Trump, television and the tortured truth
The Donald has made a skewing of the facts into an art form.
Winston Churchill once described Joseph Stalin’s Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Donald Trump’s relationship with the media is all these things, as well as being a contradictory, preposterous conundrum.
In many respects, Trump, the 45th US president, is a creation of the media. He owes his legitimacy to the media, yet to hold his position he seeks to strip the media of the power that created him by declaring it fake.
Trump has a long history of masterful manipulation of the media. Most of the early examples were on a small scale but there is one major moment when everything changed, January 8, 2004, with the debut of the reality television show The Apprentice.
Before The Apprentice, Trump was a New York loudmouth; after 27 million Americans tuned in to each episode that first season, he had created a path to a credible presidential candidacy.
Mark Burnett, the British TV producer whose super hit Survivor led to the creation of The Apprentice, says: “The Apprentice did not make Trump a candidate but there could be no candidacy without The Apprentice.”
For an hour a week across a dozen years, Trump used the program to showcase his character, his ideas and his populist politics to tens of millions of Americans.
As host of the show, he outlined tasks for competing teams and judged the results. Those who succeeded survived; those who didn’t were fired.
As a simple political concept it resonated with those Americans who saw the problems of their country and wondered why there seemed to be so few attempts to fix things and why there was no accountability for failure. Nobody got fired.
On The Apprentice, Trump as the ultimate boss made sense. He looked tough and in command. He could identify problems. He could provide answers and set tasks. Can’t do it? You’re fired.
A year ago my wife and I were travelling in southern America as Trump and his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton, crisscrossed the nation, barnstorming and campaigning for the presidency.
In the south, pointers to a Trump win were everywhere. His campaign posters stuck in front lawns outnumbered Clinton’s by perhaps 10 to one. His bumper stickers were everywhere; hers were rare.
People who would speak of their support for Trump were easy to find; those who could tell us why they rejected him or his policies were much harder to locate.
My wife immediately sensed a Trump win but I argued the pro-Trump sentiments in the south would be reversed in the north and Clinton would become the first female US president.
Like Clinton and her campaign team, I underestimated the power of Trump’s message and the political cunning behind it.
Today, she may blame James Comey, then the FBI director, who reopened an inquiry into her improper use of emails during the last weeks of the election campaign, but she must also admit that she was derelict in not even bothering to campaign in crucial swing states such as Wisconsin.
Clinton won the popular vote but, through the complicated electoral college system, Trump won the election.
The next day, a cold, drizzling, drab day in New York, people looked stunned, asking: “How could this have happened?”
The man they knew as a bold, manipulating, financially unsound New York real estate shonk with a huge ego, chutzpah to match and a history of philandering and rancid headlines was now their commander-in-chief.
New Yorkers had an intense interest in Trump. His real estate dealings marked him as a person to watch, but in 1990, he jumped the shark as he prepared to divorce his first wife, Czech-born model Ivana, in favour of a leggy Georgian named Marla Maples.
Trump was his own spokesman. He frequently telephoned reporters writing columns such as Page Six in the New York Post, using false names, volunteering snippets of gossip about himself and his enemies.
Maples’s alleged comment to a girlfriend that “Donald was the best sex I’ve ever had,” became a screaming headline that fuelled acres of newsprint coverage that ran, non-stop, across the front pages for two weeks.
Most humans would have curled up in embarrassment, but Trump lapped it up.
He executed his philosophy in dealing with the media, explained in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal: “The press is always hungry for a story; the more sensational the better,” he says. “If you are a little different, a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold and controversial, the press is going to write about you. Sometimes they write positively and sometimes negatively.
“But from a purely business point of view the benefits of being written about far outweigh its drawbacks. Even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be good for business.
“The key is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. A little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole — and a very effective form of promotion.”
The story of how Burnett hit on Trump to host The Apprentice is told by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in their book Trump Revealed, published by Simon & Schuster within weeks of Trump’s election.
Kranish and Fisher edited the work of more than 20 reporters and fact-checkers from The Washington Post to fast-track a book on Trump’s ascendancy. They tell how Burnett was fed up being away from his family, stuck in the jungle filming Survivor “with crocodiles, ants and everything that could kill you” and decided his next show had to be set in a different kind of jungle, made of asphalt.
“What I needed was someone larger than life, very colourful, a character who would be likeable, tough and fascinating,” Burnett says. The light bulb moment came when he was at an ice-skating rink in Central Park operated by Trump.
He sought an interview with Trump and within an hour had an agreement: the program would showcase Trump’s entire empire — the Trump Tower, the casinos, the hotels, the helicopter and the jet, the opulent apartment, the splendour of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida golf resort. Trump would be the main character, the arbiter of talent, the boss: judge, jury and executioner.
According to Kranish and Fisher, Trump didn’t watch reality TV and didn’t much like what he’d heard about it, saying it was “for the bottom-feeders of society”. But he immediately saw the potential of its enormous promotional value, “a bridge to a new market, a new audience, especially to young people”.
“Trump knew the power of TV to shape reputations,” they write. “A TV show of his own would allow him to mould his image as never before, giving Americans the chance to see him in a way they perceived as unmediated. Trump could remake himself as he saw fit.”
Burnett walked out of the meeting with a handshake on a deal that would give Trump the role of executive producer and 50 per cent ownership of the show. It was to earn him more than $US200 million in its various incarnations across 14 seasons.
From the start, he dominated.
He discarded scripts and ad libbed his intro: “I am the largest real estate developer in New York. I own buildings all over the place. Model agencies, the Miss Universe pageant, jetliners, golf courses, casinos and private resorts … I’ve mastered the art of the deal and have turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand. As the master, I want to pass on some of my knowledge to somebody else.”
Also unscripted was the signature phrase: “You’re fired.” It was just something he blurted out in the final take of the first show, but it was gold.
Trump in The Apprentice was astoundingly bold, brassy and loose with the truth. It was vintage Trump — and it was a hit.
Not all the promotional value came within the show, which increased its audience from a first-night 20 million to an average 27 million in the first season. For years, Trump did a segment each week with syndicated radio broadcaster Don Imus. It was designed to promote the show, but Trump used it to discuss the week’s politics in his unvarnished, blunt and decisive style that radiated simplicity and exulted in rejecting political correctness.
His opinions resonated with the people Trump had described as “the bottom-feeders of society”.
He lived in a glittering, rarefied New York celebrity cocoon, yet he spoke to the millions who struggled to make ends meet; who saw no stairway to success, who paid their taxes and resented the rip-off of no return.
They looked at potholes in their streets and wondered why they were not filled. They saw Washington as the enemy, an alien entity sucking life out of their nation.
In embracing Trump, these people pledged themselves to someone who was their polar opposite. He became their can-do man, the one who got answers and got results, just like on TV. He could make America great again. It was that simple, even if the facts failed to bear out their perceived truths.
Trump prevailed in a brutal election campaign by relentlessly staying on message: that he would build a wall; that the mainstream media was the purveyor of fake news; and that he would make America great again.
The details never mattered. For Trump, facts have never mattered. For him, the truth is what he can get away with.
His war with the mainstream media is, on the face of it, bizarre to the point of suicidal. Why take on the forces that created you? But he gambles that the power of the old media is shrinking and so is its power to hold anyone to account.
Even if newspapers demonstrate his statements are full-fledged lies, who cares? Who reads them any more? Who takes notice of them any more? Only the people who never did or never would vote for him.
So he embraced new technologies such as Twitter, which provides him with a one-to-one message pathway unhindered by pesky editors, commentators or any influence that may corrode or lessen his messaging. He aims his comments at his people and if anyone in the mainstream says he’s wrong, who cares? His people believe him and believe the conspiracies he creates about fake news.
Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal, delivered a lecture to honour murdered journalist Daniel Pearl in Los Angeles earlier this year. He said Trump was engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.
“His objection to, say, The New York Times, isn’t that there is a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity,” he says. “His objection is to objectivity itself.”
He gave an example in a question asked by arch-conservative former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly: “Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.”
To which Trump replied: “Many people have come out and said I’m right.”
Stephens says it is important not to dismiss the President’s reply simply as dumb. “We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect,” he says. “The President is responding to a claim of fact, not by denying the fact but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
“He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: that they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.”
What impact will this constant use of the truth as a political plaything have on Trump’s next three years? Regrettably, probably very little. Stephens says new rules were established in the Bill Clinton era when “we decided some types of presidential lies don’t matter; we concluded that character was an overrated consideration when it came to judging a president and we allowed the lines between political and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred”.
After Trump’s win and as his chaotic presidency evolved, my instincts led me to believe Trump could be a one-term president only. I reasoned that Americans could not overlook his stumbles, bungles, insults, lies, ignorance, arrogance and narcissistic swagger. Conventional wisdom cried out that all this would all count against him.
But Trump’s flaws were all evident a year ago. Americans elected him despite the evidence. The appeal of his simple politics swamped the repugnance of his character.
At the weekend I called one of the people I quoted in my story about our journey through the south, a security officer from Beaumont, Mississippi, named Sean Carnahan.
I asked if anything had happened in the past year to make him change his allegiance from Trump. “Hell no,” he said. “Sometimes he needs to remember he is our President, not a celebrity any more, but everything he stands for is what I stand for.
“The media is given too much freedom to criticise him and he is a work in progress. We know nothing happens with the wave of a finger, so it’s up to us to be patient.”
The latest polls shows Trump’s rusted-on core audience is unchanged from a year ago, at about 35 per cent. At this point, only a fool would write off his chances for a second term.
And perhaps only an optimist would have faith in the restoration of truth as a cornerstone of society.
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