“What you’re seeing and hearing is not what’s happening.”—Donald Trump, 2018
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”—George Orwell, “1984”
Much has been written about the way reality television producer Roger Burnett and television executive Jeff Zucker created the myth of Donald Trump as a successful billionaire executive from whole cloth early in Trump’s 14 year run as star of NBC’s The Apprentice franchise.
Absent Burnett and Zucker, Trump would be a footnote in American politics at most. It’s unlikely that he would have entered the Republican primary race in 2016 and inconceivable that he would have won the nomination.
But there’s more to Trumpism than Trump. Trump’s a fluke, Trumpism was was inevitable (although of course it would have appeared under some other name.)
Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” If Trump did not exist, the GOP would have created someone like him.
Trump’s rise — his ability to capture attention — depended on the image Burnett and Zucker crafted for a multiply bankrupt drug addict, serial sex predator and general charlatan. But Trump’s rule and his ability to retain his audience hinge on an additional factor: A substantial minority of Americans are now completely untethered from reality. People still bemoaning Trump’s 20,000+ lies in office don’t get it; we’re living in the post-truth era.
I blame the Writer’s Guild of America.
Truth died the death of 1,000 cuts but one of the deepest was accidental; an unintended consequence of the 2007-’08 Hollywood writer’s strike. The WGA strike was less than four months long; from early November until late February. But it brought scripted TV to a grinding halt. With both sides entrenched, networks scrambled to greenlight content that was not subject to the WGA agreement.
“Unscripted” shows, such as game shows and Reality TV weren’t written by WGA members. Although there were quite a few Reality shows on the air before the strike, dozens of new ones premiered in 2008. As the genre grew, shows found themselves competing amongst each other for audience share. Conflict between flamboyant, larger-than-life characters got better ratings. In order to ensure that’s what cameras captured, producers crafted storylines that were less and less believable.
Millions of gullible Americans spent every night night watching D-list celebrities (often with the implants to match) act out ridiculous scenarios that were presented as The Real World. No wonder Trump lies so shamelessly. For his supporters questions like, “Is that true?” or “Could that really have happened?” are just a buzzkill.
Fox News was also emboldened by the realization that its audience watched Fox shows like Joe Millionaire (in which single ladies competed for the attentions of a millionaire) and believed they were watching real things that happened. By the time it emerged that “Joe Millionaire” was a freelance underwear model, the audience had moved on to some other nightly bit of voyeurism.
Unfortunately for real screenwriters, by the time the WGA came to an agreement with the studios, the studios and networks had realized that Reality TV was cheaper to produce and more profitable than scripted drama.
To be clear, The Apprentice and Donald Trump weren’t created by the WGA strike – The Apprentice first aired in 2004. But Trump’s status changed dramatically when Reality TV flooded the networks in the wake of the strike. When Mark Burnett initially pitched The Apprentice, Trump was unimpressed; he told Burnett, “Reality TV is for society’s bottom-feeders.” He was right; before the strike, Trump was a star in the medium’s least-respected genre. But after the strike, Reality TV took over the medium; Trump became a TV star, period.
My own brief flirtations with writing for Reality TV were eye opening
I once pitched a dance-themed Reality TV show and was shut down because the “talent” wasn’t obnoxious enough. “If you can’t stand to be a room with them for more than half an hour,” a producer told me, “they’re about right.”
Later, I worked on a show about motorcycling. A producer and friend asked me to script a pilot episode that opened with the talent getting a speeding ticket. He told me to write the cop’s dialog.
“Do you think we’re going to find a cop who can act?” I asked.
The producer shrugged and said, “We’ll just toss him the lines from off camera until he gets it right.”
Mark Burnett & Jeff Zucker created Donald Trump, but the death of truth enabled him
Those guys created the Donald Trump character, tossing him lines from off-camera.
No one had to untether Trump himself from reality; he’s a compulsive liar. But a big reason millions of people swallow his obvious lies is that they’ve been conditioned to believe the equally obvious fabrications and fictions of Reality TV. Watching real fiction – say, The Wire – would never have that effect because it’s presented as fiction. Watching Cops did have that effect, because it was presented as reality.
“Wait a minute!” you might protest. “Cops first aired on Fox way back in 1989.”
Yep. Right after the 1988 WGA strike.
In a Venn diagram, the circle denoting the set Bigfoot believers is entirely contained within the circle denoting the set Trump supporters.