“Toying with Disaster”. American Crisis and the Reality Television President

Abstract

This article examines Donald Trump’s television, presidential, and post-presidential identities, drawing on key research in reality television studies and American politics. Specifically, it locates the early 2000s reality show The Apprentice as the key textual construct which precedes and informs the “crises” associated with Trump’s political career. I argue that the show exhibits a range of highly effective and original dramatic tropes and rhetorical devices which continue to shape Trump’s identity as a politician. He has gone on to creatively adapt shibboleths such as “you’re fired!” and other fect combative postures of the show in response to the calamities and major flashpoints of his presidential and post-presidential career. As Trump successfully transferred the hyperbole, motifs, and para-social relationships of the series The Apprentice to US national politics, he advanced a potent blend of performative power and popular culture cues never seen before in American history. I show how these theatrical cues and show constructs have helped him dominate a complex media landscape and exploit the fractures of a nation in crisis.