shock and Awe.” The attacks were designed as a spectacle for cable news consumers, but also for Iraqis, to maximize their sense of helplessness, to “teach them a lesson.” Now, that fearsome technology is in the hands of the first reality TV president. We need to get ready, a subject I’ll return to in Chapter 9.
If there is one real aspect to the festival of fakery that is the Trump presidency, it’s the hunger at the heart of it. The sheer insatiability. Trump likes to talk about how he doesn’t need more money—he has more than enough. Yet he just can’t help selling his products at every opportunity, can’t stop working every angle. It’s as if he suffers from some obscure modern illness—let’s call it a brand personality disorder—that causes him to slip into brand promotion almost involuntarily. He’ll be giving a political speech and then, suddenly, he’s talking about how beautiful and expensive the marble is at a Trump hotel, or gratuitously telling his interviewer, when discussing how he ordered a lethal bombing of Syria, that the chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago is “the most beautiful…you’ve ever seen.”
That unquenchable hunger, that hollowness at the center, does speak to something real—to a profound emptiness at the heart of the very culture that spawned Donald Trump. And that hollowness is intimately connected to the rise of lifestyle brands, the shift that gave Trump an ever-expanding platform. The rise of the hollow brands—selling everything, owning next to nothing—happened over decades when the key institutions that used to provide individuals with a sense of community and shared identity were in sharp decline: tightly knit neighborhoods where people looked out for one another; large workplaces that held out the promise of a job for life; space and time for ordinary people to make their own art, not just consume it; organized religion; political movements and trade unions that were grounded in face-to-face relationships; public-interest media that strove to knit nations together in a common conversation.
All these institutions and traditions were and are imperfect, often deeply so. They left many people out, and very often enforced an unhealthy conformity. But they did offer something we humans need for our well-being, and for which we never cease to long: community, connection, a sense of mission larger than our immediate atomized desires. These two trends—the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture—have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.
I’ve always taken solace from this dynamic. It means that, while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can’t fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you’ve thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fill the void again. It’s the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it’s a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption.
But it’s always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force—the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die. And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we’re at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).
As we’ll see in Part IV, many movements and theorists are working toward just this kind of shift in culture and values. Before we get to that, though, there are a few more important trails we need to follow to help us understand how we ended up here.