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    'Audience Of One' Aims To Show How TV Shaped Donald Trump — And Led To His Rise

    James Poniewozik's book is both brilliant and daring, particularly when it comes to Trump's image-making. But there's a gap, the one between image and audience, that doesn't get enough attention.
    by Annalisa Quinn Sep 11, 2019 4 minutes
    <em>Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America,</em> by James Poniewozik

    Dwight Eisenhower "became president by winning the war in the European theater," writes James Poniewozik in his new book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. "Donald Trump became president by winning the 9 p.m. time slot on NBC."

    But Trump isn't just on TV, according to Poniewozik. He is TV. Over the course of his life, Trump "achieved symbiosis with the medium," he argues. "Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality."

    Poniewozik does not, of course, mean all TV. Trump is not . Trump is not or or or , or any kind of TV show grounded in a presumption of empathy for other people. Poniewozik makes the convincing case that the more Darwinian genres of TV — reality, sports, cable news — have legible, internally coherent moral teachings and ideologies, and that these both shaped Trump and helped create the cultural conditions for his rise. Those messages include:

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