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Column: Trump's TV reality becomes America's reality

 
Published Nov. 11, 2016

Maybe this was inevitable.

Maybe after decades of obsessing over the rich and the famous, we were bound to bring TV reality to life by picking a small-screen star — one without a stitch of government experience — as the leader of our nation, the leader of the free world.

Donald Trump, Celebrity-in-Chief.

He didn't try to hide it. Not once during his 15-month campaign did he pretend to be someone other than a brash, truth-bending businessman-cum-entertainer who wasn't all that concerned about precedent or the polished nuances of policy.

He knew we wanted an Experience, and he gave it to us. He inflamed us and delighted us with his fury and his nonsense. He insulted his critics, who instantly became his enemies. He tweeted with abandon, occasionally in the middle of the night. He shredded political tradition and positioned himself as the ultimate outsider versus the ultimate insider. He was never, ever boring.

His opponent had stature and substance and experience. She was scripted, cautious, rarely candid. She positioned herself as the competent candidate, the one who was about solving problems and crafting workable policies and making America above-average again.

She sometimes bored even her supporters.

We have been churning down this path for a long time. Ronald Reagan was an actor for three decades before he won the presidency, but he at least served as governor of California before moving into the White House. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse (The Body) Ventura became governors of California and Minnesota. Other big-name entertainers have won seats in Congress.

And since Bill Clinton appeared on MTV and played his sax on the Arsenio Hall show, presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, have been a staple of talk shows or have felt obliged to cuddle up to stars of all kinds. They didn't see themselves as entertainers, but they understood the power of celebrity.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long understood that power themselves. From Madonna and Demi Lovato to Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen, a constellation of celebrities came out to hail Hillary, especially in the last days of the campaign.

In those final days, Trump campaigned alone. He didn't need entertainers to endorse him; he knew he could carry the show. He knew Republicans had left him isolated, but it didn't matter. Instinctively, he had figured out that we now trust celebrities more than politicians anyway. We think of ourselves as celebrities in waiting, and we now think of celebrities as one of us. We believe that their reality is our reality.

A confession: As the presidential campaign unfolded, I began to look forward to Trump's exhalations. What outlandish, ridiculous, hilarious, outrageous, baffling, infuriating utterance was he going to make today? Maybe this was because I live 10,000 miles away and wasn't suffocated by the never-ending news coverage and ads. So his words were an odd, disturbing novelty. I don't know. What I do know was that Trump was endlessly interesting.

This surely explains, at least in part, why the news media took so long to take him seriously. Reporters heard an entertainer being impolitic. Ordinary Americans heard a celebrity-politician saying things that made sense.

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A couple of commentators have said that Donald Trump's supporters take him seriously but not literally. This seems to defy reality. Trump's followers believe him when he says he plans to build a wall along the border. They absolutely believe him when he says he wants to stop letting Muslims into the country. They take him seriously — and literally. Otherwise, why support him?

Imagine the non-reaction if Trump had just complained about illegal immigration and said America needed to "crack down." Who would have remembered if he had simply promised to halt radical Islam?

Hillary Clinton undoubtedly addressed these issues too. Does anyone recall anything she said?

Trump's celebrity inoculated him during his biggest campaign crisis. He told us that his lewd comments, made to Access Hollywood, were just locker room talk. More than that, he implied that as a celebrity, he knew no rules. He could grope unwilling women because, when you're a star, "they let you do it." Based on Tuesday's vote, we believed him.

Donald Trump is a billionaire who lives in a penthouse and yet he speaks to the hearts of some of America's most marginalized citizens. It's hard to believe we trust him just because he's a great businessman (his companies have declared bankruptcy six times). We trust him because he's "authentic." That seems to mean that what we saw in real life actually matched up to what we once saw of him on TV. Trump's television reality defined him.

There are some who argue that we'll now see a calmer, more pragmatic President Trump, that he'll govern with a new sense of sobriety. Don't count on it. Donald Trump is a born performer, and he'll likely find it hard to lay down his bombastic habits, even when they stunt his ability to get things done. Then we'll see whether his supporters still find him entertaining.

Stephen Buckley teaches journalism at the Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi, Kenya. Formerly, he was dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, which owns the Tampa Bay Times. He wrote this exclusively for the Times.