President Donald Trump was, in theory, a real estate developer. But in practice, he is a television star. “The Donald” generated most of his wealth through publicity, licensing, media, and, later in life, reality TV. Likewise, he rose to the presidency by bypassing the traditional party apparatus and appealing to voters directly through the television.
He is now assembling his Cabinet on these principles. Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, Janette Nesheiwat, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Sean Duffy all became famous through television and, if confirmed, will run entire government departments. Another cohort of picks—RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy—has become famous through the podcast scene, representing the transition from television to the digital age.
Is this a fruitful approach? Does it represent a viable strategy for the New Right? And can President Trump translate mastery over television to mastery over the state?
All that and more in this week’s podcast.
The following transcript of the episode has been lightly edited for clarity:
Donald Trump has approached his career in business and politics through the television. He rose to fame first as a real estate developer, but more importantly as someone who understood how to manipulate and dominate and cast his spell through the media. It began with the New York tabloid scene, then expanded to a national television platform, then to an international film and television platform. He played the character of the real estate developer more than he was a real estate developer itself. He famously made more money licensing his name and image to real estate projects, then delegating the task of actual construction and management of these projects as he became more advanced in his career, as the intellectual property of the Trump televisual brand became more valuable than the physical property of the Trump building, brick-and-mortar work of real estate development. And he found a way to actually merge the two in a very successful formula of translating televisual fame into brick-and-mortar wealth. In this way, he represents an iconic American character type, the salesman, that was able to press his image into the television, out into the world, then harvest the returns of that fame and fortune.
During the first Trump administration, there was a lot of reporting about his television habits. He was famous for not only engaging with television, but consuming content from television, and making judgments based on what he was hearing and seeing on TV. He’s reported to frequently watch playback of his own television appearances with the sound off in order to assess how he’s looking, how he is appearing—his gestures, his expression, his presidential qualities that are communicated through the close-up image, which is the definitional television news medium image. And he even approached the process of administration through this idea of collecting a team around him that had the appearance of “central casting.” That is, first and foremost, political leaders in large organizations are actors that have to command a presence through the television and through the bureaucracy in order to have administrative effectiveness. There was mockery of this approach, and there are some real limitations to this approach, but it is not something that is an empty or bankrupt or impossible approach. In fact, there are many benefits to the approach that we’ll discuss in this episode.
As I’ve been thinking about these issues, I’ve been reading some passages from the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and there’s a critical insight that McLuhan offers that we can apply to even the second Trump presidency, the campaign, and now the transition process. McLuhan famously argued that television delivers myth. It condenses down a complex reality into a dense and powerful symbol. We can even think of the imagery of Trump’s campaign in terms of these iconic, televisual moments. The assassination attempt, where we can see the bullet zinging through the sky, through the tip of Trump’s ear, into the background of the frame. We can see this image of an avuncular Trump dressed in the McDonald’s apron popping his head out of the drive-through window. Then, we can recall Trump’s facial expressions. During debates, Trump dominated the debate moments not through his verbal rhetoric, but in part through his reaction shots. He knows that the camera is watching his facial expressions, and he can capture a mood, a feeling, a sense of the thing, just through the expression that’s delivered in close-up—he has practiced these expressions with the care and detail of a television actor.
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