The FRONTLINE Interviews
James Poniewozik
Television Critic and Author
James Poniewozik is the chief television critic for The New York Times and the author of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.
Following is the transcript of an interview conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on October 3, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Donald Trump and Reality Television
So let’s start with Rona Barrett.We have that piece of stock footage.… But tell me what the importance of that artifact is and what you thought when you wrote it and how it fits a kind of general thesis, maybe.
Two things strike me about that interview.… But the first thing that strikes me is that it’s a different Donald Trump in tone than the Donald Trump that we’re used to seeing on TV, and have been seeing and hearing on TV for years and since The Apprentice days.It’s a much more mellifluous, sort of softer side of Trump.He’s more ingratiating, more calming, which in many ways reflects not just somebody who’s new to the media spotlight, but the more sort of genteel tone of television back in the mass-media broadcast era, number one.
Number two, one thing that really strikes me is that it’s Rona Barrett who first has the presence of mind to ask Donald Trump whether he would ever run for president.He’s not even legally old enough to run for president at the time.It’s not something that a quote/unquote “serious” news interviewer might have asked him, and I think it’s very revealing that the first person who thinks of it is a gossip columnist, somebody who said that her philosophy is that people generally care about money, power and sex.
And, you know, I think she intuited, before the Reagan era had even really begun that wealth itself was becoming a form of celebrity in America and that that was a form of power.… And so she asks him, “Would you ever want to be president?” and he says he wouldn’t, and that he doesn’t think he could get elected.And part of the reason that he gives is television, the role of television in campaigning.And he says that television favors sort of a nice guy with a big smile, somebody inoffensive, somebody uncontroversial, somebody the opposite of the Donald Trump who would actually run for president.
And the funny thing is that, you know, while it’s ironic, looking back at that from our present-day vantage point, he’s not wrong.Back in 1980, somebody like Donald Trump, certainly somebody like the Donald Trump that we know right now, probably could not have run for president, or he couldn’t have run for president and won.You had George Wallaces in the past.You would have Ross Perot, you know, a decade or so after that.You had polarizing figures, but they would generally only get so far in that kind of environment where even Ronald Reagan had to assure the American public that he had this grandfatherly, avuncular side, and they could trust him and feel safe with him.
So there’s something that changes, not just in Donald Trump, and maybe not even just in politics, but in the structure of media and the tone of media and the way that media functions in order to get to the point from where somebody like Donald Trump couldn’t even be imaginable as a presidential candidate short of in a movie parody to the point where he can go directly from hosting The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC to running his first successful presidential campaign.
… 2004, I guess, is the first time you come across him as a reporter yourself.He’s about to start The Apprentice.I think you were writing for Time at the time?
Yes, I was.
So tell us the story of your thoughts about him and how the business had changed, the television business had changed and the culture had changed in those 14 years.
So, you know, I met Donald Trump and interviewed him as a TV critic.And I like to tell people now that I’m not the sort of person who is supposed to be interviewing future presidents of the United States.If I end up interviewing a future president, something has gone weird in the culture.
And certainly at the time, I did not think that I was interviewing a future world leader, although he had teased, in what were widely viewed as publicity stunts, runs for the presidency in 1988 and in 2000.You know, when I met him, he was a nostalgia figure from the 1980s who was trying to revive his career on a reality game show that he was cast in partly because he had so successfully embodied this sort of popular culture cartoon of wealth and success.And that’s what reality TV needs.It needs big, broad cartoons.
So I go to Trump Tower, and I go up the golden mirror–plated elevator, walk into his office, and what I encounter is a celebrity who very much wants to impress people and have people like him.He hands me a little offprint of an article from Crain’s New York Business magazine that he says proves that he is the largest developer in Manhattan, although it actually didn’t.And, you know, it was what we would later learn is a typical Trumpian overstatement.
But what he was, was somebody who was very good at adapting to the media of his time, whether it was the talk show media of the 1980s or the Fox News era that he would later run for president in.And at this time, what reality TV liked was sort of sharp-edged, controversial, outspoken, brash figures.And Donald Trump, whatever he was as a businessman, he was central casting for this, you know.The media had kind of come around to a kind of figure that he had been playing in his own TV show of his life for a couple of decades at that point.
So while we’re on The Apprentice, just the tropes, the ideas that exist, the hoops one must jump through in order to be a successful week-in/week-out, year-in/year-out star of a reality show, are what?
Reality TV wants conflict.It wants controversy.It wants people who are willing to project—not to play a character, not to create a fictional self that they’re playing that has nothing to do with themselves, but to create a performative version of themselves, to exaggerate the part of themselves that is most attention-getting, that is most conflict-seeking, that will create the fireworks that the camera always needs so that you have conflict to tell a story.
And that was something that Trump was well adapted to.You know, needed somebody who knew how to stir the pot, to foment conflict among others, which he proved to have a really great sense of in all those famous boardroom scenes, where he was not just firing people, but he was sort of goading the contestants into competing with each other for his favor.And that was a big engine of the show as well.
He also had just a great live sense of the camera.He could speak off the cuff and banter with people and kind of shoot little jabs at people.… He was not necessarily a great deliverer of scripted lines, but he was great at jabbing and improvising and extemporizing.And that, again, if you’re shooting a reality TV show, is something that you can edit into a great story every week.
So these sort of rules of reality television that he embodies, at least on the program, how much of that is Donald Trump playing a character, and how much of that is the real Donald Trump, whatever I mean by that?
The way I like to put it is that Donald Trump is playing a character, but the character is himself.And so, you know, the—the seeking of conflict, the love of fighting, the—the belief that sort of competing with each other is the highest state of humanity, that’s always been a part of him.That’s always been his nature.But what his experience in front of the television camera and his experience as sort of a media pop culture figure has taught him is that he’ll be rewarded if he exaggerates.That’s what will get the camera interested in him.That’s what will get him on TV, in the headlines.And that builds his brand.And that brand, that performance, that persona is something that you can leverage into whatever other fields.
So all this stuff is Donald Trump at heart, the guy who’s braggadocious, who’s cocky, who’s swaggering, who likes fights and likes bragging about winning and keeps score at all times.But you do see that character from the ’80s through the ’90s, into the Apprentice era, evolving and becoming more belligerent, more sort of sharp-edged, because, number one, that’s kind of what the media at the time is evolving towards, and number two, that is the performance that’s gotten him the biggest applause, that’s gotten him the most attention.
So if there’s a separate Donald Trump that’s different from that at some point, I think he’s just sort of lost sight of it, because this is what he knows how to be.
Trump is television, and television is Trump.
Yeah, exactly.He thinks like a camera, and that’s why he’s done so well on television.It’s why he’s used television so well.And later, that’s often why he is sort of used by television as president, because he is an instinctual performer on television and an insatiable consumer of television.
The Changing Television Business
OK.So now let’s talk about television.The television that he couldn’t have used to get elected president in 1980, the television he certainly couldn’t even maybe have used to get elected in 2004, which still wanted smiling, nice guys, Gary Hart, some of those kind of—Al Gore, maybe even George W. Bush.But by 14 seasons in, how has television changed?What has happened to the television landscape that is no longer mass appeal, no longer lowest-common-denominator appeal, but is something else?
So the thing I like to tell people is that what is on TV is on TV because it makes money.And to understand how TV works, why TV is the way it is, you have to understand a little bit of the business of television.So what television was in the middle of the 20th century was it was a mass, mass medium.There were three major American networks, commercial networks.They drew tens of millions of viewers for every show, and everything that they put on the air had to retain tens of millions of viewers in order to stay on the air.
It was governed by a concept that was referred to as the “least objectionable program,” which basically means that whatever you put on TV, you’ve got to avoid giving people a reason to turn it off or to change to another channel.And that means, you know, avoiding controversy, avoiding things that might be too offensive to anybody and so forth.Obviously, there are always objections to these sorts of things.There was, you know, risk-taking programming at the time, but that was the exception.
The rule was middle-of-the-road entertainment that offered a little something for everybody.As TV changes as a business in the 1980s and the 1990s, what emerges is first cable, right?So you’re moving in the time when you have dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of different outlets for different customers.You have channels just for old people and channels just for young people and channels just for people who want sports and channels for people who just want news.And everything is now trying to serve a specific slice of the audience, which means that, in entertainment and in nonfiction television, you are actually trying to air polarizing entertainment.You’re trying to air television that’s not necessarily for everybody, but that is very much for particular people.And that changes the business of television, because now you have things like MTV, like ESPN, like CNN.And it also changes the tone of television, because things don’t have to be broadly palatable.In fact, it’s harder to be a business success making things that are broadly palatable.
But things are more intense and focused on specific audiences.That leads to the development of phenomena like reality television, which is something that, again, at least in its sort of very controversial, very in-your-face version that we saw in the early 2000s, wouldn’t have existed back in the ’50s and ’60s on.It’s too alienating for broadcast television.
But now, you know, people like Simon Cowell, who are popular for insulting everybody on American Idol, those are—those are popular entertainers.People embrace those kinds of figures.And that means that in an environment where you have specific shows for specific people, you could have much more—you have many more avenues for controversy and things that alienate a lot of people, but that a few people like very much.
Trump Moves from Reality TV to Politics
… And so you have this man, this character on this reality TV program that’s part of the changing broadcast landscape.… He decides to cross the blood-brain barrier from network NBC television entertainer to politician that can presumably, now, 30 years after or however many years after Rona Barrett, the times are right, and the technology is right for him.
Right.There are now avenues for somebody to move from entertainment directly into politics that didn’t exist back when Ronald Reagan had to be governor of California before he could run for president.There are different kinds of entertainment.TV news has become more entertainment-ified.And you have outlets like Fox News now, which are 24-hour cable channels and that are aimed at a specific sector of the news audience; in this case, a highly politicized, conservative audience.
…So Roger Ailes, who helped establish Fox News, had an insight about what TV news was in the cable era that would parallel a lot of political thinking later, going on into the 21st century, which is that you are no longer trying to appeal to everybody; you are trying to appeal to a base.And in Fox News’ case, that meant super-serving a conservative audience that felt alienated from mainstream media and from the culture generally, and that wanted to hear a conservative point of view in the media.So Fox News existed to give them that, and it had a great deal of success with that.
Fox News was also really well produced from an entertainment standpoint.I mean, it did a thing that cable news also needs as a business function, which is to make the news exciting.It’s flashy.It has very telegenic anchors.It gives you the sense that, you know, not only is the news something to be angry about, but it’s just something to be hyped up about all the time.And that makes for a successful—you know, a successful cable news network has a showbiz aspect.It is partly an entertainment business, and the more important that becomes, the more the values of entertainment become part of the values of news.
So Fox News, like a lot of TV networks, has a morning show, which is sort of half entertainment, half news, called Fox and Friends, and that is the perfect environment for a TV celebrity to sort of port himself over into the cable news political world, right?A former Fox executive once described Fox and Friends as an entertainment show that does some news, and that was exactly what Donald Trump was at the time.He was an entertainment guy who did some politics.
So he starts appearing on Fox News as the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, much like TV stars will come on, and he’ll talk to the hosts about why he fired Gary Busey on the show the night before and then be asked to weigh in on whatever, the Obama administration’s policy in Libya.And the Fox News base loves this, because one of the things that Fox News had harped on, and conservative media harped on all the time, was liberal Hollywood does not get you.Liberal entertainment stars look down on you; they resent you; they’re from a different culture than you.Well, here is a legitimate TV star who’s on their side, and he’s one of theirs.And they loved that.
And he develops a big following.And they have him on again and again as a guest.His appearances start to become more and more political.By the beginning of 2011, he gets a weekly segment on Fox and Friends, “Mondays with Trump.”Suddenly he has an entire parallel political news career that you might not even have been aware of if you were watching The Celebrity Apprentice every week.
… A means to transmit what he thinks and what he believes and get it out to an audience that is similar or somewhat similar to the audience for The Apprentice.
He has a means to sound off about what he thinks to the audience, but he also has almost like a focus group for sensing what that audience believes, right, because, you know, in Donald Trump’s political rhetoric around that time, when he starts talking on news programs, when he later starts using his Twitter account to spout off political opinions, it’s amazing how much whatever he’s going on about is in sync with whatever Fox News happens to be obsessed with at the time.The Ground Zero mosque, Obamacare, the Tea Party protests, all those big flare-ups of the early Obama period, suddenly Donald Trump adopts.
That’s not to say that he’s not also legitimately exercised by them, but he is somebody whose entire career, business and otherwise, has been about identifying audiences and identifying markets and learning how to appeal to them.And here is a new market, a market that Roger Ailes has built and cultivated with Fox News for over a decade, and he is learning the product that they want to get and what they will respond to and the kind of stuff that excites them and works them up and makes them attach to him.
… It’s 2011; he’s got his own gig on Fox.Fox is Fox.Fox has thrived in some respects, I suppose—you’re a television writer; you may know the answer to this question.Has Fox thrived because of the Obama presidency?
… The amazing thing about Fox is how politically adaptable it is.Fox thrived in the Bush administration and in the aftermath of 9/11, you know.It leaned into sort of super-patriotism and jingoism and “support the troops” and “support the president” and all that.After a while, kind of in sync with how the Bush administration’s political fortunes flagged in his second term, after Katrina and so forth, Fox’s ratings were starting to drop off as well.Its audience was sort of less enthusiastic, the same way they were less enthusiastic politically.
Obama gets elected in 2008, and suddenly they have an antagonist.An antagonist is great for TV.Again, TV loves conflict, you know, and an enemy is just as good as a champion for rallying your base.So in a way, the election of Barack Obama is kind of a renaissance for Fox.It starts developing new stars, like Glenn Beck, who has just—is this maestro of emotional reaction and sort of echoing the kind of existential terror of a certain segment of the Fox audience to the election of this guy named Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States.And this is just—it’s a tonic for Fox’s ratings, because bad news in TV news sells as well as good news, and antagonism sells probably better than optimism.
Trump and Birtherism
We’re back to the reality TV formula, even for a news network, a cable news network.Let’s talk a little bit about the rise of birtherism and Trump’s decision to take birtherism to television.How does he do it?Why does he do it?And why is it useful to this reality TV star who has designs to be a politician?
The interesting thing is that when Donald Trump first gets into birtherism, it’s too wild even for Fox.Its hosts had avoided it, even though it had been percolating up in the conservative blogosphere.And Donald Trump really starts introducing his birtherist conspiracy theories through his Twitter account and through speeches.And that’s where he starts getting news attention for this.And once it becomes this news event, because the host of The Celebrity Apprentice is going on about how he believes the president wasn’t born in the United States, then it becomes a news story that people start covering.
And that actually gives it entree to Fox.So in a way, Donald Trump is responsible for bringing birtherism into the Fox universe.You know, Donald Trump may have sincerely believed that Barack Obama was the product of a conspiracy to get a non-American elected president; he might have been using it entirely cynically.Either way, the effect is the same.He becomes the champion of one of the darkest, angriest, most paranoid sectors of the conservative base, a part of the conservative base that has often had its senses of persecution whipped up by Fox News, but has also sometimes been treated like crazy cousins by Republican politicians: John McCain going to a town hall and telling a woman—you know, denying that Barack Obama is a Muslim when one of his supporters says that Obama is.You know, here is Donald Trump saying: “I am totally with you.I am—I’m not ashamed of you like the John McCains and Mitt Romneys are.I’m so much one of you, I even believe that crazy stuff about Kenya.”And it is a thing that kind of imprints him with this intense fever swamp of the Republican electorate, which Fox, among others, have been helping to make bigger and bigger and more and more an important force driving conservative politics.And slowly he is starting to get that base to imprint on him as much as it’s imprinted on Fox.He’s able to kind of borrow this audience and take them away from Fox.
… There is, in Obama’s view, even now, a bigger division at the end of his presidency than there was at the beginning.And some of it has to do—maybe a lot of it has to do, from his point of view—with him.
When Donald Trump is thinking about his future, what has Obama seeded in the ground that Trump picks up and says: “I’m going to go forward with this.If I do, I’ll make a political run”?
I mean, for starters, simply the existence of Barack Obama, which, you know, was not his fault, but was his problem, really unleashed a lot of racist and xenophobic responses in a lot of the American electorate, just a general sense that there was this person, this African American named Barack Hussein Obama, who is president now.And it wasn’t regular; it wasn’t normal.And something had gone crazy, and maybe our kind of people are now less important in America, and we’re being superseded and replaced.
And that creates tremendous divisions ripe for exploitation.That—I think to some extent, Barack Obama, because he disdained the welter of cable news and a lot of that sort of entertainment news complex, maybe never appreciated enough or took seriously enough.I don’t know that there was necessarily much he might have done to avoid it other than engaging it more directly.But I certainly think, you know, until the end of his presidency, he didn’t see how bad it was.
Now for Donald Trump, Donald Trump has never seen division as a bad thing, you know.Donald Trump just historically—forget his presidential campaign.Forget Fox News.You go back to what’s the ethos of reality TV?What is the ethos of his persona that he built in pop culture in the ’80s, you know?It’s that fighting is the best state of human life.It’s that life is a competition.It’s zero sum.For you to win, somebody else has got to lose.If somebody else in business or in society is getting more stuff, that means you’re getting less stuff.And that is something that you can apply directly to a kind of political argument that was not brand-new, obviously.We have seen, you know, xenophobic and racist and other kinds of “-ist” tendencies in America for centuries.
But it was something that you could directly apply to this, because he had been doing it as a public figure and an entertainer in one form or another all of his life.And you know, it’s the sort of thing that it’s just, it’s easier to inflame that kind of thing than it is to douse it, and he was glad to inflame it.He saw in this chaos opportunity.
Launching the Trump Campaign
When Trump comes down that escalator with Melania [Trump] in her white outfit, to the Neil Young song, …I think you’ve said it in the book, this was like a scene from The Apprentice.
It was a scene from The Apprentice!Yeah, this was a shot that had been used over and over again on The Apprentice, Trump coming down the escalator of Trump Tower, Trump coming down the shiny escalators of one of his hotels/casinos, because, you know, TV producers know that there’s just a visual language to film.It’s a power position.You are looking from down below to someone who’s coming down from on high.It’s like, you know, it’s like the beginning of Triumph of the Will, you know, Hitler flying to the Nuremburg rallies from his airplane.It’s—you are sort of positioning your figure as a god descending down from the heavens to the plane of mortal people.
And in The Apprentice, it’s people gambling at Donald Trump’s casinos who are craning their necks up to get a look at him.And you see that repeated in his presidential announcement.All of the reporters who drew the short straw and ended up at Trump Tower covering this presidential announcement that their editors may not have taken very seriously are craning their necks up at Donald Trump coming down on this shiny escalator, surrounded by all the signifiers of wealth and success that he had surrounded himself with for decades, you know—pink marble on the walls of Trump Tower, polished brass, glass, a waterfall.
And it triggers.If you have been watching him on The Apprentice for 14 seasons, or even if you haven’t, and you just sort of have kind of an ambient awareness of Donald Trump, it echoes all of these associations that he has had in the American consciousness for, at that point, 35 years—big winner, rich guy surrounded by luxury, lives large, fights and wins.And yeah, he lifted that shot straight from The Apprentice into the beginning of his campaign.
And a crowd filled with actual movie extras.
A crowd filled out with, yes, with actual actors who were promised 50 bucks a pop to simulate enthusiasm for him and play a role in a similar way to the way that he was playing a role.
Trump and Social Media
… The arsenal that becomes available to him, James, during the campaign—Twitter, Facebook, all of the other things that become ancillary weapons in his toolkit.… But he’s got it all at his beck and call, and I guess applying the matrix from—or the method, the playbook, if you will, from The Apprentice and wrestling to how he handles the business of being a candidate and campaigning.
… I mean, when you think about Twitter as a communications medium, what other famous people are very good at using Twitter and social media?It’s celebrities.It’s people like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, you know, people who have—see an advantage in maybe creating a kind of controversial persona on social media, or seizing the reins of it and becoming essentially their own publicists, creating their own entertainment media and going around the gatekeepers.
We all know, if there’s one thing that Donald Trump loves, it’s being his own publicist, going back to when he used to impersonate John Barron, quote/unquote, his “publicist,” who would call up newspaper reporters and pretend to speak for Donald Trump when he, in fact, was Donald Trump.On Twitter he can be John Barron all the time.He can be—he can be Donald Trump’s main spokesperson.So that’s number one.You know, that’s thing number one.
Number two, on Twitter, OK, Donald Trump is a guy who has always been concerned with numbers and keeping score.He obsessed with the numbers of floors in his buildings when he was a real estate developer.… And social media, like Twitter, is an immediate source—every tweet gets a rating.You can see how many retweets you’re getting; you can see how many likes you’re getting.
And for somebody who can use it kind of intuitively and has political aspirations, that, again, is a kind of focus grouping.You can see, “Oh, people get really worked up when I tweet about the immigrants or when I tweet about birtherism, this or that.”You can see what your market responds to.So that works very well for him.
And as he becomes more enmeshed in politics, then eventually runs for president, it’s also—it’s obviously, it’s powerful in itself in that it’s a way of speaking directly to an audience unfiltered.But it is also, in a way, reinforcing the power of television, because what he’s often doing is he’s programming the cable news networks, who are just gaga about the idea of this controversial, outspoken, outrageous celebrity who’s running for president, and doing crazy things every day.And so when he tweets something on Twitter, that ends up setting the agenda for a good part of the electronic news media.So he basically becomes, you know, the programmer in chief.
Going back to how the business of TV controls the content of TV, the thing that is most important about cable news networks as a business, compared with the old broadcast news programs, is that they’re 24 hours a day.If you’re 24 hours a day, your imperative is to figure out a way to get your audience excited all the time, even if news isn’t happening, because you don’t want them changing the channel.You want them staying on your network for hours and hours, even if there’s not anything going on.So you do that by exaggerating controversies through sensationalism, through having debate shows.You do it through things like, you know, that Malaysian Airlines plane crashes in 2014, and CNN covers it for months and months on end.Well, Donald Trump running for president is a plane that crashes every day.There is news as long as he’s talking.There’s news even if he isn’t talking, because who knows what he might say?And so you have things like him holding rallies and CNN just showing the empty podium where he’s ready to get on stage.That empty podium is now news, because it tells you, if you wait long enough, something crazy might happen again …
Trump and Fox News
He discovers along the way in the campaign that Ailes and Fox are not really on the team, that they are really representing the establishment, the Republican establishment, the donor class.… There comes a moment in August, the debate where Megyn Kelly asks him a difficult question about women and how he treats women, and Trump has an answer.And then there’s this prolonged argument.Lawyers get involved.Fifty Breitbart articles come forward.They’re after her.They’re trying to wipe her out.Ailes is, according to Bannon, calling and threatening and saying: “My anchor is falling apart.Leave her alone.” …
I mean, to me, this is where you apply the matrix of your theory about a reality television star becomes a politician.The two meet in some way.And the actions of that kind of an episodic event take place over the next three or four weeks.
Donald Trump and Fox News are basically having a tug of war over the Fox audience.You know, when their relationship started out, Donald Trump was an appealing celebrity guest to Fox, and the audience liked him, and they brought him on there.But he was getting more from the network than they were getting from him.He was getting access to this audience through Fox.
As he becomes bigger and bigger, largely by tapping into a lot of the culture-war resentments that Fox News had made its bread and butter for years, that audience starts to like him more and more.They start to attach to him more and more in the same way that they had attached to Fox News and its hosts, Fox News, whose brand was: “Trust only us, and nobody else.If you hear it in the rest of the media, it’s probably wrong.We report; you decide.We are the fair and balanced network that you can rely on.”
But Fox News, like the Republican establishment, it benefited from these cultural passions, but it wanted to be in control of them, you know, in the same way that Republicans who ran for office might want the support of the really virulent Fox News base, but they don’t necessarily want them running the show.They want that to be the fuel of the engine, but they don’t want them driving the car.
Well, Donald Trump wants that audience for himself.He wants their support.And once Fox News and the Republican establishment decide early in his campaign, “OK, this was all fun and games, but it’s gone too far now.Let’s have the real candidates take over from here,” his response is basically, “No, I think I’ll keep your audience.”And he has this conflict with Megyn Kelly, which is one of many events in the Trump campaign where people decided that he had finally gone too far, and this would be the thing that ruined him.And to a lot of high-minded people, he had made a sexist, demeaning comment that had exposed his true piggish self and would sour voters on him.
But to the people who liked what he was putting on TV, it was a dominance moment.Maybe he was just joking, or maybe he wasn’t joking but everybody was being too sensitive about it, or maybe they were seeing what they wanted to see, which was a candidate who would fight really, really hard against anybody, against the media, against even the media that they liked.And this actually solidified their commitment to him.
And so you end up with this, over the next few months of the campaign, this kind of duel, with Donald Trump and Fox dancing around each other.To some extent, Fox and its hosts help him.But to some extent, he pushes against them.And ultimately there’s a showdown, I think it’s in January of 2016, where Fox hosted a debate, and Donald Trump decides to boycott it.And he counterprograms it with a quote/unquote “fundraiser” that he holds instead.
And it’s basically kind of throwing down a gauntlet and saying: “I used to have to access your audience through you.Now, if you want to access your audience, you’ll have to do it through me.”And ultimately, at some point, Donald Trump wins enough primary elections that he wins that battle, and Fox realizes that, OK, we’ve got to—we’ve got to sue for peace, and this is the guy who’s driving the train now.
The Access Hollywood Tape
Let’s talk about Access Hollywood and how he slips that noose.… Help me understand what to make of that from the perspective that you look at it.
You know, Access Hollywood is another one of these instances in the Trump campaign that everybody is sure is going to finish him for certain.And it actually might have deeply damaged him.Maybe had things gone a different way, that might have been the end of his campaign or enough for him to lose the election.But what he decides is he’s going to handle this the way that he’s handled other battles and controversies in his life.He’s going to handle it the way that his mentor, Roy Cohn, taught him to handle conflicts back in the ’70s, which is never back down; never admit defeat; move on; declare victory.
And so he gives this angry, defiant, nominally apologetic TV speech the night the Access Hollywood tape is released, where he briefly says, “OK, I said it; I’m sorry,” and then immediately goes on the counterattack against his opponents, against the establishment, against Hillary Clinton and against Bill Clinton, whom he jujitsus into being far worse sexual predators than he himself has ever been.
And like a lot of political theater in the media era, and particularly like a lot of Donald Trump’s political theater, the way he says it is as important as what he’s saying.Again, a big aspect of Donald Trump’s appeal to his audience is, besides the “Build the wall,” besides this or that policy, it’s this notion, “I’m going to fight all the time; I’m going to bring pain to the people that you don’t like; I’m not going to cave in.”And this is him doing that at the darkest moment of his campaign, and that dark moment may have turned some people off on him, or turned them off on him for a little while.But he is able to keep that core with him by doubling down on the thing that drew them to him in the first place, which is: “I’m just going to grit my teeth and fight it out, no matter what.And join me, and we will win and bring pain to the enemy.”
And it’s not just that.There he is at a table, right before the second debate, with Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick …and literally creating another Apprentice-like event.
Yeah, another Apprentice-like event, a big shocker, a shocking twist, a shocking reveal.Reality TV loves those.Reality TV loves bringing back characters from people’s past and confronting them with them.You know, it’s kind of a wrestling move, too.It’s kicking up dust.It’s creating an alternative conflict in which you feel you have more of an upper hand.
Now, what’s the point to all of this?If you just analyze it as rhetoric, it doesn’t make Donald Trump or what he was caught on tape saying any better, but it just creates a lot of confusion and chaos.And, you know, in chaos—watch any Apprentice boardroom.In chaos lies opportunity, you know.It throws out enough shiny objects for people to focus on and worry about and analyze the drama of; that if it doesn’t erase the bad thing for you, it creates this constellation of bad things in which the bad thing that you’ve done is just one among so many things that are too much for anybody to process.
Trump the Anti-Hero
And in a 360-degree debate, it’s very wrestling-like.I’m glad you raised that, because there he is, looming over Hillary’s shoulder, roaming around like in the ring, right?Might as well be putting his shoes in that dust that you—or rosin and everything.I mean, it was just intense.And until you said wrestling, I hadn’t quite thought of it in that way, but that’s obviously what was happening there, right?
Yeah.I mean, it was a big part of Donald Trump’s—particularly his general election campaign against Hillary Clinton.You know, in the Republican primary, he’s able to win largely because he’s able to appeal to this Republican base better than any of the establishment candidates.Now he’s in a one-on-one general election, where you have to win if not a majority of the vote, at least a majority of the electoral college, and it is something that’s—it’s more like, you know, old-fashioned broadcasting, right, where you—you actually have to win over a big, big chunk of the total viewership.
And so his strategy becomes appealing to this sort of TV antihero version of, you know, tough, unrepentant masculinity.And a lot of the body language of that debate and elsewhere in his campaign, it is, you know, above all else, a lot of people read it as: “Oh, he seems like a thug.He seems intimidating.Why would he want to do this?”It’s just saying: “Big, strong man.I am a big, strong man running against this small woman.”How many times, in the 2016 election, did he use the word “stamina,” right?He loved that word.“I have stamina.I don’t think Hillary Clinton has the stamina.”
And again, that is emphasizing this language and these archetypes of masculinity that he uses to convey the idea that “I am—whatever else you think about me, whether you like me or not, you know, I am the strong leader that you can count on.”
Tony Soprano.
Tony Soprano, absolutely.You know, Donald Trump, both in reality TV and in his campaign, is in part sort of surfing on this larger trend in the culture, which is also a byproduct of media fragmentation, which is the growth of the antihero figure, that guy that you love to hate—you know, Tony Soprano; Walter White in Breaking Bad—these—these figures who you may not admire them, you may recognize that they’re criminals, but they’re also charismatic; they’re also brilliant; they’re fascinating.They’re—you can’t take your eyes off of them, you know.
And maybe you think, OK, they’re bad, but their—their enemies are worse.Maybe they’re bad, but I’m not a bad person for just enjoying the show.”And I think he really profited from that concept.It allows for a kind of moral compartmentalization, where you can say: “OK, maybe you don’t like me.Maybe you don’t admire me.But maybe you don’t need to like the president.Maybe it is a tough, ugly world, where people are coming over the border to kill you, and your place in society is threatened.And in that kind of situation, who cares if the president is a nice guy?Maybe it matters more that the president is a strong man.”
Trump’s Inauguration
… After his inauguration, why does the president worry so much about the crowd size? ...
You know, number one, Donald Trump is a TV guy, and he has always been concerned with his ratings and with numeric values of winning versus losing, so the notion of having a smaller crowd than somebody else just eats at him.And also, he had already been through this experience where yes, he won the election, and yet he’s seeing in the news every day that Hillary Clinton got, what, 2.8, something like that, million more votes than he did.He is in the position of, like, a TV program, that won the demo audience but lost the overall total audience.And that, again, you know, I think just gnaws at him.
He has always associated himself, from back in the days when he was building and promoting Trump Tower, with ideas of bigness and being the bigness, and being the most, and being the superlative.So his crowd has to be the biggest crowd.And, you know, back in the days when he was in the low-stakes environment of hosting The Celebrity Apprentice, he could just tell his publicist that, you know, “Just go out there and tell the press that we won our time slot, number one show on TV,” whether they were 72nd in the ratings or not.
It’s a bit more noticeable when you’re having your—you know, your press spokesman go out and say that an obviously smaller crowd was the largest one in history.But it is another example of never admit defeat; just declare victory, no matter the facts on the ground.And it is also a way of communicating to an audience, this audience that you have bound to yourself, and saying that, whatever the fake news media is telling you, whatever your enemies who want to diminish our accomplishment are telling you, we have done the biggest and the best thing, and you should believe what’s important for our side to believe, and not what your lying eyes are telling you.
And then, you know, it seems like a small thing when you’re talking about an inauguration audience.But in a larger sense, that is a tremendously powerful tool for a politician to be able to call on.
People, including yours truly, thought, based on my decades of political reporting, that a pivot was coming soon from Donald Trump, almost from the very beginning.We’d seen so many presidents sit in that office, and OK, the weight of it all, and I’ve got to broaden my base if I want to get reelected and I want to get anything done; I’ve got to reach out to those who didn’t vote for me.
But it doesn’t take very long for “alternative facts” to be described by Kellyanne [Conway].It doesn’t take very long for him to get angry and talk about the “enemy of the people” as the press.Were you surprised that Donald Trump did not pivot, but that this guy was going to chart the course he charted?
No.I mean, I was—I was surprised that he won the general election.But once he won, this is not a guy who changes and stands himself down to appeal to a broader audience, or at least he hadn’t been since he was a very young man in the ’80s.He said himself, “I’m basically the same person that I was when I was seven years old.”In terms of his own psychoanalysis of himself, he is not a guy who changes.He is certainly not a guy who admits to himself that he needs to change because of deficiencies in himself.That’s like, antithetical to the whole point of Donald Trump.
He has been playing a performance as himself in public for four decades, basically, at this point, and the lesson that he has gotten reinforced, over and over for himself, is that the more you fight, the more belligerent you are, the better you will do; the more successful you will be with your audience.And he’s been rewarded for it.He had a show on NBC for 14 seasons.He won an election.He never held office and won president of the United States.
So to him, he’s going to keep doing the thing that he’s been rewarded for.And he is also an inveterate, an insatiable consumer of TV.Donald Trump is in his own media bubble.He also doesn’t stop watching a lot of Fox News once he becomes president.In fact, he, by all appearances, is watching more TV than he ever was before, because, you know, he loves watching shows about himself; he loves attention to himself.He’s always loved knowing what his coverage is like and what people are saying about him.And now he’s the president, which means he is the star of the news, which is a 24-hour show in which he’s on all the time.
Like, it’s amazing he ever does anything else but watch it.And so watching Fox News, he’s getting all these reinforcement signals that say, you know, whatever the fake-news media polls are saying, that everybody loves him; that he’s doing great; that the people who have been behind him are more behind him than ever before.And so every source of outside reinforcement that he’s getting is telling him more Trump.You know, a Trumpier version of Trump has always been his solution to any problem, whether it was the ratings declining on The Apprentice or having a problem in his campaign.And so it’s—it’s almost foreordained, inevitable, that that’s exactly what he’s going to do as president.
Trump’s Antagonistic Relationship with the Media
So he’s watching; he’s consuming; he’s in the bubble.… And then Rachel Maddow, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, they come back full blast.Does it affect him in any way?Does he care?What is the impact of all of that, that’s happening on the other side of the divide?
I mean, to the extent that the criticism of him in the media, in entertainment media and in news media, that to the extent that it penetrates his bubble, every slight stings.That’s always been, again, the way he’s been as a celebrity, as a public figure.He’s an exposed nerve.And it inflames him, and it angers him.You know, this is the guy who once told Matt Lauer on the Today show, back in the ’90s, when he asked him why he wouldn’t just be the bigger man and move on from feuds, he said, “I like being small.”And he’s no different as president.There is no feud in which he won’t engage.
And so, you know, where another president might have told himself, “Keep your eye on the big picture; criticism comes with the job; don’t worry; move on,” he’s feuding with Saturday Night Live on his Twitter account from the Oval Office.He’s feuding with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the guy who replaced him on The Celebrity Apprentice, and dissing his ratings, because part of the thing that, again, that he was rewarded for on the campaign, one of the lessons of reality TV that he learned so well and that led him to success there, is that all fights are necessary.
And so his resentment is inflamed by the criticism.The resentment of his most intense base, you know, which has always seen themselves as being looked down upon by the media and Hollywood and so on, they cleave closer to him.And it’s—it’s just a reinforcing feedback loop.
So that man, that guy, when does it become a pathology?Is it a planned, organized thing with him?Is it now autonomic?What’s happening with him in terms of his fight, push back, “I’m a big guy; I’m a warrior; I’m a whatever”?But we’re also talking about issues of state.We’re also talking about the border.We’re also talking about a policy.We’re also talking about all of those kind of—Jeff Sessions, you know, Russia investigation.When does it become, or has it always been just sort of now automatic for him?
I mean, it becomes pathology at the point when he is running the country and is actually in charge of the country’s well-being, and doing things and accomplishing things.He never ends up changing from the mode of angry Fox TV viewer.You know, there has always been a kind of a tone, an affect in his political—in his political persona of seeing things in the news and getting angry about them and saying, “Oh, the president should do something about, like, that.”
And when he’s the president, he’s essentially doing the same thing.It’s almost as if he’s watching the news and saying, “Well, they should do something about this; this shouldn’t be allowed.”You know, even when he is the most powerful person in the world, he still feels this grievance, and the grievance fuels him.And he’s—he’s not able to let it go, because it is so ingrained in his way of living and his way of seeing the world.
… He watches [Brett] Kavanaugh on Fox do that interview, because Kavanaugh is under fire over the weekend, from Dr. [Christine] Blasey Ford.He watches Kavanaugh do that interview, and he thinks it’s too soft, …and it puts Kavanaugh in some jeopardy.… Talk about that.
One thing that quickly develops after Trump becomes president is that other people become very conscious of the fact that the president of the United States is a creature of television.He was made by television.Everything he has, to some extent, has come to him through TV and the media, and he is an increasingly obsessive consumer of television.It is almost as if things are more real to him when they’re on a screen than when he witnesses them in person, to the extent that his own staffers will book themselves onto Fox shows to make points to him that are not persuasive when they’re making them to him in the flesh.
In other words, there is a consciousness among his staff, among other people in politics, certainly among people in the media, that the news has become a vast television show that is controlled by and performed for one extremely powerful and irritable viewer.And what you see with Kavanaugh is that, yeah.So when Kavanaugh’s nomination runs into trouble, he gives a very defensive, sort of canned, almost robotic interview, doing the things that, you know, in a way, is sort of standard damage control in the past.You just—you say, “I’ve always respected women; I’ve always respected women.”You stick to your talking points.You say it over and over.You try not to antagonize people.
Well, I mean, to Donald Trump, antagonizing people is the point of life, you know.He sees this, and he sees his guy not fighting and defending himself.He used to fire people for that on The Apprentice all the time.You know, what’s going on here?So what ends up happening, when Kavanaugh has his big moment and his nomination is hanging by a thread, and Donald Trump is holding the thread, is that he basically, whatever his internal motivations, whatever genuine offense and rage he’s feeling, he gives a performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that is basically a Donald Trump impression.You know, he shows up, and his face is getting red, and he is insulting and fighting back and, you know, seems on the verge of a breakdown, of losing emotional control.
And that may not be impressive to senators on the panel; it may put off a lot of people in the home audience.But to the one most important television viewer in America, that’s exactly the show he wants to see.He wants to see himself.And immediately after Brett Kavanaugh finishes testifying, Trump tweets out his review that he could not be prouder of how well he stood up for himself on TV.And now Brett Kavanaugh is an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
The Party of Trump
We made a film a couple years ago about his takeover of the Republican Party and the first year of his presidency….You’ve watched [Speaker of the House Paul] Ryan get destroyed by him.You’ve watched [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell get destroyed by him.You’ve watched how he is with all of them.And the film ends with all of these people in the White House steps, just after they’ve passed the tax bill, glorifying him, bowing down to him; Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, all of them stepping up to the microphone and saying, “You’re doing a great job.”This is one of the things.It’s akin to that Cabinet meeting where they all sat around the table and glorified Trump in that moment—certainly a television event, absolutely organized for a regular viewer and consumer of The Apprentice.I guess it is the final proof moment for him of how he had vanquished and taken over the Republican Party, and it was by then now his.
Yeah.I mean, so many of these moments in how he relates to his staff and the Republican establishment after he’s president on TV are straight out of The Apprentice boardroom, where, you know, part of the idea is to ingratiate yourself to the boss and tell Mr. Trump how wonderful he is and how you read The Art of the Deal and you’ve modeled yourself on him, and he is everything you could aspire to be and want for yourself.
The Republican Party learns that lesson pretty quickly after he’s president.He is not going to change to the institution of the presidency.Their institutions are going to change to fit him if they want to reap the benefits of having a president of their party in office.I mean, basically, like what you see happening with the Republican Party and Trump, through his campaign and into his presidency, is the Republican Party is like the mad scientist that built a giant robot, and it got out of control, and they tried to find the off switch, and they couldn’t, and that that robot is powered by this, you know, this fuel of resentment and conservative identity, politics and culture warring that they always benefited from as long as it was within their control.But in the form of Trump, who did that culture warring better than any of them, it got out of their control, and finally they decided: “Well, we can turn against our own robot and get squashed by it, and maybe, maybe destroy ourselves in the process of destroying the robot, or we can climb on board it, do what it says, and, you know, we’ll get our tax cuts.We’ll—we’ll get our regular Republican things that we want at the price of letting the robot be our master.” …
A Divided Nation
So the results.There was once a division; there had been a division.It was bad at the end of Obama.Here we are at the end of the first term of Trump.The state of the division is what, from what you can tell, as a result of having this character named Trump starring in our United States of television?
News flash: We’re more divided than we ever used to be.And Donald Trump, to be fair, did not create that alone.He didn’t do that by himself.He is in office in part because of his instinctive mastery of many of the forces that have divided the American public, both …political resentments and tribalism and this war of all against all that has been fomented, and cultural differences, where you have parts of the country owing to the fragmentation of our culture that experience an entirely different cultural life than others and doesn’t really understand the other people that they share the country with.
You know, those were always problems.They would have continued to be problems whether Donald Trump got elected president or not.They will continue to be problems when he’s not president.But the exacerbating factor is that generally, we’ve always had presidents, even if they benefited from division, who saw a value in paying lip service to the idea of unity.You know, even very divisive presidents, very divisive figures would talk about our greater common purpose and the need for people to join together, and so on and so forth.Constitutionally and instinctively—and this is a way in which Donald Trump has so merged with the mindset of television—for Donald Trump, division is not a bad thing.It is a thing to be exacerbated, a thing to be encouraged.If there is a division, you make it deeper, because that brings your side closer to you.And in a way, narrow victories are better than broad victories, because they create more delicious suffering on the part of your adversaries.And, you know, narrow losses will bring your side even closer to you.
So what we have as a result is the—we have the amplification effects of having had a president in office who has done everything he could to make the country more divided, because he essentially, at his core, sees that as a good thing, if not just the essential kernel of human nature.It’s possible that with another president, it could recede somewhat in tone.You may have another president who’s just more boring and the fire hose of news will somewhat diminish.But partisan media will still be around; cultural fragmentation will still be around.All the resentments and divisions of identity and group identification that exist in the country, they’re not going to go away.It won’t just be as if Donald Trump were—were never president.Donald Trump will always have been president, and the forces that made him president will continue to be.
You tell a great story about when Donald Trump comes out on the stage, first thing he does is he looks for the red light.The red light is the thing that can never, ever be forgotten, because it cannot be turned off.Just take us to that moment of what he does.
So after he was elected president, Donald Trump told some reporters that at his rallies, often he wouldn’t necessarily focus on the crowds at the rallies.The crowds were—it was easy to regenerate their energy.If their energy starts flagging, he’d just say, “Build the wall!,” and they’d cheer, and you’d get them going.
But he said, “I would always make sure that I would say something new to keep the red light on.”And the red light is the light of the cameras, the live TV cameras that are stationed at the back of the crowd.And the red light says that they’re carrying your event live.The red light to him says that you matter, that you’re worthy of attention, that you’re giving the cameras something exciting and interesting.And it doesn’t necessarily matter that the thing that you’re giving them is the truth; doesn’t matter that it’s responsible; doesn’t matter that it’s presidential.But it needs to be sensational, needs to be exciting; it needs to be something new.And in a way, you know, that sort of symbiosis between Donald Trump and the camera’s red light was the core of his successful campaign.
The GOP Convention
One other last thing is that we didn’t cover so far is the GOP convention.And you talk about how many people saw it as a disaster, but in fact, in his head, and in the head of a lot of other people, this was great television.
Yeah.… Trump’s Republican convention was another one of those things in the Trump campaign that reasonable, experienced pundits saw as a disaster.The lighting didn’t always work.There was chaos on the floor.Ted Cruz got up and gave a long speech, at the end of which he basically anti-endorsed Donald Trump.The speakers ran forward.There were ugly cries of “Lock her up!,” you know, the chants in the crowd.And in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s convention, which had some protests, but it was generally a sort of tightly scripted, well-produced sort of polished CBS drama of a show,this seemed like chaos and disharmony and the sign of a campaign that was going to fall apart.
And that’s true, if you are judging his convention by the traditional standards of a TV convention, where basically the ability to put on a smooth, boring TV production becomes kind of a metaphor for your ability to guide the ship of state.The one TV world in which his convention made sense was the only TV world that Donald Trump had ever thrived in, which is the world of reality TV, where chaos and conflicts and throwdowns and people confronting each other is the stuff of drama and excitement and gets people engaged.
You know, the world of pro wrestling, where you have the heel showing up and confronting the hero, and the crowd goes wild, and, you know, it’s kind of chaotic, but people love the chaos, and they throw themselves into it.These kind of sort of chaotic, nonfiction-esque entertainments in which Donald Trump had lived and thrived, they ran on the same kind of energy that, in his convention, seemed like chaos, but was the energy that would power his campaign.
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