The head of Donald J. Trump’s TV profession lasted one evening, and he has by no means stopped making an attempt to relive it.The finale of the pri
The head of Donald J. Trump’s TV profession lasted one evening, and he has by no means stopped making an attempt to relive it.
The finale of the primary season of “The Apprentice” in 2004 was the top-rated present on TV. Afterward the host, lastly a mass-media star after many years of courting fame, believed that giving folks twice as a lot of him can be twice pretty much as good.
NBC agreed, scheduling the present for 2 cycles the next yr (after which a by-product with Martha Stewart). The “Apprentice” that returned was extra Trump-centric, the host extra brash, loud and insulting, his boardroom firings extra dramatic and stunt-filled. Mr. Trump himself took to the talk- and comedy-show circuit like a starlet in Oscar season, showing in advertisements and on purple carpets delivering his trademark “You’re fired” finger-point and sneer. He was in every single place.
It didn’t work. The scores declined, first regularly, then precipitously. Whereas rivals like “American Idol” topped the charts for years, “The Apprentice” declined till Mr. Trump was left internet hosting a gimmick model with C-list celebrities. For years after, he would cling to that one superb stat from 2004 like an Electoral School map, to assert that his actuality present was nonetheless the largest factor on TV.
The host, in fact, rebooted himself, parlaying his community superstar right into a second life as a political commentator on Fox Information, then candidate, then president. However his reality-TV expertise is value holding in thoughts as he plans to revive his night coronavirus briefings, within the obvious perception that rebooting final spring’s scores hit will reboot his ballot numbers.
NBC’s mistake with “The Apprentice” was partly an everlasting TV pitfall: milking the prize cow till it runs dry. Donald Trump, it turned out, was no extra proof against overexposure than Regis Philbin and “Who Needs to Be a Millionaire.” (“Idol,” alternatively, aired only one season a yr, and aimed to make stars of its contestants, not simply its hosts.)
But it surely was additionally an error distinctive to Mr. Trump, who was each the star and a producer of “The Apprentice”: Since his 1980s tabloid days, he by no means believed there was such a factor as unhealthy publicity, no less than for him. Or because the “Pod Save America” host and former Obama strategist Dan Pfeiffer put it in a Tweet on Tuesday: “Trump at all times thinks extra Trump is the answer when it’s at all times the reason for the issue.
Certain, consideration is an asset, in politics as in actuality TV. Mr. Trump’s willingness to feed the information beast in 2016 earned him billions in free media and successfully made him the election’s protagonist.
And as I wrote throughout Mr. Trump’s first run of briefings within the spring, they supplied him a possibility he hadn’t had since he began “The Apprentice”: a daily TV platform through which he may communicate to a mass viewers past his loyalist base. For a second, they allowed him to create the visible impression that he was performing on the pandemic, by going out and talking on it. For a second, his approval scores — and TV scores — went up.
However what you do with the eye seems to matter, no less than when the stakes are a whole lot of hundreds of lives, not a game-show prize. It issues when you counsel that family disinfectants could possibly be a medical therapy. It issues when you go to struggle with your personal medical consultants. It issues when you reduce, on Web page 1, a horrible actuality that everybody can examine for themselves within the obituaries.
Judging by the president’s choice, he doesn’t see this as the issue. As an alternative the issue isn’t sufficient him on TV, giving the folks what labored for him earlier than — zinging, blustering, pointing fingers and combating.
His plan to return to prime time was not accompanied by an introduced shift in public-health coverage. The considering merely appears to be: Folks wish to see the president doing one thing. And to Donald Trump, happening TV is the doing-somethingest factor of all.
Thus we noticed him on Sunday, sitting for an excruciating interview with Chris Wallace of Fox Information, doubling down on blatant disinformation — like his declare that the US has the bottom Covid-19 mortality fee on this planet — within the face of ruthless fact-checking. As in his “You’re fired” days, he fell again on his trusty catchphrase, calling Mr. Wallace “faux information” as if the phrases may dispel the interviewer from the boardroom.
At one level, Mr. Wallace introduced up the president’s previous criticisms of him, asking if he understood that it was a journalist’s responsibility to interview the president’s rivals, too. A extra blunt means of placing it might be: Does the president suppose it’s Fox’s job to assist him win the election?
He appears to suppose so. He tweeted a grievance in Could that Fox was “doing nothing to assist Republicans, and me, get re-elected.” However in a broader sense, he has instructed that TV itself owes him payback for all he’s given it. TV networks, he has stated, will miss the scores he brings if he’s voted out of the White Home.
He could also be proper, however he additionally assumes that TV viewers suppose like TV networks. He acts as if People would endure something somewhat than the boredom he imagines they’d endure with out him. Thus his most popular epithet for his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — “Sleepy” — which might not be the killer burn he imagines to a populace bored with staying up all evening in anxiousness.
And but Mr. Trump is, when you belief the present polls, at present shedding to a challenger who’s working a quasi-incumbent-like media technique, avoiding making large splashes and letting his rival do the work for him. Mr. Trump appears resentful of this — “Let him come out of his basement,” he informed Mr. Wallace — or possibly simply incredulous. Why would any sane individual not get as a lot media consideration as attainable?
Mr. Trump appears to consider that People are craving for a TV star greater than they’re craving for a frontrunner — or, no less than, that they don’t acknowledge a distinction between the 2.
Criticize his strategy, in fact, and there’s a prepared reply: The “An excessive amount of is rarely sufficient” technique labored for him in 2016. It labored in 2004, too, within the first season of “The Apprentice.”
It at all times works till it stops working. Till somebody decides that an excessive amount of, actually, is sufficient already.