The Problem With Calling Trump a 'Reality-TV President'
On New Year’s Eve, in a much-maligned assessment of Donald Trump’s first year in office, The New York Times declared that the president had brought a “reality-show accessibility” to the office. Trump was a maverick who—whatever you thought of him—bucked the status quo, the writer Peter Baker argued. The ensuing backlash to the story centered on the Times’ unwillingness to make a value judgment on Trump’s behavior. Few critiques, though, mentioned the detail that was most jarring to me: The piece marked, as far as I can tell, the first high-profile occasion when reality-show was used as a potentially positive reference point for Trump.
Mentioning Trump’s roots in the genre with a sneer, or as an attack, has become so ubiquitous that the label has been all but robbed of any real meaning. Last year, NPR ran a with reality-TV producers in an attempt to explain Trump’s appeal. , Jennifer Weiner wrote that she could no longer watch in good conscience now that the distorted morality of reality TV had taken over the world’s most powerful office. And then , essentially:The man and the genre that helped make him
