INTRODUCTION

TH E GoSSI P coLuMN IST SAW H IM coMI NG F I rST.

In October 1980, Rona Barrett, recently lured away from ABC’s
Good Morning America by NBC, was putting together a one-hour
prime-time special for her new network. Miss Rona, as she was
called, was a morning-TV superstar, a beguiling presence with a
crown of platinum-frosted hair who drove mercilessly for Holly-
wood scoops. She was the sort of reporter who was disdained by
more “serious” (generally, and not coincidentally, male) journalists,
yet who had a better understanding of the world than they did: what
moved people, the narratives that shaped their interior lives, the
changes bubbling up in the culture. NBC wanted to groom her as a
news personality and burnish her respectable credentials.
She decided to do an interview special about rich people. “I’ve
always felt that money, power, and sex is all that anybody really
cares about,” she would say years later. She realized in 1980, before
the Reagan years began, before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
premiered, that wealth would become a chief form of celebrity in
America. And she intuited that, in the decades to come, this celebrity
might ultimately lead to more than mere economic power.
For Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich, which aired in
July 1981, she interviewed a half-dozen entrepreneurs, including
fashion magnate Diane von Furstenberg; John Johnson, the founder
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of Ebony magazine; and a young New York real-​estate scion named

Donald Trump. He perched on a couch in his apartment overlooking
Central Park, wearing a tie diagonally striped in five shades of brown,
as she asked him about ambitions, connections, and family money.
In one section of the interview, which was left out of the primetime
special and surfaced on YouTube decades later, the conversation took
a turn—​to leadership, the Iran crisis, America’s stature in the world.
Then something made Barrett ask a question most reporters would
never think to raise with a thirty-​four-​year-​old wannabe regional
mogul: “Would you like to be president of the United States?”
“I really don’t believe I would, Rona,” he said. The problem, he
added, was television. “Capable people”—​he defined those as peo-
ple who “head major corporations”—​were not interested in running
for office. TV had ruined the process, because it favored inoffensive
nice guys.
“Somebody with strong views,” he said, “and somebody with the
kind of views that are maybe a little bit unpopular, which may be
right, but may be unpopular, wouldn’t necessarily have a chance
of getting elected against somebody with no great brain but a big
smile . . . ​Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today
because of television. He was not a handsome man, and he did not
smile at all. He would not be considered to be a prime candidate for
the presidency, and that’s a shame, isn’t it?”
When the special aired, TV critics, already dismissive of Barrett’s
hire, panned it. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales was especially
amused that Barrett introduced the Trump segment with the line,
“Some say the age of Trump has just begun.”
Thirty-​five years later, Donald Trump, a political gadfly who had
played a businessman for fourteen seasons on NBC’s The Appren-
tice, called in to the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, the
day before he would announce what would be his successful cam-
paign for president.
Fox & Friends was Trump’s second TV home. He’d had a weekly
segment, “Mondays with Trump,” for four years, weighing in on
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national politics and recapping his elimination decisions in the

Apprentice boardroom. It was friendly territory, but there was an
obvious issue, and even Fox & Friends couldn’t ignore it: Trump was
famous for being obnoxious, and a lot of people hated the sight and
sound of him.
Cohost Brian Kilmeade phrased it more gently. “Are you worried,
Donald Trump, that maybe what resonates in New York and New
Jersey and the northeast won’t resonate in the south and the west
coast, where they’re maybe a little bit laid back?”
“I don’t think it matters,” Trump said. “I don’t think this is going
to be an election based on real popularity.”
It was essentially the opposite of what he had told Rona Barrett
half a lifetime ago. But here’s the thing: he was not wrong either time.
In 1980, a person like Trump could not have won an election
fought on TV. (In 1980, The Apprentice—​a game show on which
viewers cheer a businessman who lives in a golden tower as he fires
his employees—​could not have been a hit either, except maybe as a
dystopian parody like the ones in the movie Network.) And Trump
was not a fundamentally different person in 2016, when he ran a
campaign that would not have been possible had he not spent so
much of the intervening decades on TV.
What had changed in the meantime? TV had changed, which is to
say, America had. This book is my attempt to describe how.

* * * *
O N OCTO B E R 2, 198 4 —​the year Donald Trump was opening his
first casino, Harrah’s at Trump Plaza, in Atlantic City—​the media
scholar Neil Postman gave the keynote address at the Frankfurt Book
Fair. The fair’s theme, befitting the title year of George Orwell’s
1984, was “Orwell in the year 2000.”
“The choice of this theme is a mistake,” Postman said. “To be
precise, it is half of a mistake.” Orwell’s nightmare of totalitarian
thought control was, he said, applicable in about half the world, par-
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ticularly the Soviet Bloc. But in the West, he argued, another warning
was more apt: Aldous Huxley’s, in Brave New World. In Huxley’s
dystopia, the people were controlled not by force and propaganda
but by pleasure—​games, drugs, and phenomenally immersive enter-
tainments. “Orwell thought we would be marched single-​file and
manacled into oblivion,” Postman said. “Huxley thought we would
dance ourselves there, with an idiot smile on our face.”
For Postman, the pied piper was TV; it elevated the image over the
word and thus appearance over substance. Postman’s critique of TV-​
era politics was, in one sense, not far from Donald Trump’s. Trump
said that sour-​faced Abe Lincoln couldn’t win a modern-​day elec-
tion, because TV favored a pretty face and an idiot smile. “In Amer-
ica, circa 1984,” Postman said, “a fat person cannot be elected to
high political office.” Things were getting to the point, he observed
dryly, that “it is even possible that some day a Hollywood movie
actor may become President of the United States.” (Ronald Reagan
would be reelected the following month.)
Postman expanded on this argument in his brilliant and prophetic
1985 study Amusing Ourselves to Death. It built on the ideas of
Marshall McLuhan, arguing that the forms of media—​the book, the
telegraph, the radio—​inevitably shape the ideas that they can com-
municate, and thus how the audience thinks. The “Age of Typogra-
phy” had given way to the “Age of Television.” Television spoke in
image rather than text, and it engaged emotion rather than reason.
“One can like or dislike a television commercial,” he wrote. “But one
cannot refute it.” Postman laid out how this dynamic affected every
area of life: education, religion, news, and politics. The ideology of
television was entertainment, and what reigned in a television age
was what entertained the most people.
Postman didn’t know the half of it. Well, to be fair, he couldn’t
know the half of it. The electronic media of 1985, compared with
the multifarious hydra of today, might as well have been two tin
cans and a string. Cable TV was not yet in half of American house-
holds. CNN, launched in 1980, was the only cable news network,
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and Postman’s analysis focused on broadcast news, which aired a

relatively few hours per week. The computer modem was a thing
only for researchers or hobbyists.
The distinguishing feature of the mass medium of Postman’s time,
broadcast TV, was that it was mass. Television of the mid-​twentieth
century was the greatest aggregator of a simultaneous audience ever
invented. Postman, like other media critics of the era, was concerned
about TV as a stupefying force, but related to that was the argument
that TV was a homogenizing force, which—​in the days of three TV
networks that had to appeal to tens of millions of viewers at once—​
was true. The fear of a TV monoculture was a recurring theme of
the time. Richard Hofstadter warned that electronic media could
empower demagogues to whip up the mob: “Mass communications,”
he wrote, “have aroused the mass man.” George W. S. Trow argued
in Within the Context of No Context that broadcast TV placed the
individual within “the grid of 200 million,” displacing other civic
communities, alienating people, and corrupting the national soul.
The emergence of cable TV, the Internet, and social media, how-
ever, would take the culture in the opposite direction: fragmenting
the audience into niches instead of consolidating it into a common-​
denominator monolith. In some ways, TV—​freed from the con-
straints of every show having to please a gigantic audience—​got much
better, more daring and diverse as an art form. But it also got much
worse—​it got much more—​in ways that Postman warned about, and
ways he didn’t.
Postman was mortified at the implications of 98 percent of fam-
ilies having a TV in the living room. Now they effectively have
dozens, on their desktops, in their vehicles, in their pockets. This
fragmented, nichified media environment created new and differ-
ent effects. It pacified the audience in some ways, but made it more
heated and angry in others. It reorganized America into new subcul-
tures, delineated not by geography but by taste and allegiance. And
those divisions became hostile, replacing culture with culture war,
merging fandom with ancient blood passions. The multiple twenty-​
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four-​hour news channels became more melodramatic and sensation-

alistic. The Internet and social media, which promised to connect
the world, also divided it, allowing the efficient digital sorting of peo-
ple into superfans and superpartisans, like speaking to like, affirm-
ing, exhorting, and misinforming one another. (Though Postman
dealt with computers only briefly in Amusing—​he would expand
on them later in Technopoly—​he was skeptical of them, predicting
that “the massive collection and speed-​of-​light retrieval of data [will]
have been of great value to large-​scale organizations but have solved
very little of importance to most people and have created at least as
many problems for them.” Or as president-​elect Trump would put it,
appearing with boxing promoter Don King and dismissing the possi-
bility of Russian hacking on his behalf: “The whole age of computer
has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.”)
Donald Trump’s career (which was, from the beginning, a media
career) began where Amusing Ourselves to Death left off and went
from there. So does this book.
Consider this a work of applied TV criticism, for a time when
all of public life has become TV. It tells two parallel stories. One is
about television: how TV culture changed from the era of midcen-
tury media monoliths to the age of media bubbles, how it reflected
and affected our relationships with society, with politics, with one
another. The other is about Donald Trump: a man who, through
a four-​decades-​long TV performance, achieved symbiosis with the
medium. Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appe-
tites; its mentality was his mentality.
This dual story is about how TV evolved from the Great Homog-
enizer of the twentieth century to the Great Fragmenter of the
twenty-​first, and how America, culturally and politically, atomized
along with it.
It’s about how pop culture got louder and more abrasive, more
comfortable with cheering for the antihero.
It’s about how the techniques of reality TV—​conflict, stereotype, the
fuzzy boundary between truth and fiction—​became tools of politics.
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It’s about how public fights were carried out through the pro-​
wrestling histrionics of cable news.
It’s about how the culture war originated as a proxy for politics
and increasingly became politics itself.
Through all of those changes, Donald Trump used the domi-
nant media of the day—​tabloids, talk shows, reality TV, cable news,
Twitter—​to enlarge himself, to become a brand, a star, a demagogue,
and a president. (Whether Postman’s dictum that a fat person cannot
win high office in the TV era has now been overturned depends, I
suppose, on how seriously you take Trump’s rosy personal-​physician
reports.)
Because Trump so thoroughly fused himself with the pop cul-
ture of the last forty years, because he was both an omnipresence
on TV and a compulsive devourer of TV, his story is its story, and
vice versa. Follow the media culture of America over the course of
Trump’s career, and you will understand better how Trump hap-
pened. Follow how Trump happened and you will understand better
what we became.

* * * *
I I NTE RVI EWE D DO NALD TRUMP O N CE , in late 2003, for Time
magazine, when he was about to launch The Apprentice. When you
visit Trump’s office in Trump Tower, every aspect of the experi-
ence is designed, like the ballooning collar on a frilled lizard, to
make him appear larger. You walk into a skyscraper with his name
inscribed on the entrance, the headquarters of a Marvel-comic bil-
lionaire. You take a mirror-​plated elevator, as if you’re ascending
to heaven.
I remember being surprised that he shook my hand. (He was noto-
riously germophobic.) And I remember his handing me an offprint of
a Crain’s New York Business article about the Trump Organization.
He kept a stack of them out for visitors, the way you might a dish of
mints. “Take one of these,” he said. “When you see that, you’ll know