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.
Fake Fights, Real Stakes
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.’?”