Audience of One:  Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
By James Poniewozik
Liveright, 2019

Donald Trump isn’t President of the United States because of his Klan rallies, nor because he campaigned relentlessly on the promise of stripping millions of Americans of their health care, nor because he stoke racist, xenophobic fears about invading Mexicans. He’s President because of television. For years, he was the reality-TV game show host of The Apprentice, where he regularly played a part in front of cameras that he’d never managed to play in real life: a successful businessman. Millions of viewers watched this carefully-packaged version of a tycoon manqué and thought it was the genuine item. Those viewers watched this TV version of Trump delivering decisive bits of boardroom wisdom and, famously, fire people. 

It gave millions of American voters a fictional creation, a sharp and competent master of business, somebody they could vote into office specifically in the hope that he would be the ultimate outsider, a bottom-line boardroom genius who would improve the US economy, make tough deals with international trading partners, and cut through the bureaucracy of Washington. 

And as New York Times television critic James Poniewozik points out in his new book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, this illusion was explicitly built on a foundation of amorality:

Trump in The Art of the Deal … doesn’t coach his success in homilies of responsibility. He doesn’t deserve what he has because he’s a good person. He deserves what he has because he has it. He says that success is not nice, a message amplified in his talk and in the Sauron’s-castle aesthetic of Trump Tower. It’s like reading the autobiography of a Tyrannosaurus rex, whose final moral is: freshly killed flesh is delicious.

But as many snide kudos as Poniewozik might warrant for comparing Trump with a giant, fat-headed, brainless scavenger with tiny hands, there’s an odd but noticeable tremor of disconnect running through his book, and it often centers, ironically enough, around television. The author’s central contention seems to be simple: that Trump is a creature of TV and is best understood in TV terms. But this contention only works if the reader feels that Poniewozik himself understands TV, and too often his interpretations of common TV touchstones seem decidedly off, almost enabling. Following on from his observations about The Art of the Deal, he discusses the ethical questions posed to viewers by such shows as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad:

These stories share, with much great art, the possibility of being read differently. They say: you can get farther in this world by doing wrong, and yet you can choose to do right. There is no way of ensuring that every viewer will get past and yet. There is a morality to antihero fiction, or there can be, but it’s a complicated and yet one, like the morality of a religion with no heaven or hell.

But surely the visceral draw of shows like these comes rather unambiguously from the viewers’ awareness throughout that although it might be fun to watch criminality, it wouldn’t be fun to be a criminal? Poniewozik says there’s no way to guarantee that every viewer gets past the “and yet” at the heart of moral ambiguity, but how important is that? In every crowded movie theater, there’ll be one viewer who can’t get past that “and yet” moment when John Wilkes Booth pulls the trigger. That doesn’t complicate the right and wrong of Lincoln’s assassination. 

Poniewozik’s deepest condemnation of Trump seems to be that he makes for bad TV. When writing about Trump’s ridiculous Twitter photo showing him “writing” his inaugural address at Mar-a-Lago’s concierge desk - with a Sharpie, on a one-dollar pad of paper - Poniewozik rightly sneers, “It was a picture of statesmanship as Mark Burnett might stage it for B-roll footage; it looked like ‘writing’ the same way a scowling man at a boardroom table looked like ‘business.’” But that B-roll footage worked.

“Trump was the human avatar of TV,” Poniewozik writes, noting “There’s a bigger question here, finally, than one presidency. Is TV our permanent God Emperor? Is the weltanschauung of cable news and reality TV - life as a constant, frenzied highlight reel of smackdowns and table-flipping - now hardwired into democracy? Is this simply our life now?” 

These are, at least on some frustratingly over-simplified level, good questions, and they deserve better than the ratings-friendly all-timezones answers Poniewozik tends to give them. His answer to these particular questions? Yes and no. *Sigh*

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.