The Little Discussed Secret to Trump's Ruination of America
Years ago – twenty-seven to be exact – I wrote a smallish book titled Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, in which I argued that the most powerful force of the then-late-twentieth century wasn’t political or religious or social or intellectual or philosophical or scientific or artistic. It was cultural or, more precisely, recreational. That force was entertainment, broadly put – “broadly put” becoming an imperative where entertainment was concerned. Entertainment had become so overwhelming, had spread so far beyond the boundaries of movies and television and music and books, so entwined itself with life, that it had come to usurp life, remodel it in its image, suffuse nearly everything, including realms that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment until they became adjuncts of entertainment, even created a whole form of consciousness that interpenetrated our own minds to the extent that we came to see ourselves through the scrim of entertainment. Entertainment was voracious and unslakable. It demanded submission. And more: it was addictive. It habituated us to want bigger, faster, louder – anything and everything that would grab our attention and hold it, though it kept on upping the ante. Bigger. Faster. Louder. It also habituated us to dismiss anything that couldn’t meet its demands. We had become a hyped-up culture, a thrill-seeking culture, an ants-in-your-pants culture, a-two-second-attention-span culture, a dare-not-be-bored culture. Give me excitement or give me. . .more excitement. Or, as Philip Roth once framed it, “Suppose entertainment is the Purpose of Life!”
This analysis, I have to admit, didn’t meet with universal approval – there were critics who didn’t want to see their culture that way - though, in all modesty, I think time has proven the book prescient, and nowhere perhaps more prescient than in politics. We strive to understand why our nation continues its self-destructive descent into hell – the American nadir. We adduce all sorts of possible reasons that Trump has managed to find the keys to unlock the nether regions of the American soul. I certainly do. You can excavate like crazy.
But there is something that neither pundits nor political scientists to my knowledge have discussed, possibly because it seems beneath them and is too simple an explanation, even if simple explanations may sometimes be more illuminating than complex ones. (I myself think that the Democratic Party suffers from a complexity complex.)
So here is another explanation and a very simple one: Donald Trump arose – was allowed to arise – because the American people got bored with their politics, and they hungered for something more entertaining, something with more juice, something that kept pace with the speed of the culture, something that gave them the impression of action.
It wasn’t that the political system ceased to function, which is one of the usual explanations for our discontent, though it is certainly true it hasn’t always functioned well. There have been problems galore. But that said, it functioned pretty well, certainly better than it does now. In any case, we didn’t lay awake nights, as many of us do, bracing for some new catastrophe in the morning. We didn’t fear our president would sic the military on American citizens or drag innocent people off the streets. We didn’t worry that our democracy would disappear and our elections be cancelled. We didn’t think our president might be insane, even when we disagreed with his policies.
In short, politics and governance, were anything but entertaining; they were efficient, relatively well-managed. And they were also dull, routine, formulaic, repetitive, sclerotic, boring – so boring that most of the time we scarcely even thought about them. Remember those days? Well, they’re gone. Say what you will about Donald Trump – and I say that he is as close to pure evil as a leader, or any alleged human, is likely to get – but he is anything but boring. And that may be the point – a rather appalling point. When you see those frothing crowds at his rallies, they are not frothing over policy. They are frothing because finally they have an entertainer in the White House – someone who shakes the dust off of politics. This is a big show, and he is their showman – their star. He hypes them up, which is what entertainment usually does. He feeds them red meat. And he keeps them hankering for more.
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But he is not only a showman. He is an unprecedented kind of showman, and the impresario of an unprecedented kind of show. There have always been affinities between politics and entertainment, not least of which is that both are basically designed to satisfy people. And those affinities only increased with the rise of mass politics and mass culture, so that any good political practitioner had to master certain performative skills. Franklin Roosevelt mastered radio and found a way to convey not only his policies but also his national aspirations to the country. John F. Kennedy, the most telegenic of presidents, mastered television, and, as Norman Mailer would describe it in his aptly titled Esquire essay in which he examined Kennedy’s appeal, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” stirred the untapped hopes and dreams of Americans the way movie stars did – that romantic, heart-pounding sense of something wild and mysterious and decidedly, untraditionally political, which is to say exciting rather than boring. (Mailer posited the contrast between Kennedy and his 1960 presidential opponent, Richard Nixon, as the difference between a politics of entertainment and one of bland convention.)
Ronald Reagan, a professional entertainer, did a whole lot of things, which I shall get to in a moment. But no one did what Donald Trump has done. Those other presidential entertainers applied the tools of entertainment to politics and governance, largely as a matter of transmission. They were an accoutrement to power – a way to package and sell it. Trump changed the fundamental relationship between politics and entertainment, reinvented it, and in doing so, changed both the fundamental operation and purpose of government itself in ways that have been enormously consequential. Trump conflated the two. He did what Philip Roth had pondered. He made entertainment, not governance, the very purpose of government or, to put it another way, he reconceived government from its traditional role as a system to guide the nation into a highly untraditional one as a vehicle for his performance, which is just as reductive and terrible as it sounds. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a stroke of perverse genius as well as the basis for so many other of his perversities. Suddenly, government wasn’t boring anymore, which seemed to tickle his supporters. Suddenly, government commanded our attention.
In the past I have written extensively about Ronald Reagan’s contributions to our political mechanisms. Most analysts, many of whom called Reagan the Great Communicator, saw in him an exceptional political actor, and Reagan himself once said that he wondered how anyone could be president without having a talent for acting. But Reagan was selling himself short. What he really perceived was something much larger and more significant than the way those entertainment skills could be deployed politically. He perceived that a constituency was really an audience; that the audience wanted to leave the movie theater on a high; that, for a president, the conduct of good government was less important than the creation of good vibes; and that, in the end, a presidential administration was really just a movie in another form. When the Reagan campaign pronounced that it was “Morning in America” in a famous 1984 re-election ad, it might as well have been announcing a new film. It was as close as anyone had gotten to merging entertainment and politics – to turning politics into entertainment and visa versa.
Until Donald Trump.
Trump’s achievement of transforming government into entertainment is a sea change. Reagan came from the movies where the ambitions were often large and grew ever larger over time until they were hardly popular culture anymore but full-blown art. Trump comes from reality television where the ambitions are small and cheap and keep getting cheaper. Like Reagan or not, and I didn’t particularly like him, he aimed in his own way to elevate the American soul. Trump, a huckster and Kardashian knockoff, aimed to inflate himself and keep the public alternately amused and angry – and, above all, focused on him: government, if you want to call it that, by, of, and for Trump. He was the show. He was the nation.
In fairness, this required some doing, some massive doing. If Reagan understood the principles that underlie the appeal of movies, Trump, after years on the gossip pages, understood the principles that underlie the appeal of celebrity and reality TV, which are that you must constantly keep the narrative going, constantly introduce new twists, pump up bigger, faster, louder elements, ever more ridiculous elements, spring ever new surprises, dominate the news cycle, never give the audience a break, or let the show lapse. It is a temporal form of bullying – basically monopolizing time. Trump even tweets on Truth Social in the middle of the night, lest there be any pause some other news might fill. It was all Trump all the time. It still is. (Of course, this can also come back to bite you too. Trump is also the star of the Jeffrey Epstein Show.)
Trump knew, too, that if the audience loved the new politics of relentless outrageousness, so would the media. They subsisted on narrative churn. Churn attracted eyeballs and generated advertising, which made them his allies, and encouraged them to judge him not as a political leader but as an entertainer, a showboat, which is one reason why he escapes so much of the media opprobrium that would be hurled at any other president, save him. CBS head honcho Les Moonves could have been speaking for the entire media establishment when he quipped of Trump’s appearance on the political scene, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” That sentiment hasn’t changed much in the past ten years. Trump is great entertainment, if that sort of entertainment is your cup of arsenic. It is another reason why the media hesitate to call him out. He is too good for business – a business where boredom is the cardinal sin.
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And so, in short order, did Donald Trump eviscerate government as we had always known it and turn it into a reality show. The word “performative” is often attached to Trump, but it is as insufficient as calling Reagan “The Great Communicator.” Trump isn’t just performing; he is staging stunts non-stop. Every single thing in his administration is designed with the show in mind. His immigration policy is a stunt. (Why else have Dr. Phil, of all people, accompany the ICE agents?) His meetings with foreign leaders are stunts. (Why else have his February hi-jacking of Zelensky in the Oval Office in front of cameras?) His so-called “negotiations” on tariffs are stunts. His loosing DOGE on the so-called “deep state” is a stunt. His unleashing the Justice Department on his political opponents is a stunt. His gerrymandering demands are stunts. Each and every episode of the “show” is designed for maximum effect in capturing attention – government by photo-op. Even his Cabinet appointments were made with television in mind; he raided Fox News for personalities whom he regarded as attractive, regardless of their qualifications because the only qualification was how they would “play” in the media.
None of this is to say that just because they are entertainment one should underestimate the cruelty of his staged events and the damage they have done to this country, nor underestimate how deliberate the cruelty and damage are. Far from it. The entertainment isn’t kind. But its malice does help explain why his supporters never seem to tire of his shenanigans. It isn’t, I submit, just because they are entertaining, even energizing, though for a certain kind of sadist (Republicans?) it obviously is. It is, I think, because entertainment itself has a subtext, and Trump plays to it and draws upon it. You could even say that the subtext of entertainment is the subtext of his entire presidency.
That subtext is yet another affinity between politics and entertainment – arguably a deeper one than those FDR, JFK and Reagan detected. When our popular culture first arose in the nineteenth century alongside Jacksonian democracy, it was the cultural equivalent of Jacksonian democracy - a way to attack and degrade so-called “high culture,” a way of flouting good taste, which was the taste of the much-despised elites in this country. It was a rebellion challenging high art with low artlessness. In some ways, despite the elevated status of popular culture, that hasn’t changed. (You don’t eat popcorn at the ballet or the symphony.) As the film critic Pauline Kael put it in her seminal essay, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “Perhaps the single most intense pleasure of movie-going is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture.” Those of us who love the movies also love that escape, it is one of the great appeals of the movies and of all popular art, but in a political and moral context rather than an aesthetic one, escaping the responsibilities for proper responses could serve as the very definition of Trumpism. It exists to deny the high-minded and bring its ruination.
Beyond the pleasure of the show itself, then, the joy and triumph of Trump and his supporters in making government a tawdry reality show is that in doing so they are also destroying the conventions and values that had seemed to constitute good taste, good conduct, and good government – the very things the MAGA movement abhorred. One glaring new example: to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, Trump is hosting a UFC cage match in the White House, which is akin to wiping your muddy feet on the flag. It is a disgrace. It is meant to be a disgrace.
In effect, Trump has been not only laying waste to government generally and the presidency specifically; he has been mocking them with his entertainments. His offensive remarks (the Smithsonian Institute made slavery seem to be worse than it was, he declared this week!), his inappropriate behavior, his tone-deaf insults and assaults and depreciation of others, his endless skein of lies, most of them whoppers, his constant careening from one position to another depending on his disposition at the moment, his gaudy and garish sense of style, his outlandish self-importance that is a caricature of vanity – none of these were remotely presidential, which, again, is the point. What Reagan, as his longtime observer, Los Angeles Times reporter Lou Cannon, wrote, “wanted to be and what be became was an accomplished presidential performer.” (Cannon titled one of his Reagan biographies, The Role of a Lifetime.) Trump, on the other hand, gloried in being un-presidential – in being an anti-president, in being the vainglorious lout they mistakenly let into the White House.
He degraded the presidency and along with it government because degradation is his métier and that of his supporters. It is what the latter want from him and what the latter appreciate from his “shows.” And not at all incidentally, flouting high culture has another benefit; it is yet another way of seeming to own the libs, whose higher standards they assume and at whose alleged condescension he and his supporters bristle. Thus did Trump and the MAGA crew simultaneously get both their kicks and their revenge – an entertainment two-fer.
I have often written here about our desperate need to restore morality to the nation. I believe it is the best weapon with which to fight Trump. But now that government has been trashed, we will also need to restore it as well, by which I mean not the instruments of government, which Trump has also degraded, but the very purpose of government – not to aggrandize a narcissistic fascist tyrant in his project to destroy the last few shards of human decency, but to serve the interests of democracy and the needs of the American people. If we are to restore it, of this I am certain: the show must not go on, and the nation must acclimate itself to something different - smaller, slower, and softer.
Notes
Neal Gabler. Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. (NY: Knopf, 1998)
Philip Roth, “On the Air,” New American Review 10 (1970)
Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/leslie-moonves-donald-trump-may-871464/
Lou Cannon, President Reagan:The Role of a Lifetime (NY: Simon & Schuster 1991)
Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)
