The Emperor Has No Clothes
Of course you hate Donald Trump. And that could be the point. To understand the rise and durability of Trump, you have to understand his years as a reality TV star. More broadly, it helps to consider reality television’s evolution into a genre where people thrive precisely because you can’t stand them. To explain, Michael Hirschorn takes use back to the first season of Survivor: “For those still struggling to understand how Donald Trump could remain within sight of being our president again despite flattering dictators, inspiring an attempted coup, getting convicted on 34 felony counts, vowing to shred the Constitution and imprison opponents, and decorating his bathroom with state secrets, not to mention blustering semi-coherently in Tuesday’s debate, it’s worth looking back to a certain island in the South Pacific, and a man named Richard Hatch … He broke the golden rule of network television: You have to be likable. David Letterman even predicted ‘rioting in the streets’ if ‘the fat naked guy’ won. He was the most hated man in America.” NYT (Gift Article): How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity. (To put a positive spin on this, at least Trump is fully clothed.) “Mr. Trump clearly understands how to operate in this particular version of the upside down, collaborating with his audience to create shareable moments that are full of in-jokes and provocations, perpetual-motion meme machines. How could he say all those outrageous things? Doesn’t he know people are going to be shocked? Well, of course, he says them specifically because people will be shocked. He has succeeded in making himself the most most-hated man in America, and the rewards, at least until this moment, have been huge.” Trump himself famously made the same point when describing his own reality show: “If you have ratings, you can be the meanest, most horrible human being in the world. There’s only one thing that matters: ratings.” It may sound crazy, but the biggest threat to Donald Trump’s campaign may not be that a majority of Americans see him as an existential threat to global democracy but rather that the Trump show is getting old. During the debate, Kamala Harris described Trump rallies and explained, “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” Maybe this wasn’t just baiting Trump. It was a TV show review.
