Live from the White House, it’s Trump TV
Donald Trump’s presidency has sent people searching for historical analogies. Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, calls him a modern incarnation of Andrew Jackson. Newt Gingrich compares him to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Liberals prefer authoritarian analogues, like Vladimir V. Putin or figureheads of the Axis powers.
Each comparison assumes that Trump is a political figure with a politician’s instincts and calculations.
But that is wrong. Trump is not just a president who is unusually obsessed with media. He is an aspiring media mogul who happens to be president. When Bannon told The New York Times that the media should “keep its mouth shut,” he was being disingenuous. Trump doesn’t want the media to keep its mouth shut. He wants to silence his critics, co-opt their distribution and broadcast the story of his stardom. After winning with the instincts of a media impresario, he will lead using the strategy of a media empire.
Before the primaries even got rolling, Trump stormed to a lead through means that would be familiar to any upstart media or entertainment group. He identified an underserved audience demographic – the white working class – for whom he produced a range of genres from horror and comedy to uplift. Then he found a formula – nativist outrage and invective – for getting his message distributed on broadcast channels that he didn’t own or control, which happens to be the challenge of every 21st century media company in an age of decentralization.
Now in the White House, Trump is poised to enact his agenda through extraordinary means – by broadcasting an alternative reality in which he seeks a monopoly on his own narrative and facts. It is 20th-century strongman meets 21st Century Fox.
In conversations with dozens of entertainment and media executives and academics from hit-making industries over the past few years, I have learned that there are three overarching rules of popular entertainment. Each applies to Trump.
First , every successful franchise is fundamentally a hero myth. The primacy of heroes is self-evident in film, where five of the 10 highest-grossing movies of 2016 were superhero and fantasy sequels and spinoffs. But the creation of fictional heroes is what television is all about, too. “I define a hero as somebody who can do what we can’t do,” Nicole Clemens, a former executive vice president for series development at FX, told me. “That would include a brave fireman, but also a sociopath.”
Savior-to-sociopath might measure the full spectrum of Americans’ feelings about Trump. His self-regard is legendary. His buildings are Pharaonic, emblazoned with golden surnames. Producers on the “The Apprentice” edited his entrances and utterances for maximum authority, painting him as a Caesar of the boardroom. Trump carried this mythic posture through the primaries, where he said what other candidates never would, and into the Republican National Convention, where he told his supporters that he could do what they could not. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said, “which is why I alone can fix it.” In other words, I’m not a politician. I’m a superhero.
The second rule of popular entertainment is that, as critical as it is to write stories that move people, distribution is more important than content. On Twitter, Trump’s ability to distribute his message directly to voters is both novel and nostalgic at once. In the radio era, Franklin D. Roosevelt reached tens of millions of people with his fireside chats. When television eclipsed radio, presidential addresses remained blockbuster events. In 1970 alone, Richard Nixon delivered nine prime-time addresses to the nation, which reached half of all television-owning households.
But the presidency’s star power has shrunk as the entertainment options around him have grown. Ronald Reagan’s average address reached less than 40 percent of households, and Bill Clinton’s reached 30 percent. At the same time, the average presidential sound bite on the news shrank from 40 seconds in 1968 to less than seven seconds in the 1990s. Cable created the golden age of television, but it ended a golden age for the bully pulpit.
That is, before Trump. Twitter in his hands is an old-fashioned mainline to voters, with a key twist. . Trump’s chief audience – the one he watches constantly and whose insults hurt the most – isn’t the public. It’s the newspapers and TV shows; the mass media is the audience. In a 2013 meeting of New York Republicans, when people told him he couldn’t run for president by relying on TV alone, Trump disagreed, according to Politico. “It’s really about the power of the mass audience,” he said.
In an attention economy where success is theoretically driven by microtargeting and nifty viral ideas, Trump may have initially seemed like a dinosaur. But network scientists agree with the president’s instincts. In their famous study of viral online content, the researchers Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman and Duncan Watts found that social distribution was chaotic, unpredictable and rarely produced hits. Instead, they wrote, “popularity is largely driven by the size of the largest broadcast.” Neither purely viral nor traditional, Trump’s media strategy is an ingenious blend of old and new – a direct line to voters, consistently amplified by the largest broadcasters. THE THIRD rule of popular entertainment is the most distressing for the news media and for the country at large. The dark history of 20th-century entertainment is that media blockbusters seek to become monopolies. For nearly half of the 1900s, the movie studios owned movie theaters, before the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. Throughout the century, music labels bribed radio stations to play their handpicked songs over and over, until states cracked down on this practice, known as “payola.”
This is the point where Trump and Bannon’s ambitions meet. The White House wants to establish a political media monopoly, which seeks dominion over its own set of facts, by demonizing critical news sources (even those within the government) and promoting sycophantic alternatives.
The president has now labeled CNN “fake news” on live television and on Twitter. His adviser Kellyanne Conway deemed a series of obvious lies about the size of his inaugural crowd “alternative facts.” Trump issued gag orders to prevent government agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, from making public statements that presumably contradict his personal beliefs. In the last month, the administration has hailed the Fox News Channel, cited stories from Breitbart, the largest platform for the alt-right, and tweeted stories from LifeZette, a site that traffics in false pro-Trump rumors. We are seeing the origins of a White House Media Group, a constellation of pro-Trump sources that get access and kudos at the expense of traditional news companies.
In a world of Trump-branded media, what role do we, the viewers, play? The next few years will be full of false certainties – and false uncertainties. Objective lies will get government support; objective truths will be darkened by cynicism. It could also be an age of brilliant investigative journalism and renewed civic engagement. Before Trump, social media had shrunk the universe of news to a handful of preferred stories picked by peers. But democracy was not designed for catharsis, and news was never meant to be therapy. Digging out the truth, for both reporters and readers, is painstaking and sometimes painful work. But the next four years are going to hurt, anyway. We might as well spend the time learning to love digging.
It’s hard enough to predict the next four hours of the Trump administration, much less the next four years. But the publicity-driven instincts that got Trump to the White House may serve him terribly in the Oval Office. He is
No longer does the president just makes news; he now runs his own media company
unpopular and torn between paradoxical instincts to condemn traditional news companies while seeking out their approval. The volume of early leaks suggests that many aides are already weary of a president who elevates representations of popularity over politics and policy.
But Trump has had dreadful weeks before – and here we are. Several months ago, many people thought that he would badly lose the presidential race and build a television network, Trump TV. Instead, he has won both: a presidency that seeks to broadcast a separate media reality, in which an unpopular president is actually a hero of the people. If he succeeds, the Trump Show will be worse than reality television. It will not be reality at all.
Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of ‘Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.’