8/25/20
Donald Trump owes his presidency in part to his reality television career. And, at times, he has run his administration like a cutthroat reality program, pitting staffers against each other, conducting regular eliminations and elevating love-to-hate-them veterans of his actual television shows — such as Omarosa Manigault Newman — to starring roles. But Tuesday night’s Republican National Convention showed that Trump still hasn’t learned that governing is different from entertaining, and that his self-interest is not the same as his country’s. Just as Trump used “The Apprentice” franchise to burnish his image as a hard-nosed businessman, he and his team used some of the functions and trappings of his office to recast him as a man of compassion, instead of a callous jailer of children or a TV addict who spends all day tossing racist bombs on Twitter. Issuing a full pardon and conducting a naturalization ceremony in the White House might have been effective stunts if Trump was merely playing the president on a television drama. As an effort to spin his record, which ranges from warning White suburban women that Black criminals are coming for them to trying to lie away a pandemic that has killed more than 170,000 Americans, it was grotesque.
But there’s a fundamental tension between Trump’s attraction to competitive reality television shows and the message he needs to send in convention segments such as these. None of that was on the agenda Tuesday. The “contestants” were mere props; they existed only to reflect glory on Trump. Their value was less to the country’s future than to its show-runner's. The Tuesday convention programming had other little stylistic touches borrowed from reality television. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began his address by announcing that “I’m speaking to you from beautiful Jerusalem,” with all the pep of “The Bachelor” host Chris Harrison kicking off a travel episode to a romantic location. That President Trump did not, as initially planned, escort first lady Melania Trump to the podium for her speech will inevitably prompt plenty of Wednesday-morning speculation. But these convention moments mostly revealed that Trump doesn’t understand that when you’re president, there’s only so far you can go to create your own reality.
