anti-theatricality + politics (one more for the road)

On the ever darkening bronzer

The more extreme he becomes politically, the more theatrical his public persona must be. The dictator persona is full of obvious artifice: the sunglasses, the macho posturing, etc.

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat

At Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman gets the mea culpa from NBC chief marketing officer producer John Miller about The Apprentice and its role in elevating Trump to world-historical figure

Miller believes that without The Apprentice, Trump would never have been in a position to run for president. “He didn’t have a real company. It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They’d been bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. The Apprentice helped him survive that,” Miller told me. “People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”

.... Initially, we leaned into the idea that it was a show from Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. But when we saw some early takes, we realized Trump was going to be a big character. So we created the title sequence with the theme music of the show, which was For the Love of Money by the O’Jays. We shot the promos with Trump in his limousine, in his helicopter, in his jet, and at Trump Tower. We created the sense of an American royalty. We kept pounding that message over and over again. I called it “ruthless consistency.”

 .... Trump made Mark Burnett rent two floors in the Trump Tower. One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower. So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist. And then another part of that floor was the boardroom that was entirely created to make it look like it was a big, important boardroom. Because Trump’s real boardroom was shabby. You would never think of it as a big-time businessman’s boardroom.

.... When I retired in 2022, I started writing a book called How I Ruined American Culture. 

.... The show aired on Thursday nights and he would often call me on Friday and say, “John, how did we do?” I would just say, “We did very well.” And he would say, “We were the number one show on television!” I’d say, “No, we weren’t but we did very well.” That happened a number of weeks and I kept thinking, Does he just not read the ratings? And I just realized, that’s what he did: He said something he wanted people to believe over and over again, and eventually, it will be true.

 ... We had a wrap party after the third season at Lincoln Center. I was at the bar waiting to get a drink for my wife, and Trump came up to me and said, “John, I’ve got a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.”.... I said, “I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.”

He said, “The ratings would be huge!” 

On 2015 and Trump's entry into the race

I thought, Has there ever been somebody who is less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anybody that’s more telegenic and understands how to manipulate the media more than Trump?

 ... I do think he would like to be a dictator....   This time.... he’ll hire yes-men and he’ll hire loyal people. And so the government, at best, will function badly, and at worst, he will do his best to make it authoritarian. 

 

Live by showbiz, die by showbiz - a snippet about the Madison Square Garden hate-rally from this  fascinating report by Tim Alberta  at the Atlantic behind the scenes of the chaotic Trump campaign

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous.... who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign. In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It turns out to have been the operative who persuaded Vance to go with the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing: 

Alex Bruesewitz. Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves....   colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.