As Biden and Trump Square Off in Their First Debate, Let’s Revisit Why Trump Won the 2016 Showdowns

Don’t worry about it, Little Marco …. Low energy …. You are the single biggest liar….

The first 2024 presidential debate is set for Thursday, and there may be wisdom in the old adage: Past is prologue. A case can certainly be made that one of the main reasons Donald Trump earned his party’s nomination in 2016—and went on to win the general election—is because of the sheer must-see spectacle of his off-the-rails debate performances. Eight years later, a sizable audience will be either tuned into the faceoff, to be hosted by CNN, or will spend time scrolling through the online highlight reel. In preparation, it is useful to consider why those bygone showdowns played to Trump’s strengths.

It is a given, of course, that Trump went into the early debates with a substantial advantage against the large GOP field. The main reason: he was a reality TV star, extremely comfortable with the medium of television and in tune with the audiences at home and in the studio. Experience in reality TV—a genre that is untethered to the real world—allowed Trump to parse the truth and make up facts on the fly, behavior that proved especially effective when courting a public with a compromised rumor-immune system.

Not to belabor the obvious, but Trump knew how to treat politics itself as a reality show. In the first few months of the primaries, skeptics had viewed his candidacy as little more than his way of burnishing his brand. Full stop. Yet once Trump had gotten a debate or two under his belt, he realized—as did the political and media establishments—that he had found his political métier. In short order, the cable and network news divisions began to cast him in the lead.

Soon, they were marketing the presidential race like a prime-time series. On two dozen evenings, TV provided live coverage of the primary and caucus results. Over the course of 15 months, beginning in August of 2015, there were 31 debates, town halls, and forums. In addition, Trump’s campaign rallies and primary night speeches were sometimes broadcast or streamed live.

Jeff Zucker, for one—then the boss at CNN—was going all-in for Trump. No wonder: he’d been the executive at NBC who’d help steer the success of Trump’s own reality show, The Apprentice. Roger Ailes, then running Fox News, also saw the candidate as his kind of marquee talent: loud, brash, unpredictable, and physically imposing, all of which translated into ratings catnip. In no time, this saturation coverage on cable and broadcast got viewers hooked on The Great Race. The debates became, in effect, an episodic TV series, in simulcast. The program merged three formats, all of which had been perfected during the 1990s: the reality show, the talk/opinion show, and the monthslong TV-news saga, from “Conflict in the Gulf” (’90–’91), to the O.J. Simpson “Trial of the Century” (’94–’95), to the March to Impeachment (’98-’99), not to mention Bush v. Gore (’00–’01).

The debates—and the race itself—turned out to be tailor-made for a reality-TV character like Trump: the serialized nature of the contest, the faux suspense, the obsession with process. So, too, was the fixation on the week’s winners (“We are going to win big-league, believe me”) and losers (“I like people who weren’t captured”). This was a format Trump knew intimately. And he solidified his hold on voters early by appearing in a setting that suited his showman’s flashiness and his insult-comic style.

As the Republican candidates lined up on the debate stage, Trump would typically be positioned at the center lectern. He would field more questions than his competitors. The setting had hints of Survivor and The Apprentice. At times, the moderators would focus less on the candidates’ policies than on their views about one another: “Senator Cruz, you suggested Mr. Trump ‘embodies New York values.’ Could you explain what you mean by that?” This line of questioning encouraged conflict and helped amplify Trump’s tendency to razz his rivals. Meanwhile, the postmortems by experts would reverberate for days across websites, social media, the print press, and the news and opinion programs, prolonging the agony and the exegesis.

Read the Book HereBuy on Amazon Buy on Bookshop

All along, Trump was playing by reality-TV rules. He didn’t “prepare.” He played his malaprops and bluster as authenticity. He and his surrogates “spun” his performance in pre-interviews and post-interviews. He inserted his family into the process, which helped bolster his appeal and fill out his back story. He spread hearsay (“I’m hearing…”; “Everybody is saying…”). When things weren’t going his way, he blamed his mic or his earpiece. He cast doubt on the moderators. He whined and he sulked and he scowled.

Trump seemed to have the facility to say whatever sounded sensible or outrageous in the moment. He would build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border—which Mexico would pay for. He would alter his positions, debunk fellow candidates he’d previously praised, deny saying things he’d actually said. And all of it went relatively un-fact-checked by his opponents—or even the moderators. While the other presidential hopefuls on the debate stage gave responses that were based IRL, by and large, Trump played virtually. He understood that on reality programs the cleverest half-truth could mortally wound an opponent, and the craftiest player would often win—and win over his audience.

By building on a sturdy foundation of perpetual fabrication and obfuscation—a foundation that had been set by two of his predecessors Bill Clinton (“I experimented with marijuana a time or two…. I didn’t inhale”) and George W. “Mission: Accomplished” Bush (“In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed”)—Trump began elevating the Long Lie into performance art.

There is no mystery about where Trump first honed the reality craft. He had first learned from the clown princes of the trade: pro wrestlers.

In 1988, the casino magnate had wooed World Wrestling Entertainment (then called WWF), which began to hold matches at his Trump Plaza arena in Atlantic City. It was the golden age of conservative populism, as Stephen L. Miller once described it in the National Review, and “pro wrestling’s biggest stage was where Donald Trump the populist was born.” In the late ’80s and into the ’90s, Trump came to respect the stars of the sport, along with their theatrical antics and the way they targeted “evil” enemies who could be summarily vanquished.

“He became a master at trash talk, smack downs, and sheer television entertainment,” according to David Gergen, the presidential advisor and former CNN political analyst, and it would culminate in Trump’s 2007 appearance in the ring, where he emerged victorious when his designated wrestler stand-in beat the stand-in of WWE honcho Vince McMahon. The spoils of Trump’s victory? He got to shave McMahon’s head, right there on the canvas—as the fans went wild. “Trump’s blue-collar base,” wrote Miller, “believes he’s one of them. He loves the pageantry of it all as much as they do, and he’s spent years upon years cultivating them. These people are fans of Trump more than they are fans of conservatism.” Added Gergen: “Pro wrestling fans understand they are watching a contest that is usually fixed. More than anything, they want to be entertained.”

This gut instinct about his audience put Trump in great stead, in the estimation of journalist Judd Legum, then editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress.org, against a slate of candidates who proved to be no match for him. “Trump is behaving like a professional wrestler,” noted Legum in 2015, “while Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair.”

“Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair.”

The debates would lay the reality-TV groundwork for all that followed. The snippy contestants, the unpredictable star, the shifting alliances, the offstage histrionics—all became addictive, not only to the viewers but to the networks as well. News divisions began to bank on the ad revenue that came from these unscripted, low-cost, highly anticipated programs, which proved a bonanza to their bottom line. More debates were scheduled. The series snowballed. The star was given more and more airtime. The trivia of the race became magnified in the news cycle and in the culture.

When the Republican National Convention rolled around in July 2016, Trump broke with tradition and decided to put in an appearance all four nights, sometimes beaming in via Jumbotron. And come the general election, he had a distinct edge. While Hillary Clinton at her rallies would enlist the likes of Barbra and Bruce and Beyoncé, Trump, thanks to his fan base and his months of debate exposure, could draw on an arguably wider audience that considered him on par with his fellow reality peeps and tweeters. He had the Kardashians and Kanye. He had the Duck Dynasty crew and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Yentl compared with Kimye? No contest. As pure entertainment, Trump had already won. His show was The Bachelorette; Hillary Clinton’s was a public-TV fund drive.

And that September and October, when he would go head-to-head with Hillary Clinton in three presidential debates, all bets were off. At one stage, he seemed to be breathing down her neck. At another, he muttered aloud, calling her, “Nasty woman.” The mutual animus was so thick it could have been cut with a saber.

If past is prologue, there is one key moment to consider before next Thursday. During one of their debates, Clinton and Trump had this exchange.

Hillary Clinton: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.”

Donald Trump: “Because you’d be in jail.”

Which sounds particularly rich from a man who is set to be sentenced on July 11—on 34 felony counts.

The bottom line is clear. If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wants to win this one, like he did in 2020, it might make sense for him to start watching some of those old videotapes before he heads into the ring. Because, well, as someone once tweeted: “Be there. Will be wild.”

Excerpted from THE NAUGHTY NINETIES: The Decade that Unleashed Sex, Lies, and the World Wide Web by David Friend. ©2024 David Friend and reprinted by permission from Twelve Books, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.