The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same recurring characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows where the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to be on display. Tens of millions were glued to their sets as participants were voted off the island on Survivor, voted out of the mansion on The Bachelor—and, eventually, fired by Donald Trump.
The timing makes sense. The first season of Survivor—so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators—was in 2000. That was two decades after the “free-market revolution” had been kicked into high gear by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society. It was now possible to peddle as mass entertainment the act of watching people turn on each other for a pot of gold.
The whole genre—the alliances, the backstabbing, the one person left standing—was always a kind of capitalist burlesque. Before The Apprentice, however, there was at least the pretext that it was about something else: how to survive in the wilderness, how to catch a husband, how to be a housemate. With Donald Trump’s arrival, the veneer was gone. The Apprentice was explicitly about the race to survive in the cutthroat “jungle” of late capitalism.
The first episode began with a shot of a homeless person sleeping rough on the street—a loser, in other words. Then the camera cut to Trump in his limo, living the dream—the ultimate winner. The message was unmistakable: you can be the homeless guy, or you can be Trump. That was the whole sadistic drama of the show—play your cards right and be the one lucky winner, or suffer the abject humiliation of being berated and then fired by the boss. It was quite a cultural feat: after decades of mass layoffs, declining living standards, and the normalization of extremely precarious employment, Mark Burnett and Donald Trump delivered the coup de grace: they turned the act of firing people into mass entertainment.
Life’s a Bitch
Every week, to millions of viewers, The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer. That’s how you help the economy and, more importantly, yourself.
In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more sadistic. The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion—drinking champagne in inflatable pool loungers, zipping off in limos to meet celebrities. The losing team was deported to tents in the backyard, nicknamed “Trump trailer park.”
The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the “have-nots,” didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates, and slept to the sounds of howling dogs. They would peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the “haves” were enjoying. In other words, Trump and Burnett deliberately created a microcosm of the very real and ever-widening inequalities outside the show, the same injustices that have enraged many Trump voters—but they played those inequalities for kicks, turning them into a spectator sport. (There was a slight Hunger Games quality to it, though hemmed in by network television restrictions on non-simulated violence.) On one show, Trump told the tent team that “life’s a bitch,” so they’d better do everything possible to step over the losers and become a winner like him.
What’s interesting about this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, is that the pretense sold to a previous generation—capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds—is completely absent. No: this is a system that generates a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you are on the winning team.
This reflects the fact that, for well over a decade now, the ideological and intellectual side of the neoliberal project has been in severe crisis. In 2016, Credit Suisse estimated that there is roughly $256 trillion in total global wealth—with a staggeringly unequal distribution: “While the bottom half collectively own less than 1 percent of total wealth, the wealthiest top 10 percent own 89 percent of all global assets.” Which is why there just aren’t many serious people left who are willing to argue, with a straight face, that giving more to the wealthy is the best way to help the poor. Trump’s pitch has always been different. From the start, it was: I will turn you into a winner—and together we can crush the losers.
In a Real-World Nightmare, Dreams Sell
It’s worth remembering that Trump’s breakthrough to national celebrity status came not via a real estate deal, but a book about making real estate deals. The Art of the Deal, marketed as holding the secrets to fabulous financial wealth, was published in 1987—the peak of the Reagan era. It was followed up over the years with crasser variations on the same theme: Think Like a Billionaire, Think Big and Kick Ass, Trump 101, and How to Get Rich.
Trump first started selling the notion that he held the ticket to joining the top one percent of income earners at the precise moment when many of the ladders that provided social mobility between classes—like free quality public education—were being kicked away, and just as the social safety net was being shredded. All of this meant that the drive to magically strike it rich, to win big, to make it to that safe economic stratum, became increasingly frantic.
Trump, who was born wealthy, expertly profited off that desperation across many platforms, but most infamously through Trump University. In one ad for the scandal-plagued and now-defunct “university” (actually a series of dodgy seminars in hotel meeting rooms), Trump declared, “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”
And then there were the casinos, a large chunk of Trump’s US real estate portfolio. The dream at the center of the casino economy is not so different from the dream for sale at Trump University or in How to Get Rich: you may be on the verge of personal bankruptcy today, but if you (literally) play your cards right, you could be living large by morning.
This is central to how Trump built his brand and amassed his wealth—by selling the promise that “you too could be Donald Trump”—at a time when life was becoming so much more precarious if you weren’t in the richest one percent. He then turned around and used that very same pitch to voters—that he would make America a country of winners again—exploiting those deep economic anxieties and using all the reality-simulation skills that he had picked up from years at the helm of a top-rated TV show. After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Donald Trump understands exactly how little needs to be behind the promise—whether on renegotiating trade deals or bringing back manufacturing—if the desperation is great enough.
Reveling in the Fake on the Road to the White House