Few White House events have earned the kind of instant infamy that greeted Friday’s disastrous meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And few lines have been as revealing as the one Trump uttered as a benediction, of sorts, to the spectacle: “This is going to be great television.”
The boast was, as the line goes, shocking but not surprising. Trump’s deference to television—and the celebrity he has gained from it—are core elements of his brand, his biography, his mythology; his connection to the medium is so widely recognized that commentators were calling him the “First True Reality TV President” before his first term had begun. And he earned the epithet. Trump “cast” key roles in his administration based on candidates’ ability to “look the part.” He announced his choices to fill Supreme Court vacancies as if he were the Bachelor, offering a lifetime appointment as his final rose. He churned out ever more dramatic episodes of The Real White House of Donald Trump, and each was a ratings bonanza: Few things make for appointment viewing like a show whose arcs bend the lives of its audience.
“The reality–TV presidency,” in that way, was accurate. But the characterization was also woefully premature. Reality TV, at its core, is a genre of total immunity. Its many contradictions (it is at once fact and fiction, anthropology and escapism, “unscripted” and highly produced) free it from the standards that might constrain other shows. Is it real? is a foolish thing to ask about a genre premised on a shrug, in which the foolishness is part of the appeal. Reality shows wink. They tease. They make everything delightfully suspect. Plausible deniability, in the hands of skilled producers, can be spun into TV gold.
But the ambiguities that make reality so engrossing as a mode of entertainment make it hazardous as a mode of politics. Trump, in his meeting with Zelensky, was not merely performing “reality” as a show. He was wielding it as a weapon, planting a new flag as he burned another.
The spectacle that resulted was a striking exception (to history, to world stability, to decency). Trump was abandoning an ally and bullying him in the process; he was rejecting frameworks that distinguished America’s friends from its enemies. The meeting declared the president’s—and thus everyone else’s—new reality: Trump’s earlier show was mere prologue. This is Trump’s reality-TV presidency. The new season will be darker, grimmer, and filled with ever more dizzying plot twists. It demands to be watched not as entertainment but as an omen.
Trump’s 2016 campaign, the rumor went, was a bid to control the news by becoming the news: He had hoped to convert his growing political following into an audience for a cable-TV empire. When he won the election, he adjusted course. Like an insult comic who had wandered onto the wrong set, the new president ad-libbed his way through the political drama. The improv explains, in part, why Trump focused so much on appearances while “casting” his Cabinet, and why he bragged about the “ratings” his COVID-related press conferences earned him: TV was the language he knew. Even The Apprentice, the series that had bolstered his image by claiming to show him as he was, had helped him hone his skills as a performer: The Donald Trump of the show was a character acted out by Donald Trump.
He treated the presidency, similarly, as a part to be played. And he prepared for the role with the help of TV—in particular, the channel that had served him so well. The “reality-TV presidency” was also, by conventional wisdom and in practice, the Fox News presidency. The Fox star Sean Hannity effectively operated as Trump’s “shadow press secretary” in his first term; Tucker Carlson, texts would later reveal, functioned as Trump’s mouthpiece. Many days, the president spent hours watching TV news, his staffers said, and Fox in particular. He was so influenced by the viewing that many claims he made in the afternoons could be traced directly—and verbatim—to claims the network had made in the mornings.
Through all of that, though, a fundamental distinction remained: The president was here; Fox was there. Yes, a revolving door spun between Fox’s green room and Trump’s White House. But revolving doors are necessary only when walls stand between the inner space and the outside world. Those walls, in Trump’s first term, remained largely intact. Trump watched the news and tried to influence it; he did not try to stage-manage and wholly subsume it.
Performance itself, in retrospect, served as one more democratic guardrail: Trump winged some lines and ignored many others, but he operated mostly according to an old set of scripts that worked as a check on executive power. He demeaned the role, yes—he twisted and tested it—but he performed the presidency and, in that most basic of ways, preserved it. He paid the role the smallest bit of courtesy by acknowledging it as a role in the first place, scripted and edited and honed over time—a single part meant to be interpreted by many actors.
Trump proved his acceptance of the performance, in fact, by chafing against its scripts. The lawyers who constrained him, the generals who restrained him, the reporters who questioned him, the understudy who threatened him—the assorted producers and directors and designers and actors who had their own roles to play in the show—each, Trump fumed, dimmed his limelight. That first term, as a consequence, found him working as both the government’s headliner and its fiercest critic. He panned the whole thing for its complicated plots and its sprawling cast and, most of all, its failure to be a one-man show.
This was another reason Trump’s first season got the ratings it did. Each of his outbursts was also a cliffhanger, with democracy in the balance. But each, too, was a reminder that the imperiled government, for all its backsliding, had not yet succumbed to the abyss. Even as Trump railed against his castmates, he grudgingly accepted their right to share the stage. Even when he went off-book—even when he missed his marks and ignored his cues—he acknowledged that he was part of a broader production.
Only at the end of his first term did Trump try to torch the stage and shred the scripts. And only at the start of his second has he embraced the full license that comes when “reality” collides with democracy.
As Trump berated Zelensky under the guise of good TV, he also embraced the political force of reality TV. He was converting the genre’s core features—the refusal to distinguish between truth and lies, the ambiguities that verge into nihilism—into an exercise of unchecked power. Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance used the occasion to repeat misinformation so egregiously wrong that it mocked the very notion of “information.” Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” of coming into the Oval Office and trying “to litigate this in front of the American media.” (It was the White House, of course, that had turned a meeting that would typically be conducted in a closed-door session into a media event.)
Reality affords total immunity in part because it creates environments that cannot be penetrated by the standards of the outer world. The Apprentice—a spin on Survivor, essentially, set in the kill-or-be-killed world of the corporate jungle—made no sense in practical terms; it reflected the executive-hiring process about as well as Survivor reflected bushcraft. But Does it make sense? is roughly as relevant to a reality show as Is it real? In the worlds established by reality TV, nothing makes sense, and everything does. Reality shows establish, and then are beholden to, their own rules. They are stridently insular. They are thoroughly self-rationalizing. That is the fun—and the danger. They will do whatever they want, because they can.
Trump brought that logic to his meeting with Zelensky—and the permissions of The Apprentice to the White House. Here was the Oval Office, remade as his “boardroom”; here were the confrontations that brought climactic closure to each episode, reconfigured as diplomacy. Here was Trump, the all-powerful executive, bringing his signature glare to the world stage and his signature phrase to a nation: You’re fired, he basically told Ukraine, as he posed and vamped.
The global viewership assured by the cameras in the room was complemented by a studio audience: members of the media who had been selected to join the show. Their presence was the fruit of a claim Trump had made earlier in the week, when his White House announced that it would be determining the makeup of the press pool that covers the president. The announcement, one of many recent White House attacks on press freedom, wrested power from the independent organization of journalists that had overseen presidential reporting for more than a century. In the process, it destroyed a standard meant to ensure that the White House receives independent press coverage—and, with it, one more democratic guardrail. (“We’re going to be now calling the shots,” Trump said of the move.) The change also helped explain why, after witnessing a meeting that truly deserved to be called “historic”—one that concerned the future of Ukraine, the future of NATO, the ambitions of Russia, and the possibility of World War III—one member of the press gaggle chose to meet the moment by asking about Zelensky’s outfit.
In a coup, you first go for the media: You take over the radio stations, the TV channels, the papers. From there, you can do nearly everything else. You can steadily replace the journalists who would question you with ones who will do your will. You can replace the officials who might question you with ones who will serve you. You can create a world in which the president of Ukraine is to be blamed for the invasion of his own country; in which Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, is the dictator; in which Ukraine, not Russia, is the villain; in which you are a president who operates like a king. You can air the new “realities” so relentlessly that, before long, they can seem like the only reality there is.
Power grabs, when made by those who already have power, can be harder to detect. They can occur gradually, bureaucratically, cut by cut and claim by claim—and they can look, from the outside, innocent, ordinary, and unscripted. The meager distance that once remained between Fox News and the White House has been, in Trump’s second term, obviated; the president has now brought the full weight of “reality” to bear on his relationship with the network. Why watch Fox as a viewer, painstakingly translating the televised content to reality, when you can cut out the middleman and simply integrate TV into the daily operations of your administration? Why allow a division between the Fourth Estate and the First when you can simply incorporate the one into the other?
By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff—many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration. The president announced the latest addition to his cast last week (around the time he announced that “White House correspondent” would effectively mean, for his presidency, “White House loyalist”): He appointed Dan Bongino—Fox contributor, radio host, purveyor of conspiracy theories, partisan in good standing—to serve not in a media role in the White House but as the deputy director of the FBI.
Bongino, like many of his fellow appointees, is qualified for his new role mostly to the extent that “personality” is a job description. But in a politics governed by “reality,” qualification will be whatever the producers claim it to be. Loyalty can be its own line in the résumé. And Bongino quickly proved his worthiness within the standards of the show: On the same day that Zelensky visited the Oval Office, the White House announced that the FBI, with Bongino installed in its top ranks, was in the process of returning a cache of documents that the Justice Department had previously held as evidence while it investigated Trump’s potential mishandling of classified information.
This was “justice,” in the insular world of Trump’s show. It corrected a “hoax,” as Trump’s lawyer called the investigation, that had put the president in legal jeopardy. In the reality that has no scare quotes, though, the reclamation of evidence might also look like impunity. It might look like the power afforded to Trump when the Supreme Court—three of the nine justices owing their spots on the bench to one Bachelor and his final rose—made his broad immunity a matter of law and judicial precedent. In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy—in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?
The post This Is What Happens When Reality TV Comes for Democracy appeared first on The Atlantic.
