The Trump Show
TO THE U.S. LEADER, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THE PRESIDENCY IS HOW IT LOOKS
TRUMP PUT SO MUCH ENERGY INTO COVERAGE OF HIS PERSONAL SOAP OPERA THAT ‘I TOOK MY EYE OFF THE BALL’ AT HIS CASINOS AS THEY TEETERED TOWARD BANKRUPTCY.
Last spring, while reporting The Washington Post's biography of Donald Trump, I asked an executive who had worked for Trump for more than three decades to help me understand a central contradiction: How could he be the micromanager who would wake an employee at 2 a.m. to clean up litter in one of his buildings' lobbies, and also the boss who claimed to be ignorant of his hotels' finances as they fell into bankruptcy?
The executive offered this guidance: “If you're ever confused about Trump's motives, go to showman first.” The building lobby was a showcase for the Trump brand, requiring the close attention of the man behind the name; the finances were backstage stuff, easily ignored.
Those words keep coming back to me as the rituals of Washington are washed out by the bright glare of President Trump at centre stage. News conferences, diplomatic summits, relations with Congress, campaign-style rallies — the public-facing aspects of the presidency are being flipped on their heads, transformed into stages for the master marketer to play out his unique approach to brand enhancement.
What Washington perceives as disorder — a blizzard of contradictions, a president saying one thing while his appointees say the opposite — is actually a long-running theatrical event, The Trump Show, by which the star builds excitement, demands attention and creates storylines that at least superficially seem like success. The most important thing about this presidency, to the man in the Oval Office, is how it looks.
For Trump, the product almost doesn't matter; it can be hotels or casinos or steaks or wine or a university. It can be a one-state solution for the Middle East or a two-state one. It can be a “Muslim ban” or an executive order that his aides insist is anything but. The persona, more than the content, is his concern.
The Trump Show is new to the White House but old hat to anyone who has watched its star as casino magnate, hotel builder, pitchman or reality TV host. Three decades ago, he used the New York tabloids to build his brand by directing attention away from his troubled casinos and toward the collapse of his marriage to Ivana Trump and the flamboyant, playboy lifestyle that he wanted his audience to believe he was leading.
“The show is Trump, and it is sold-out performances everywhere,” he told Playboy at the time, about his own divorce. In frequent conversations with TV and print reporters, he perfected the art of showmanship, turning personal anguish into a startlingly public and popular drama. By his own account, Trump put so much energy into coverage of his personal soap opera that “I took my eye off the ball” at his casinos, which would saddle him with six corporate bankruptcies.
HE IS THE SOLE FOCUS
Similarly, Trump's daily delivery of detours and distractions in the White House is meant in part to mask disarray. But more than that, it's a continuation of a strategy to focus the audience's attention on the man in the moment. In this show, what happened yesterday is always crowded out by what the master of ceremonies is doing right now. He has been, and must remain, the sole focus of attention.
The Trump Show is simultaneously disturbing and effective. He uses it to take credit, levy blame, bully enemies and entertain supporters. I watched Trump's news conference this month at a barbecue joint near Dallas, where some in the lunchtime crowd nudged one another with delight as the president made outrageous claims. The audience read the proceedings as a show: When one man told his friends that Trump wasn't actually answering questions about Russia and the election, his lunchmate replied, “He's just smacking down the media.”
Already, Trump is constructing his presidential brand as a series of personal moments — anecdotes about jobs saved, denunciations of opponents, boasts about victories. He may not sound presidential in his rhetorical style. But he has spent his first month in office creating events as theatrical as the marketing appearances he put on throughout his decades of building the Trump brand.
His energetic handshakes with whiplashed heads of state, the al fresco power tableaus he stages at his Mar-a-Lago beachfront estate, his prime-time announcement of his Supreme Court pick — this is already the most theatrically minded presidency since Ronald Reagan's.
Yet The Trump Show is elementally different. Reagan's image-maker, Michael Deaver, created dramatic settings in service of policy themes. When Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and dared Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” the point was to enhance the message: end the Cold War.
Trump's events, by contrast, are crafted to focus on the president's authority. Sometimes Trump makes policy seemingly on the run. When he says on stage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he's open to a one-state solution, and his own UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, says the very next day that the administration is “absolutely” committed to a two-state solution, that's not a policy difference, but evidence of how the show works. Trump's statement focuses attention on him as artisan of the deal. His appointees come in after to deliver the actual content.
So on The Trump Show, NATO is “obsolete” and the president will always put America first. If the vice president then tells European leaders that America remains committed to the alliance, that's OK, because the show isn't meant for them; it's meant for Trump's TV audience. On The Trump Show, it's outrageous and absurd to think that the Russians meddled in a U.S. election. If Defence Secretary Jim Mattis then says that well, maybe they did, that's fine, too, because the show is not about diplomatic and legal reality; the show is about building Trump's image of strength, success and control.
For decades, Trump has devoted his time and energy more to the facades of his enterprises than to their underlying structures. When Milton Bradley introduced a Trump board game in the 1980s, and the game's inventor visited him, Trump didn't even want to see how it was played. But then Trump volunteered to fly up to Milton Bradley's plant in Massachusetts to stage a media event where he could be seen as a job creator.
TRUMP MEANS SUCCESS
The key to his business success, Trump wrote in several of his books, was to solidify in the public's mind that “Trump” meant ambition, wealth and a personal expression of success. Some of his ventures would flop, and some would make piles of money, but he would sit at the core of all of them, insisting that he — not his staff or his company — was the star.
Everything else serves that idea. Details are important only when they affect the brand. If he's not quite certain whether the nation should have a strong dollar or a weak one, or if he's planning to speak “in a broad sense,” as his press secretary put it, rather than in detail, in his first address to a joint session of Congress — that's beside the point of The Trump Show.
Diplomacy and politics have traditionally depended heavily on nuance and shades of meaning. The Trump Show spurns subtlety. Trump has always put more energy into staging a riveting show than into how business titans are judged. He focuses on how things look, positioning his girlfriends, wives and children as avatars of wealth, posed to impress.
So it should come as no surprise to hear from top staffers that Trump approaches the hiring process much as a casting agent decides which actors get roles — whether it's a crusty combat general in charge of the Defence Department or a silverhaired alpha male executive at State, the look matters.
Similarly, when Trump blasts cable news channels in his speeches and news conferences, that reflects both his extreme dedication to watching coverage of himself and his decades-long role as TV critic. Throughout his career, Trump has made a daily habit of critiquing those who cover him, calling up reporters and sending writers hand-scrawled comments on their stories. Their work, in his view, is a reflection of his image-moulding efforts — a show about his show, and he has always felt proprietary about it.
The line between showbiz and politics has been blurring for decades now. In the '60s, it was a shock to learn that Richard Nixon had hired TV producers — including a young Roger Ailes, who started Fox News — to run his campaign. Decades later, Reagan was criticized for having Deaver stage his appearances.
All of that has become utterly routine, of course, and now any politician who didn't also aim to entertain would be considered odd. But The Trump Show takes us a step beyond. When he and Netanyahu spoke at their news conference, they had not even held a meeting yet. Such appearances are normally meant to communicate what the leaders have already talked about. This show was only about the show.
In The Post's interviews with Trump, he often took on a puzzled look when confronted with some contradiction between what he'd said in the past and what he was saying now. “Only you people care about that,” he'd say, whether the topic was his tax returns, his coarse relationships with women or his longtime liberalism in the years before he decided to paint himself as something of a conservative. The show is always now.
Great theatre both entertains and confronts. Trump gets the first part — his brand of performance aims to deploy his audacity and his authority to rev up the audience and soak up attention. But neither at his campaign rallies nor in the opening weeks of his presidency has he challenged the crowds' thinking. The Trump Show is, as ever, a spectacle, a cavalcade of provocations. It is designed not to prompt thought or even to persuade, but to sell tickets to the next performance.