The Great Game-show Host Turning the Presidency into a Game Show

but can’t bring himself to deliver his famous tagline

Donald Trump is a history-making iconoclast.   Every single one of his most ardent supporters (along with everyone else too) recognizes in him attributes that no other US president has ever possessed.

Just to point out a couple that everybody will agree on: he is the first ever who had never held any kind of public office before, neither elected nor appointed (he had never even been dog catcher—to use the time-honored, classic example); the other is that he is the president who was by far better known by the public prior to taking office than any other president in history.

While one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, had appeared regularly on TV (and in the movies for decades), these were all scripted appearances; even when he had not been playing a role but had been hosting a TV show, Reagan had merely been reading prepared introductions.   Trump’s TV-show-hosting fame (and recognition), however, had come from a show that was tailored precisely to showcase him and his ways of thinking and behaving and that was in a completely different genre: the reality TV show.

Mark Burnett is a British-expatriate American TV producer, executive producer, and executive.   In 2000, he had his first mega-hit; it was in a subgenre of the reality TV show: the game show.   He joined together with another British TV producer, who had created a successful Swedish game show that had premiered three years earlier, to create an American version of it.   Together with the TV personality who was chosen to host it, they were the executive producers of the show they named Survivor; it soon became one of the biggest hits in television.

The format comprised a group of several competitors being placed on, generally, a jungle desert island; here these contestants were to work with each other and (crucially) against each other through the rigors of surviving in this wild environment and rigors of manipulating and backstabbing each other to determine which one of them was the best at embodying the criterion for winning the game: being a survivor—being the best backstabber.   Using this theme that so perfectly exemplifies this key ethic in American culture made the show such an enormous hit.   Riding on the show’s huge success, Burnett soon had a pivotal insight; he saw the potential of transposing this culture’s greatly admired and revered manipulative backstabbing method of success to a new setting: the work environment of the modern American corporate “jungle”.

Donald Trump’d had a checkered past in the corporate world.   Having been introduced to the family business of real estate, he’d been involved in development of numerous properties, such as hotels and casinos.   He’d cultivated the image of a wheeler-dealer, while at the same time, his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses had filed for bankruptcy protection several times; in addition, the US government had alleged that Trump’s properties had used racially discriminatory practices.

Burnett saw in this reputation of Trump’s the potential for being the host of this new game show of survival in the “cutthroat” American business jungle.   Their show The Apprentice and its successor The Celebrity Apprentice ran on TV for more than a dozen years.   In each episode, Trump would observe the contestants in their corporate gladiatorial competition and would choose one of them to be eliminated from the game.   It would conclude with him sitting in the “corporate boardroom”, pointing at the one he’d chosen as the “loser”, and saying what became his famous catchphrase: “You’re fired.”   The format not only showed the manipulative machinations of the contestants, but far more importantly and fascinatingly displayed the often capricious or petulant or just plain inscrutable thinking process of Donald Trump.

Trump became the game-show host par excellence.

And he has brought the techniques of this great success of his to the presidency.   These were on display so clearly in his State-of-the-Union speech early this year.   As the impresario of the game show he seemed to be hosting, he gave out prizes and penalties throughout his performance.

Never before had a Presidential Medal of Freedom been awarded in this setting.   But that night, he introduced his wife to bestow one on a political talk-show host whose fans he surely would like to curry the favor of.

He alluded to the deficiencies and faults of his opponents as if deducting points from their score.

A very pretty little black girl and her mom were shown, and he told of how hard they were trying to get her into a good fourth-grade program.   In his first speech before a joint session of Congress right after becoming president, he had proclaimed, “Education is the civil rights issue of our time.”   And he had followed that with not a single word more on the subject—no plans for addressing the grave injustice of low-quality educational opportunities in inner-city schools or other communities in our nation, an injustice that statistics clearly show is more predominantly visited on blacks and other children of color and other poor kids throughout the country.   But on this night three years later, he announced that arrangements had been made for this one little girl to get into the good class.

He pointed out a soldier’s wife and her young children and extolled the fine volunteer work she’s doing on the homefront.   Just then the door behind them opens, and out comes her husband, brought back from duty on the far-flung battlefield for this surprise reunion.   Military top brass were shown weeping over this one.

This night, he gave a fine performance indeed.

Further leveraging this greatest success in his career before taking office—his triumphant experience as a game-show host—he has, as president, turned to others in that line of work for political analysis and commentary.   He has, for instance, publicly reiterated the analysis of long-time game-show host Chuck Woolery.   Again just yesterday, Trump retweeted Woolery’s accusation that the CDC (the US government’s Centers for Disease Control) and doctors are lying about Covid-19.   This is just one aspect of a White House campaign of obliquely (or even, in cases such as this, outrightly) calling into question the expertise of the most prominent member of its own White House Coronavirus Task Force, the nation’s “top expert” on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This is one more example of a another pattern of behavior: undercutting and discrediting an organization or individual, instead of attempting to reorganize or redirect them or of firing them.   And this, of all things, is one particular feature that we’ve been missing for a long time.

There was another example of it the end of this last month.   His attorney general released the statement that a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (who was deeply involved in investigating the activities of a key Trump confidant) had resigned.   Right away, that prosecutor publicly made clear that he had not resigned and had no intention of doing so while these important investigations were underway.   Then another statement was released that the attorney general had gotten the president to fire this prosecutor.   But immediately, Trump himself announced that, no, he hadn’t had anything to do with it.

For some reason, he just hasn’t used that signature catchphrase, which increased his fame and the admiration for him and helped propel him into the presidency.   Some speculate that, even when it’s innocuous, he doesn’t want to be held responsible or accountable for anything—and this year, he certainly has famously asserted, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”   Perhaps he wants every move he makes to only possibly be seen as the most perfect decision.   So much for President Truman’s well-known adage, “The buck stops here.”   Ah well, whatever the cause may be, we just don’t anymore get to hear President Trump’s famous tagline: “You’re fired.”

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