Trump is reality TV at its worst
The Republican might be rich and famous but he is un-American at heart, writes the king of trash TV,
‘Hillary Clinton belongs in the White House. Donald Trump belongs on my show.” That is what I tweeted after the first ClintonTrump presidential debate, and it went viral. Now we have had the third debate and people are asking whether the whole presidential campaign – labelled the dirtiest in our history because of the level of personal abuse between candidates – resembles an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
It is a fair point. The issues which Donald Trump is talking up, and his bragging about what he does to women, are clearly the exact same issues that exist on my show. However, I have never, ever, thought that someone on the show should be President of the United States.
The only question that can therefore legitimately be asked about the role of reality television in this contest is, should we have reality TV at all? Once you say yes to letting ordinary people get on TV and talk about their lives, you can’t have censorship of all those bits you don’t like. And if you don’t let them on TV, you are discriminating against them, which is anti-democratic.
What I feel we should be debating is the fact that although voters can see that Trump belongs on my show – and he is certainly better than I am on television – they go on to say, “I don’t care, I still want him to be president.”
In Britain, you have the Queen as head of state, and your prime minister is just the leading political figure. In America, we make our leading political figure the head of state. So, when we vote for president it is not just about who we think has the better legislative programme. We are choosing who we think represents what America ought to be. And that is the difficulty with Trump.
What America aspires to be is an open country that does not discriminate on race, religion or ethnicity. We like to think the symbol of America is the Statue of Liberty. Yet President Trump would replace it with a wall along the border with Mexico. An un-American thing to do.
I am an immigrant, I was born in Britain. There was no question in my family’s mind when they arrived in America about what the Statue of Liberty meant. Every American, if not a Native American, at some point in their family history has been an immigrant. That’s the idea of America.
What is so appalling about Trump is that we have never before had a major party presidential candidate who is against the idea of America. And that is why this campaign is so unsettling, and why it is such big news. With hindsight, I believe that Trump running for president was inevitable. We should have seen it coming. In America, the past two generations have been raised to believe anything Washington does, anything the government does, is horrible, corrupt, incompetent and evil.
Any political commercial you see on TV is about how the other guy is a bum or should be in jail. This is what we are subjected to every single election season. If you train people to believe these things, you can’t then be surprised that we end up with a candidate who is anti-government, antiWashington and thinks all politics is evil.
In order to run for president you have to be well known, and there are only two ways, outside politics, to be famous in America – sports or entertainment. Since athletes are too young to run for president, we have ended up with an entertainer running for president, although I couldn’t have foreseen that the entertainer would be someone as crude as Trump. But is this really the dirtiest election in our history? I think not. Look back to 1800, for instance, when Thomas Jefferson fought John Adams. It was filthy with all kinds of sexual charges. Both of them bought newspapers and paid writers to pen slanderous articles about their opponent. The sort of thing we have been seeing and hearing in recent weeks has been going on for centuries. However, I am not sure if we have had a presidential candidate who attacks sections of the public like Trump does.
It’s not just Hillary Clinton; he attacks all women voters, voters who are heavy, Hispanic or Muslim. He attacks disabled voters by shaking as if he has a palsy when he refers to one disabled reporter. You want to be able to make things up about him, but you can’t. He has done them all.
For me, though, the most surprising point in this campaign is the hacking. If Russia really is involved in hacking Clinton’s campaign manager, as our government has alleged, in an effort to destabilise a US election and bring chaos to our democracy, then I never thought such a day would come.
In the Seventies, a break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building brought down Richard Nixon, but now, when the Russians are allegedly doing something very similar, Trump and his followers seem unfazed.
And what of Hillary? I know her. She is totally likeable, and incredibly knowledgeable. At the same time, I admit, she is not the most charismatic. In modern America, charisma is often the most important political currency. It’s not hard to see why John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have become political icons. It is that charisma factor that gives people, even those who ought to be Hillary supporters, some pause.
For his part, in this week’s final debate, Trump was acting as if he knew he was going to lose. He seemed to be creating a narrative for that loss with his refusal to say he would accept the outcome of the election. Or as he put it, “I will keep you in suspense.”
Since his ego and his brand can’t stand the embarrassment of defeat, Trump is getting his explanation in early – that the media, Hillary, and the Republican Party are conspiring so that he, the representative of the people, doesn’t get in. The truth, of course, is very different. On November 8, I am confident that America will make a pretty strong statement against Trump. And that will happen not because the election is rigged, but because he does not represent what America ought to be.
‘I am not sure we have ever had a candidate attack the public in the way that he does’