Donald Trump Gives Away the Game on His Made-for-TV Presidency

As Donald Trump neared the end of his contentious Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he almost absent-mindedly revealed his made-for-TV approach to the presidency, telling the assembled press, “This is going to be great television.”

Everything about Trump’s time in politics, from the moment he descended that escalator to announce his candidacy to his “casting” of Cabinet positions based on their telegenic qualities, has reinforced that premise: That Trump, as a heavy consumer of TV and one-time reality star, sees everything through the lens of the “show” he’s producing.

Indeed, if the 1998 movie “The Truman Show” focused on a man blithely oblivious (at first, anyway) to the fact his entire existence featured him as the star of a TV show, “The Trump Show” is its polar opposite — a spectacle almost painfully aware, at all times, of the cameras, and how he perceives it unfolding through the prism of a screen.

Trump even uses his social-media feed to tease upcoming events, such as Tuesday’s address to Congress, promoting the evening in advance like a season-ending cliffhanger by posting (all-caps his), “TOMORROW NIGHT WILL BE BIG.”

The “show” was big, both literally — running nearly 100 minutes, a record for such an address — and figuratively, filling the speech with human-interest anecdotes and “Queen For a Day”-style giveaways to reinforce various aspects of administration policies and buttress some of Trump’s fact-challenged claims.

In those moments, this “Trump Show” more than anything resembled earlier days of daytime TV, with stories of victims, survivors and heroes, such as the heart-tugging tale of a 13-year-old cancer survivor and stirring moments for him and others.

As critics were quick to point out, several of Trump’s actions and policies have actually clashed with the reality of these stories, among them funding for cancer research.

“The beauty of that child is the tragedy of the Trump presidency, because we don’t know how he survived pediatric cancer, but it is likely he benefited from some sort of cancer research,” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said during the network’s post-speech analysis, which drew a rebuke from the White House. “And it is a fact that Trump has slashed cancer research.”

At CNN, commentator Van Jones proclaimed Trump “a master showman,” before dissecting many of the places where what he said represented fantasy, not reality.

Such details, however, are easily lost in the emotion and pageantry of the moment, which was, of course, the goal when weaving in each carefully orchestrated digression.

Again, Trump and his supporters didn’t exhibit much subtlety about the political angle built into those made-for-TV vignettes, or who the bad guys were. The president complained early in the speech that Democrats wouldn’t rise to applaud anything he said, and Donald Trump Jr. seized on the cancer-stricken child by posting on X, “If you can’t stand up and cheer for a kid with brain cancer being made an honorary member of the Secret Service, then you might be a deeply disturbed and f—ed up person!!!”

Admittedly, identifying Trump’s preoccupation with how things play on television hardly qualifies as a fresh insight. The issue arose frequently during his first term, as people came to grips with Trump’s relationship with a medium he and indeed an entire generation of Baby Boomers were weaned on.

“Trump has always been both acutely aware of the power of TV and absolutely and completely addicted to it,” journalist Chris Cillizza noted in 2019. Even earlier, The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey analyzed Trump’s “obsession” with TV, writing shortly after he took office, “No president has consumed as much television as the current one, or reacted as quickly or directly to what they were seeing.”

The second term, however, already feels even more overtly focused on optics and imagery, from the laundry list of Fox News alumni filling key White House positions to Trump’s frequent press availabilities while simultaneously endeavoring to control the message by filling the White House with more pro-administration media figures.

Perhaps more than anything, Trump recognizes the inherent appeal of conflict and surprise. Jon Stewart identified that in a recent “The Daily Show” monologue in which he compared the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting to professional wrestling, which in its modern form has always served as a violent soap opera, just aimed primarily at male demographics.

Trump’s ties to wrestling and mixed-martial arts go deep, serving as conduits his campaigns used to woo and interact with men, while securing support from figures like UFC CEO Dana White, wrestler Hulk Hogan and WWE’s Linda McMahon, the last recently confirmed as Secretary of Education.

As biographer Tim O’Brien noted after Trump named his trio of “ambassadors to Hollywood” — the AARP-eligible trio of Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight — he appreciates TV’s power thanks in part to the significant role “The Apprentice” played in building his image and sees himself in cinematic terms.

“He is constantly directing, writing and starring in his own movie about his life,” O’Brien, the author of“TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” told TheWrap in January.

Trump has spoken of restoring a “Golden Age” for both Hollywood and the arts and culture — the latter in reference to his controversial takeover of the Kennedy Center — which, like his “Make America Great Again” slogan, reflects the backward-looking lens through which he tends to see the world.

For many that nostalgic mentality has struck a resonant chord, and the address to Congress averaged 36.6 million viewers across multiple TV platforms, per Nielsen — ranking below earlier Trump speeches, but registering a 13% increase over last year’s State of the Union delivered by Joe Biden.

Yet even for those who reject the formula, buckle up. Because “The Trump Show” has been renewed, and while it’s unclear what happens in the next episode, the producer/star looks determined to ensure that it “WILL BE BIG.”

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