Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
(Liveright, $28) Not so long ago, serious thinkers liked to pretend that politics and pop culture existed in separate realities, said Tom Carson in Bookforum. The 2016 election blew up that illusion, and James Poniewozik has now produced the essential account of “the bride-of-Frankenstein mating” of Washington and low-brow TV. Having observed the splintering of mass-audience entertainment—blue state elites tune in to boutique TV shows such as The Good Wife, red state residents to Duck Dynasty—The New York Times’ TV critic is well placed to explain exactly how a former reality star came to occupy the White House. As Audience of One makes clear, “conquering the society of the spectacle was Trump’s specialty from his earliest days as a Potemkinvillage New York tycoon.”
Poniewozik argues that Trump “isn’t just on TV—he is TV,” said Annalisa Quinn in NPR.org. A dedicated viewer, the president has achieved symbiosis with the medium, absorbing the moral teachings of its “more Darwinian genres.” He learned from sports and game shows that life is a zero-sum competition, and from cable news and reality TV that the best response to controversy is to heighten the conflict. It’s easy to understand how Trump’s made-for-TV behavior won him attention in 2016, but Poniewozik fails to explain how he translated that into votes. “In his reading, Trump’s supporters must be stupid, dazzled creatures” who uncritically absorb his darkest messages as they march zombie-like to the polls. That both demeans and excuses them.
Still, the parallels that Poniewozik draws between modern TV and Trump are “so tantalizing that the more you read Audience of One, the harder it is to view this president any other way,” said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. Reality TV, Poniewozik notes, derives its appeal from “the relentless challenging of norms”—the feeling that you are watching something that you really shouldn’t be. That perfectly captures the experience of watching the Trump show. It’s disturbing, “yet hard to change the channel.”