The 21st Century’s Greatest, Ghastliest Showman
5 min read
In early 2017, just after Donald Trump took residency in the White House, the New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo engaged in an experiment. He spent a week doing all he could to ignore the new president. He failed. Whether Manjoo was scrolling through social media or news sites, watching sitcoms or sports—even shopping on Amazon—Trump was there, somehow, in his vision. In those early days of his presidency, Trump had already become so ubiquitous that a studious effort to avoid him was doomed. “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever,” Manjoo observed. Trump was no longer a single story; he was “the ether through which all other stories flow.”
This week, the former president made himself inescapable once more. He will have another four-year term in office, the Trump Show renewed for a second season. And his political power has been ratified, in part, by a dynamic that Manjoo observed at the start of Trump’s first presidency: His celebrity changes the politics that surround him.
Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.
The book that best explains Trump’s dominance may well have been published in 1962. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin described the image as a medium—a photograph, a movie, a representation of life, laid out on pulp or screen—that becomes, soon enough, a habit of mind. The image doesn’t merely replicate reality; it also surpasses it. It normalizes spectacle so thoroughly—life, carefully framed and edited and rendered in Technicolor—that reality itself can seem boring by comparison. Images, in Boorstin’s framework, are intimately connected to many of the other phenomena that shape so much of American culture: celebrity, fantasy, all that gives rise to the “thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”
In describing imagery in action, Boorstin pointed to Phineas T. Barnum, the famous peddler of spectacular hoaxes and lustrous lies. Barnum was a 19th-century showman with a 21st-century sense of pageantry; he anticipated how reality could evolve from a truth to be accepted into a show to be produced. Barnum turned entertainment into an omen: He understood how much Americans would be willing to give up for the sake of a good show.
Trump is Barnum’s obvious heir—the ultimate realization of Boorstin’s warnings. The difference, of course, is that Barnum was restricted to brick-and-mortar illusions. The deceptions he created were limited to big tops and traveling shows. Trump’s versions go viral. His humbugs scale, becoming the stuff of mass media in an instant. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his refusal to accept the defeat became known, in short order, as the Big Lie. His resentments become other people’s anger, too. In the introduction to his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the future president includes a quote from a book about the rich—a classic Trumpian boast doubling as an admission. “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world,” it reads, “an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”
The assertion was borrowed from the writer Richard Conniff, who would later profess his shock that the line—he had intended it as an insult—had been used by Trump to bolster his own brand. Trump: Think Like a Billionaire was published not long after the premiere of The Apprentice, earlier in 2004; the show, as it reimagined reality as a genre, also transformed its host into a star. When Trump announced his first presidential candidacy, he staged the whole thing in the gilded atrium of the New York City tower emblazoned with his name, a building that was real-estate investment, brand extension, and TV set. Many, at the time, assumed that Trump was running, essentially, for the ratings—that he might try to channel his campaign into an expansion of his power as an entertainer.
In many ways, it turns out, Trump has done precisely that—despite, and because of, his ascendance to the presidency. Barnum, too, converted his fame as a showman into a second life as a politician. While serving in the Connecticut legislature, he crusaded against contraception and abortion, introducing a law that would become infamous for its repressions of both. Trump’s neo-Barnumian status has not only allowed him to exercise similar power over people’s lives; it has also enabled him to convince a large portion of the American electorate of the supreme rightness of his positions.
In 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, HuffPost announced that it would not report on him as part of its political coverage; instead, it would write about his antics in its Entertainment section. “Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” the publication declared. “We won’t take the bait.”
That category confusion explains a lot about Trump’s durability. He defies the old logic that tried to present politics and entertainment as separate phenomena. He is a traditional politician, and he isn’t at all. He is a man—a person shaped by appetites and whim and spleen—and a singular one, at that. But he has also styled himself as an Everyman: an agent of other people’s resentments, fear, and anger.
It didn’t matter that Trump lost the presidency in 2020. It didn’t matter that he was impeached and impeached again, held liable for rape, convicted of fraud. In another time, with another figure, any one of those developments would have meant a culmination of the narrative, the disgraced politician slinking into obscurity. The end. But Trump has used his remarkable fame—its insulating power—to argue that he is not a politician, even as he has become an über-politician. Each of his might-have-been endings, as a result, has served for him as a new beginning. Each has been an opportunity for him to reset and begin the narrative anew, to double down on his threats and hatreds. The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.
“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017. He was absolutely correct. But he could not foresee what Trump had in store. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the old Breitbart saying goes. But Trump’s reelection is one more piece of evidence that politics and culture mingle, now, in the same murky water. Both seethe in the same dark sea. Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.
