Trump’s “Reality” Hustle

It is now axiomatic to claim that Donald Trump is the “reality television” candidate. Armed with a potent, pre-existing brand value proposition as a “wealthy” “winner” honed by his fourteen-year run on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, a compelling narrative as an outsider challenging a divided political party, and an uncomplicated, unpredictable communication style, Trump is now poised to win the Republican party nomination. Many pundits credit his success to the fact that he has shattered the traditional horse-race rules of election coverage by making himself and his whole campaign the story. As Trump regularly proclaims and the media slavishly illustrate, he is “ratings gold,” the king of “earned” media. A recent study found that Trump earned more airtime on the four major networks in 2015 (three hundred twenty-seven minutes or 31 percent of the total) than all the other presidential candidates combined (Tyndal Report 2015). Motivated by the ratings catnip, the mainstream news media have become complicit in Trump’s campaign, throwing all pretenses to neutrality out the window. Even those who want to criticize him are caught in Trump’s Chinese finger trap; the more they try to knock him down, the more grist they provide for his promotional mill and, of course, their own. Trump the Brand operates in an entirely different register than any of the other candidates; they are running political campaigns while Trump is running the media. And, so far at least, Trump’s “reality” television rules are winning.

Of course, promotion and branding are in the DNA of reality television. Beyond the tales of home renovations, pawnshop owners, or botoxed rich ladies, the message of reality television has always been that life should be a non-stop entrepreneurial adventure involving the pursuit of multiple revenue streams predicated on the savvy deployment of virtuosic communicative and image skills. And, at the same time as this message is being enacted by the likes of “real housewife” Lisa Vanderpump or Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson, reality producers actively practice what they preach, producing branded content, branded show formats, branded goods and services, and branded selves or mini-celebrities (A&E, 2012) . The Apprentice, first aired in 2004, was a pioneer in this regard. It told stories about the cutthroat values of corporate capitalism, simultaneously embodying those values by creating lucrative promotional synergies with multiple products and brands, and functioning as an elaborate marketing campaign for Trump’s own business interests, including golf courses, casinos, bottled water, steaks, and, of course, Trump himself.

The “reality” rules of self-promotion are simple: craft a notable persona, say whatever will set you apart and garner attention, break the rules of the game wherever possible, choose your message, and repeat it clearly and often. Trump’s brand is “successful winner,” and his rambling stump speeches are comprised mainly of repetitions of this claim. During one speech in Albany, for example, Trump repeated a variation of the word “win” fourteen times in forty seconds and then went on to claim that, as president, he would “win” so much the American people would actually have to beg him to stop winning (Moore 2016). While political branding and promotion are nothing new, in this example, Trump illustrates their apotheosis in the starkest of terms. Trump the Brand has no sense or substance; no one really knows what he stands for or what kind of president he will be. All hustle and bombast, he fills up his speeches with self-referential qualifiers and racist and sexist threats with impunity because what matters most is not substance but his attention-getting skills.

Over the past decade or so, the practices of self-branding and reputation management, entrenched by reality television, have spread across the culture at large thanks to the affordances of social media. On websites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, individuals work to craft their own personal brand, cultivate a reputation, and monetize themselves by developing legions of followers or subscribers; these days, achieving a reputation for having a reputation has come to seem as reasonable a life goal as any other for many people. Even the gainfully employed, including academics, musicians, scientists, corporate managers, and CEOs, must assiduously network and self-promote to “stay relevant” and protect their jobs. The real story with Trump, then, is not just that he honed his persona on reality television and knows how to play the press, but, rather, that he demonstrates and embodies what many people are now doing daily. In this age of perpetual connection and high stakes visibility, everyone is required to hustle and shill, to be a little bit “Trump.”

Given this, it may be a mistake to see Trump supporters as dupes who have swallowed his manufactured “winner” hype, and more correct to see them as hip to his masterful skill at creating and manipulating the hype to his own advantage. This would explain why no outrageous action or statement seems to stick to him or diminish his support; in the “hall of mirrors” of a promotional culture (Wernick 1990, 121), there is no truth or morality, only “winning”—attention, market share, allegiance, and votes. For Trump’s followers, his brand is his substantive skill set and all the qualification he needs to become president.

What Trump supporters may not recognize, however, is that Trump’s brand, valued at $125 million (Carlyle 2015), did not spring full-blown from his personal charisma. It is a product like any other, the result of his already-existing wealth and power, predicated on the labor of countless workers on his reality shows and other ventures, who are routinely denied union rights, work on precarious contracts, are paid very little, and have no benefits or health and safety protections (Laughland and Ryan 2016). Trump the Brand and reality television’s gauzy promise of mini-celebrity are symptoms of, and alibis for a failing political economic system marked by perpetual crisis, where traditional jobs are disappearing and employment is ever more precarious. The techniques of promotionalism are central to the maintenance of this system, subjecting everything and everyone to the same instrumental, self-interested, homogenizing logics, stripping away the meaning of values such as experience, ethics, or expertise, and promulgating individualized solutions to what are serious collective, structural problems.

As Trump edges toward the nomination, pundits and critics grow increasingly alarmed, referring to it as a “McCarthy moment” (Brooks 2016) and an “extinction level event” (Sullivan 2016). But if they had been paying any attention, Trump’s success would not seem at all surprising. He is, quite literally, the boss of a nation full of celebrity apprentices.

Inevitably, the changes that need to occur to ameliorate the alienation, anger, and suspicion of a great majority of the U.S. electorate will require far more than a new president or a responsible media. They will require bodies in the street, like those who forced Trump to flee his motorcade, scramble across a highway, and squeeze through a hole in a fence to get to his campaign venue (Wong et al. 2016). In this moment, the material power of collective action, bodies putting themselves on the line to demand something better, taught Trump a whole new meaning for the word “hustle.”